Key West

Microfiction: One Sentence Story

Of all the writers who assembled each January in Key West, to escape the frigidity and relative conservatism of their lives elsewhere, he knew he alone was the only real artist among them—he suffered all their self-congratulatory cocktail parties, sat through their endless readings (how they all seemed to enjoy the sounds of their own voices—they couldn’t all be the best, could they?), ate the bland mignardises they served each other, and even, fleetingly, enjoyed snippets of conversation they shared, lubricated in the telling and the listening by rum and self-confidence, but when he heard, just as he walked into one of their rooms, arriving late, as was his habit, an insult to his artistic sensitivities, he resolved then and there to end it all, not by acting out any suicidal impulse but instead by harnessing his own gifts to write of them as they are, telling all their secrets for the world to read, to take inspiration from his idol, the one and only TC, to, with a single work, destroy their little January paradise, lay waste to their smug harbor of warm breezes, and make the place uninhabitable for them all.