Web Original / The Shortest Story

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The curiosity that kills the cat need not be its own.

The Shortest Story: Postcard Stories from Impossible Worlds is a weekly series of "postcard-sized" Flash Fiction written by Peter Chiykowski. Each story, sized to fit on a postcard, is shown over an appropriate photograph which was frequently the inspiration for the story.

The stories cross many genres — horror, comedy, fable, science fiction, fantasy, and more. Many riff off of stock moral lessons or other common phrases, finding new uses for them. Some, such as "The Prison of Forgetting", make use of animation or transition to tell their story.

Stories have been posted weekly on Tuesdays for almost 7 years, having started from June 18th 2017 and seeming to have stopped as of the current last being June 4th 2024's, "Stop Our Daughter".

Tropes found in The Shortest Story include:

• Aliens Steal Cable: When the aliens made contact, the cable industry sued them for piracy.
• Ambiguous Ending: Often, but "The Prison of Forgetting" is particularly notable. Is the original text written by someone who has a serious mental health issue and is getting better, or are they healthy and being brainwashed into compliance?
• Anaphora:
  • Every sentence of The Ghost on the Bay starts with "On a calm, clear night," as it gets more and more dangerous.
  • The first three sentences of Ethics Committee start with "Is it wrong to":
    Is it wrong to tamper with human D.N.A.?
    Is it wrong to murder an entire ethics committee?
    Is it wrong to replace them with obedient laboratory clones?
• Animal Testing: In Every Office Building by Christmas: "a short story about animal testing and office holidays"
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: A good way to produce humor in few words.
  • "The Dump of Miracles: a very short story about things too good to be true": Two things that are magically amazing, and one mundane "impossibility":
    A radio that plays music from the future.
    A photograph that shows you any part of the universe you wish to see.
    A pot that cooks the right amount of rice.
  • "The Shuttle": Two good things for the world, and one personal gripe solved:
    No more war.
    No more famine.
    No more mission partner eating all the good oatmeal packets and leaving you with cinnamon.
  • After the Bombs, where the beach has something that's weird, but good:
    we made for the coast, surprised to find the sky alive with the calls of sea birds and the ocean churning with new life that looked strange and dark and beautiful
• At the Crossroads: "The Road Less Travelled" deconstructs Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken", bringing up the option that if you don't like one choice, you can make a different one.
• Backstory Invader: The group in "The Town With No Name" goes from three people to four people without anyone noticing.
• Badass Pacifist: "The First Healer". Go into battle, knowing that if you fall you'll go to an eternal feast? Fine. But going into battle unarmed, saving the lives of your companions, knowing that if you fall you're doomed to hell? That's badass.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • The Wishing Dice: about dice that grants wishes. It seems that if they land evens, it grants the wish nicely, and odds, not nicely, since a wish for a bigger house and getting odds resulted in "My house burned down with my family inside." and an apartment building that doesn't have a bottom, just a Bottomless Pit.
  • "The Gift You Can't Wrap" is the experience of being chased through the woods by yetis — the listener asked for something that doesn't fit in a box. "So stop complaining."
• Best Served Cold: "How To Serve Revenge" gives a bit more specificity. Revenge is best served screaming, tied naked to a chair, covered in bees.
• Bewitched Amphibians: Subverted in "The Princess and the Frog":
  "Some princesses are into frogs."
• Book Burning: "Burn, Burn" references the Heinrich Heine quote.
• Brainwashed: "The Prison of Forgetting" plays with it. As some of the text of the story fades, the reader can see the drugs taking effect, but whether this is good or ill is unclear.
• But What About the Astronauts?: "The Lights of Earth":
  "I thought the worst part would be the screams coming through the space station's uplink as I watched the lights of Earth's cities go out one by one."
• Chess with Death: Attempted exploitation in "A Game of Chess". The speaker has been practicing chess their entire life so that they could beat Death at chess.
• Chest Monster: "Mimics" deconstructs it a bit, showing evolutionary pressures on mimics once adventurers learn to be careful with the standard treasure chest.
• Coming-Out Story: "Summer Diary" is a heartwarming one about a grandfather posthumously encouraging his grandson not to hide his feelings for other men.
