Aesop's Fable

By Colleen Sutherland

That first day of first grade, Miss Algard read us an Aesop fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The grasshopper fiddles away the summer while the ant works. At the end of the story, the ant is secure in its home with plenty of food while the grasshopper starves to death. Other versions would have the ant taking the grasshopper in but that was not how Aesop wrote it Miss Algard said She didn't believe in messing with the classics.

After Miss Algard finished the story, she asked the first grade class: “Which would you rather be?” We all dutifully said, “The ant,” which is what she wanted to hear. We promised we would all be good little workers. All but Sallie Mae. “No, the grasshopper. The grasshopper has all the fun.”

“But in the end, he starves,” Miss Algard said.

“Worth it,” insisted Sallie Mae.

Sallie Mae did have fun and got into trouble for it. On nice days she was down by the river splashing around, playing hooky. Once the police picked her up as she was riding her bicycle around and around the park and deposited her at school. She was there ten minutes and was out the door again. “Good days shouldn't be wasted,” she said.

The Crossing Guard

Author's note: this is the story I promised to write in the my blog post about never running out of ideas.

Image by SchuminWeb via Wikimedia Commons

After all the times that Gunther had been stabbed, shot at, and bombed by IEDs it seemed unfair that he should be killed by a seventeen-year-old girl in his own neighborhood. He supposed he shouldn't complain too much though, at least it was a bright sunny day. Or was that just the light at the end of the tunnel? At least it wasn't raining. 

Black Coffee Fiction now available in more places!

Our anthology from year one is now available at Smashwords, iTunes, and Kobo. We will be adding more retailers in the coming days, stay tuned!

The Farmhouse - Conclusion

by Colleen Sutherland

He grabbed the seeds and ran out the door. “I ain't a fuckin' farmer,” he screamed at the tractor though the guy couldn't hear him over the engine noise. He threw the packets at the machine but the wind picked them up. They flew back in his face and on into the marsh. Later he realized he didn't even know if the farmer left those seeds but he was the only other human around.

That night it rained as hard a rain as he had ever seen. Lightening shot across the horizon. The lights flickered but stayed on. He decided to take a break from escaping. He roamed around the house. There was an old television but analog TVs no longer worked in a digital age. He tried a radio that dated from a time when FM didn't exist but got only static. Nothing electronic was working except for the lights and the stove. There were books, mostly old classics, and a bunch of Readers' Digests. He wasn't much of a reader anyhow.

He looked through the cupboards. There were cracked dishes and cups and rusted cast iron pots. He took inventory of the food. For some reason most of it was tuna. There was a lot of it for an abandoned farmhouse, but then nothing about this place made any sense. There were a lot of bugs, too. He found an insect guide among the books and amused himself identifying them: box elder bugs, lady bugs and earwigs. As fast as he killed them, even more appeared on the walls. Somewhere inside the walls he could hear rustlings, rats or mice he thought. He hoped not bats. He didn't like bats.

He slept half the day and into the night as the rain clattered on the roof. He woke in the night and wandered around trying to find something to do to pass the time. Perhaps someone left maps behind, that would be useful. The only map he could find was from New Jersey and as far as he could figure out that was five states a way. It was thirty years old anyhow. He settled down to read the jokes in the Reader's Digests.

The sun rose on a cloudless day and the constant sound of the tractor. That farmer never let up.