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Slow burn stories
Slow burn only works when the two people have a reason to keep meeting that has nothing to do with wanting to. Every story tagged slow burn here is built on a standing appointment: a shift, a weekly errand, a waiting room, a lesson, a commute. The situation brings them back. Neither of them has to.
That also means either one can walk out of any scene without the story breaking, which is the pressure the form actually runs on. Nothing here is kept apart by a misunderstanding that one honest sentence would clear up.
All of them are finished. Three episodes, about ten minutes, free from start to end.
10 stories tagged slow burn
- My Neighbor’s Cat by Helen Abbott — Romance, 4 episodes, about 13 minutes, complete and free. I feed the cat that turns up at my back door at seven every morning. In October he arrived wearing a collar with a note taped to it, from the neighbor I have never once met, telling me to stop. So I wrote back. We have been writing for six weeks now, and the cat has been carrying it.
- My Husband’s First Wife by Helen Abbott — Domestic Suspense, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free. I’m the second wife. He never once asked me to change anything. He simply moved the mugs to the other side of the cupboard, and then the coat, and then my hair, until a woman called the first wife’s name across a parking lot and I turned around.
- The Seven Second Delay by Nadine Greer — Horror, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. I host the overnight show alone, midnight to five, with seven seconds of delay between me and the transmitter. The same man gets through every night, and what he wants is my shift.
- Every Tuesday at Station Two by Cass Ewing — Horror, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. Our company meets every Tuesday to check the pump, raise the ladder and eat badly. Pack six keeps coming back logged as inspected in my handwriting on nights I went home early, and one of our runs is still open.
- The Twelfth Stop by Lorna Keough — Horror, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. I have run the same eleven stops for nine years and I could do it asleep. There is a woman waiting at a stop that is not on my schedule, and the only way to be rid of her is to write down her name.
- The Two O’Clock Wash by Nora Feld — Romance, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free. I work the overnight at a laundromat on Sixth, and for fourteen Tuesdays a man came in at two in the morning with the same green duffel bag. He never washed anything. He just sat.
- Thursdays in Chair Four by Claire Mosley — Romance, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free. My father had dialysis every Thursday, and for two months I sat across from a man in chair four and assumed he was waiting for somebody, the way I was. He was not waiting for anybody.
- The Tomatoes Were His by Ada Rowe — Romance, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. I inherited my aunt’s garden plot, thirty dollars of dirt, and the man in plot eleven who says the tomato hanging on my side of the fence is his. He is wrong. He is also the only person in this town who knew her.
- Lesson Six by Nell Halloran — Romance, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. My new student is forty one and has never held a license. He pays cash out of a bakery envelope and he needs to pass by November. I thought I knew why. I teach people to drive for a living, and I have never been so wrong about anyone.
- Property of Nobody by June Whitaker — Romance, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. He lost something on the 5:41 every Thursday, and every Thursday he came down to my window to claim it back. It took me four months to work out that he was leaving them there. It took longer to find out what he was trying to put down.