Short Story: Parlor Tricks

This (incredibly short) story is in response to Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction challenge this week.

(According to my Microsoft Word word counter, it is 98 words. I can’t believe I actually managed to keep it under 100.)

Hope you all enjoy!

Parlor Tricks

Alice’s fingers read anything they touched.

Like any gift the gods ever gave a human, she squandered it on parlor tricks, guessing cards for passersby.

And Heth was a passerby. Shoulders bent from piggybacking his twins, Worry and Doubt, who liked to grab pens and scrawl their maybes and what-ifs on his skin. In a mirror, he was a novel of anxieties, but no one else could see.

Crowded streets threw the two together. Alice’s fingers read a story of worry and she chased the book back to his library.

And that night, she learned she could erase.