Nanofiction

Marilyn tidied up the appartment under a thundercloud, wishing Matt would die in a fire rather than come back, until she walked through the hall with a bottle of india ink in her hand. He had left his best-beloved suede jacket on the coat rack.

This was much better. She would hear him scream.

To test a theory, Harriet built a catapult to throw sticks into thunderstorms. She carefully noted what happened to each - usually only the place where she found it again, rarely that it had been hit by lightning, in which case the result usually was a charred stick.

Finally a success: One came back with toothmarks.

On a walk along the edge of the woods, Manuel took a deep breath, and sighed. "You could almost imagine we were the only people in the world."

Jessica politely refrained from saying that she could see airplane exhaust trails and hear cars - and that tarmac paths didn't grow naturally. She found civilisation reassuring, nowadays.

When Nancy and Tom divorced, the little cottage by the lakeside was the one thing they argued over. A compromise was found once they figured out he loved the house, while she loved the place. She kept the land. They could afford to convert the holiday home to a houseboat for him to take away.

"What's the opposite of boot?"

"Sandal?"

"No, entirely different --"

"Hat!“

"Nooo, what you do with a computer."

"Oh. Um. Crash?"

"I'd think that's something the computer does... I mean what you do before switching it off normally,
anyway."

"I think that's 'shut down'."

"That's all?"

"Can't think of anything else."

"Bah. Thanks, anyway."

Elsa looked around scornfully.

The lab was a big clicé, full of dark wood and leather props, candles stuck on skulls chipping highlights off inlaid runes. At least they had a pickled dragon embryo rather than the old stuffed alligator...

She finally got the joke when she saw the familiar.

Nobody expected a sun conure.