Very Short Stories.

Have tried writting a spot of 'flash fiction' recently.

 SIX MINUTES.

He lit his cigarette with the lighter she had given him. The one with their names engraved in a language which no one had spoken for over a thousand years.

Inhaling deeply from it, he thought about how every cigarette was suppose to reduce your life expectancy by six minutes. ‘But the last six minutes are crap anyway’, his friend used to say.

Which was almost ironic, because the previous six minutes had been crap too

He watched the smoke drift up to the dark sky in elegant coils. ‘There is a beauty in that which no one can ever take away from us’, he had once told her as they sat at a wooden pub table watching their smoke dance in a beam of light.

It didn’t matter about the six minutes, because- he had heard- a glass of red wine repairs the damage done to the human heart by six cigarettes. And he had drunk a lot of red wine.

He savoured the last drag of the cigarette, knowing it would be his last before sleep took him.

Crushing the end of it between weather beaten fingers, he cast the remains of it onto the street, and walked home to an empty bed.

SPIDER.

Two thousand and ten years ago a spider spun a web across the mouth of a cave where Christ and his parents hid, saving Him from infanticide.

Over a thousand years later, the same spider did exactly the same thing with another cave (spinning a web really fast, so that it looked like no one had been in recently), and saved the life of Robert The Bruce.

A few hundred years after that, the same spider worked very hard building and rebuilding her web on a windy day, and convinced Nietzsche that life was worth living. In fact, she convinced him that life was worth living over and over again.

Now, as the spider sits in her web, chewing on a fly, she reflects that Christianity did not work out as well as she had hoped, Scotland still wasn’t quite independent, and Hitler had misinterpreted Nietzsche a great deal.

But, on the other hand, she had spun some very pretty webs, which had caught some very tasty flies. And she was, after all, just a spider.