Charles Wiegand
Excerpts from 3 Short Stories
Short story - The Laundromat
Emma was lost in the fantasy when the dryer dinged.
"Shit! Not now," she muttered, leaving the laundry to sit so she could finish her chapter. After she read about a steamy three-way, her own body felt as hot as the characters in her book. But when she reached into the dryer for a stray sock, something pulled her inside. Emma screamed, but it was too late. In an instant, she was in a strange world—a land of dunes and a man who looked like he'd stepped off the cover of her book.
Short story - The Aroma of Coffee
At the shelf with the coffee, Donny took a blue package off the shelf, gave it a small squeeze, smelled the aroma, and something happened.
Everything changed! The store was gone, replaced by a vast coffee plantation. Donny spun around, bewildered. "This can't be real," he muttered, but the warm mountain air felt all too familiar. Suddenly, he recognized it—this was his childhood home, the coffee farm his family had left behind when they moved to the U.S.
Short story - Candycane Trees and Lollypop Flowers
Fluffy cotton-candy clouds of pink, blue, purple, and yellow floated, no meandered, across, no, all around in the sky. The sky, as blue as a bluebird, had a smiling sun looking down and sharing its warmth with the world below. The lemonade rivers flowed down from the vanilla-snow-covered mountains of chocolate-chip cookie dough. They flowed through forests of cinnamon-stick trees, fields of lollypop flowers, with marshmallow bunnies hopping to and fro.
Tweety birds flew from one cinnamon tree to another, singing their songs in rhythm with their happy-flappy wings of yellow, blue, green, or violet, fleeting through the butterfly-filled air over the chocolate-covered graham cracker lily pads floating on the minty-fresh ponds. The butterflies had wings of chromium blues, reds, yellows, and oranges. They were as big as your hand and glided on the breeze that hinted of the wonderful scent of fresh-baked apple pie.
