by Steven Lemprière
Tick; Harry, Grandfather’s antique wall-mounted dining-room clock. Tock; Father’s nineteen-sixties General Electric—appropriately named—bedside timepiece. Tick; dinnertime and Harry chimes, summoning family as metronome-like, he conducts us to our traditional Sunday roast. Tock; dawn, beep, beep, beep—the sun rises, as does Father, and therefore, without choice, so do I. Tick; Father has clocked out. Tock; no longer alarmed, I roll over and return to sleep—Zzz-Zzz-Zzz…
6S
Steven Lemprière's work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Drabble, Friday Flash Fiction, 50-Word Stories, 50 Give or Take, Punk Noir Magazine, The Hoolet’s Nook, Literary Garage, Suddenly and Without Warning, and Paragraph Planet. He took a creative writing course while a patient at an Irish psychiatric hospital, and shortly after his discharge, the Cúirt International Festival of Literature shortlisted him for the New Writers Prize. When not writing, he’s seeking the sleep he lost as a child.
Flash fiction in exactly six sentences. Publishing writers since 2006.
