Wine and Cheese

by Alan Keith Parker

I tore down the county courthouse with my teeth, biting through dingy concrete and gray steel until I cracked my molars. I never liked its smug midcentury façade. My friend from college, a brutal apologist for flat roofs, took my 1974 Alfa Romeo Spider and kneaded it into a bubbletop cruiser from The Jetsons. I scowled; she curtsied. We finally buried the hatchet on the town square where the courthouse used to be, bringing a picnic basket filled with Camembert, fig jam, and a Rochioli Chardonnay. After the first sip, she turned my white wine into a tasty Merlot, and I was good with that.

6S

Alan Keith Parker writes literary and speculative flash fiction. His most recent work appears in the June 2025 issue of Flash Phantoms. In May, he had stories featured in both SciFanSat.com and 10x10 Flash. Earlier publications include the March 2025 issue of Flash Phantoms and the August 2024 edition of Bruiser Magazine. He’s been publishing since the 1990s, with past appearances in Stories: One, Aim Magazine, The Fifth Di--, Zone 9, and on WLRH public radio. In the 2010s, he was a featured speculative fiction writer for JustUsGeeks.com and received a Freshly Pressed Award from WordPress in 2012. He’s married to his college sweetheart, whom he met at Birmingham-Southern College—a small liberal arts school where they studied physics, history, and beer. They have two children in graduate school and one cantankerous cat. To support his writing habit, he works as a modeling and simulation analyst at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.