Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Highway (265 words)

Her problems faded out of sight in the rear-view mirror and she relished the roar of the highway wind. In a few minutes, maybe, she would turn on the radio, twist the volume up until it rumbled in her floorboards, her seat, her lungs. Until it filled the car and pushed the horizon farther away. She usually did, just as part of ignition, listening to the engine turn over once before she drowned it out with drums and guitar.

A friend had told her once that there was a science to why music sounded better when it was cranked up loud. She didn’t need the excuse, but she used it just the same, turning the dial higher. Turning decent songs good, and good songs great. Forcing everything back.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Coming Home (1090 words)

They tore the bridge down in the middle of the night. Swung their sledgehammers and broke the guardian statues from the stone rails. Faces shattered, heads taken off shoulders, torsos sheared off legs, legs and bases distorted to shards. Then they gathered the rubble, packed it into battered, old carts, and set them into the river upstream. The water crashed the carts through the pillars. The bridge crashed down. Waves and broken stone.

A mile away, the docks burned. Waves and damp, choking charcoal. The walkways fell apart, the pillars stayed, tops like dark, broken teeth. The little boats in their moorings caught fire, broke, sank or drifted free, terrible lanterns reflecting off the canvas of the great ships deeper in the bay. Men and women dragged buckets of water up from the night tide, smothered what they could. The fire didn’t spread, so much as hop from one pier to another, and little shadows scuttled from each new spark.

The southern tangle of the palace burned the same night, and dusted half the city in white ash.

Another fire in the agora blackened the aged paving stones.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Sunlight Greeting (500 words)

She woke up deliciously warm. Sleep fell away slowly, letting her down easy, and sunlight glowed behind her closed eyes. When she blinked them open, everything was flushed with yellow, edged in soft shadows. The window was closed, but she could still smell the ocean salt outside, locked in on the balmy air from yesterday. There was a faint citrus sharpness from somewhere she had yet to find. And she took a long breath in, pushed it back out, conscious, but thoughtless.

He breathed behind her.

Her back rested against his ribs. His arm laid flat beneath her neck. She listened to him, gently waking into the strange room.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Only Once (1126 words)

Kadie has a scar now. A straight line, cutting one eyebrow short on the outside and skipping over her eye. It’s darkest over her cheekbone before it fades to nothing above her jaw. A fine line, nearly invisible, except that the best-trained and best-paid physicks couldn’t make it actually invisible. So it stands out.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Carefully (1113 words)

Catia liked breathing. There was something pleasant about the liquid feeling of a breath, pulled gently over her tongue, warmed in her chest, pressed back out. It was soothing, the gentle tug on muscle. It rooted her into the world, with the sweetness, sharpness, spice, sourness hanging in the air.

But she didn’t need to breathe, and just now, it seemed selfish.

The crash and roar of the rockslide had shocked her out of two or three breaths. The sudden darkness and the ringing in her ears made her forget for another long moment. She blinked, and waited, perfectly still. The ringing died down. Her eyes slowly turned the darkness into gray, shifting shadows. Fynn’s breaths began to echo in the newly shortened space.

“Catia?” Fynn called.

She took in air, just to respond. “I’m here.”

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Brilliance (575 words)

The Short Docks was Kell’s least and most favorite place in the city.

Skiffs and dories and skipjacks and cutters all crowded into their moorings, tied up, creaking and bobbing in the tides. Their lines and short masts and rough-bound canvas criss-crossed each other across the bottom of the sky. Cramped and lively, the walkways were carved deep by sea salt, and scrubbed down by the heavy breeze. The warehouses and stayhouses, dry docks and taprooms, slipways and repair yards leaned into each other, until the whole place was a tangle.

Everything smelled like fish. Everything clattered, creaked, or groaned. There was always someone on a corner playing something with strings. There was always someone shouting. Girls and boys ran through cracks between men and women hauling and bartering, and everywhere there was the distinct hustle of living. Noisome, and brilliant.

Kell came once every eight weeks. At dawn, he started down the long line of little boats. In the cool air of his little office, his mornings were steady and sedate. He couldn’t find an hour early enough to keep the Short Docks quiet, and he kept his head down in the gray light, trying not to feel the clamor under his skin. He checked the names of every boat – Second Wind, Island Girl, Zanna – against the list registered to his office, collected their fees, and checked them off with a careful hand.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Too-Bright (372 words)

“Heads, I win. Tails, you lose. Your choice.” And the girl smiled as she said it, her mouth a charming, crooked line.

In her chair, she relaxed without leaning either forward or back, her spine carelessly straight. Her dark hair was braided loosely down her back and a too-bright scarf held it back from her face. With one elbow propped lazily against the table, she let the silence stretch. And she waited for the unnecessary reply.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Proper Profit (1028 words)

Elida knew every creak in the expansive apartments. She had watched Ness invent them eight months before when they moved in.

It had been pure entertainment, watching him on his hands and knees, teasing floorboards and stair railings and cupboard hinges into making their little noises. He tested them and he memorized the distinctions at the same time. Each was a little warning bell when anyone moved inside his apartment. When Elida stepped forward to help him, he gave her a look the equivalent of slapping her hands away, and laughed at himself after. He trusted her. But he trusted himself more.

So, she just watched him engineer squeaks and groans and creaks out of polished elegance. She hadn’t purposefully memorized them, too, but she liked the look on his face when she arrived in all her usual silence even while he rattled in the spaces he created.

Creeping down the stairs now, Elida had no need to see his surprise. She wished it very far away. Keeping her hands off the railing, she skipped the last step, and slid immediately to the right. A brush of air instead of a body, she imagined. A ghost. A thing already moved on.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Bone Match (793 words)

He knocked against her with his shoulder, moving gently enough, but she pulled out of his way apologetically all the same.

When they had met, his broad shoulders and his bulk had been so welcome. He was built of warm muscle and she had liked to tuck her shoulder into the curve of his, had enjoyed finding the match in their fingers and the right way to fold herself against him. In the last year though, since he had come back for her, she had simply felt as if all her angles intruded. There were always three breaths between them, always a jarring when he accidentally closed the gap.

She hated it, quietly. She didn’t have the words to demand the return of something she had thrown away.

Leonathan let her take her single step back. He didn’t look at her. The city was dark, lit with distant lanterns that pricked through the black, flickering white and yellow. His face was a shadow, while the light from the room behind them spilled over his tan coat, his dark hair. She didn’t allow herself to watch him for more than a moment.

Leaning forward on the rail, she crossed her arms over each other. She traced the lines of the lights below until she was charting familiar streets by the string of them. She breathed slow. And then he leaned against the rail as well, leaned his shoulder into hers, and the purpose in it made her freeze.

Legal Theft Flash Fiction: Scouring (858 words)

In the evenings, the Watchers lit the church candles. Warmth seeped between the pillars. The center aisle turned golden and warm, while the side aisles were streaked with grey shadows. Flickering light and thin, steady smoke sprawled between the arching stone walls, stretching the heat of the afternoon a little further, so long as no one ventured outside. The close air hugged and held and gave an excuse to shrug out of the cover of coats and cloaks.

Ren did not come to church in the evenings anymore. His parents had stopped dragging him through the doors years ago, about the same time he had learned to embarrass them with a well-timed swear, and just a little after had started sailing on a ship of his own choosing.

He preferred the afternoons, the step down onto an echoing floor while sunlight flirted through the high windows and never quite reached the floor. A haven of cool air, set halfway below the street, chilled relief from the city two steps above him. His coat hung unbuttoned, and the small bite of the air reminded him gently what it felt like to be made of real flesh and bone and skin.