• Crying Wolf: Deconstructed in "Bring the Wolves Down", with reference to a sexist Double Standard. When a boy cries wolf, the villagers turn out to help; when a girl cries wolf, the villagers tell her it's just a dog, and anyway, she shouldn't walk around with torn clothings and bloody bite marks — that sort of thing will bring out the wolves.
• Curiosity Is a Crapshoot: "Mimics".
  "Curiosity, though. That's worth dying for."
• Deserted Island: "Alone On My Island" is set on one. The person doesn't actually want to be rescued, but wants it to look like they tried.
• Dig Your Own Grave: "Dig Two Graves" parodies the Japanese saying. The first grave is a decoy, to lure your enemies into a trap; the second is meant to mock them as you leave their bodies next to an open grave but don't even bother burying them.
• Disposable Intern: "There's No 'I' In 'Laboratory'" involves using interns as test subjects.
• Emotion Eater: "Vampath" is about a vampire-empath who vows not to be like others of its kind who leave only negative emotions. However, it hunts too often and on the same few victims, to the point that they're able to band together and confront the vampath over the fact that it's destroying itself by taking only their negative emotions. The story ends with the vampath opening a mental health practice where it drains a little positive emotion and a lot of negative ones.
• Evil Phone: "My Ex-Husband Keeps Calling The House" has a phone call coming from a dead person.
• Evil Twin: Subverted in "Evil Twin". The narrator murdered his "evil" twin, because the twin was happier.
• Exact Words: "The Cave" combines this with a form of Rescued from the Underworld. As long as the speaker is in the shadows of the cave, they can visit their loved one's ghost. So they're going to take the cave with them.
• Face, Nod, Action: After Kalmar the Bloody's impersonator excuses himself, the rest of the party all silently nod and agree that they prefer the impostor over the real Kalmar.
• Faking the Dead: The purpose of the first grave in "Dig Two Graves" is to lure your enemies into a trap.
• Flash Fiction: The entire point of the series.
• Good-Looking Privates: From Joining the Army:
  My mother was so proud when I signed up.
  “Everyone wants to marry a man in uniform,” she told me.
• Hugh Mann: "Octopus Facts" is a very short science fiction story about octopuses (trying to fake being human, badly):
  HELLO I AM SCIENTIST IN OCTOPUS SCIENCE LABORATORY HERE ARE SOME OCTOPUS FACTS
  ONE: OCTOPUS CAN SQUEEZE THROUGH ONE-INCH HOLE
  TWO: OCTOPUS CAN CHANGE COLOUR AND SHAPE FOR DISGUISE LIKE PREDATOR OR ROCK OR SCIENTIST IN OCTOPUS SCIENCE LABORATORY
  THREE: SCIENCE OCTOPUS IS MISSING NO ONE KNOWS WHERE IS HAHA
  NOW IS YOUR TURN FOR TELL ME SOME HUMAN FACTS: HOW MANY ARMS DOES HUMAN LEADER HAVE?
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: "Terrarium" centers around aliens revealing Earth was a terrarium they set up, and being disgusted at how violent humanity became.
• I Have This Friend: "Have You Ever Wanted to Drive?" plays this straight, with a bizarre and disturbing question followed by "Asking for a friend."
• I Never: "Never Have I Ever" weaponizes it with Truth Serum.
• It's the Journey That Counts: "The Real Cursed Barrow Treasure".
  "Time together is the real cursed barrow treasure."
• The Joy of X: "Hope in a Time of Cholera" is a reference to the 1985 book Love in the Time of Cholera.
• Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: "The First Healer". If the only way into heaven is to fight, a healer cannot go there. Subverted when their fellows rescue them.
• Last of His Kind: "The Last Human on Earth".
• Lighthouse Point:
  • "The Welcome" uses a lighthouse signaling in Morse Code to convey that something is wrong.
  • "The Black Beacon" has a very worrisome lighthouse that uses different colored signals to warn ships away, draw them near, or raise the sunken ships as a new fleet.
• Literal Genie: "Animate Life". The closest skeleton is the one inside you...
• Literal-Minded: "The Literally Spell":
  "The wizard's spell made it so anyone who said 'literally' had their words come true."
• Little Red Fighting Hood:
  • "Girls With Hatchets" gives her a hatchet and a willingness to use it.
  • "Red The Woods" says the girl isn't red, but everything else is...
    "There was only the girl, eager to show the wolf how she kept her woods so red."
• Lottery of Doom: "Banished to the Cave" plays it straight, subverts it, then plays it straight again. A village chooses people to exile into a cave... only to find a beautiful underground city built by the previous exiles. As the city grows, it gains new problems, and begins exiling people back up to the surface.
• Magic Misfire: "The Devil is in the Details". (And in the family dog now too.)
• Meat-O-Vision: "Does It Count as Cannibalism?"
  Does it count as cannibalism if you're hallucinating the other person as food?
  Wait, why am I asking you?
  What would a giant turkey leg know about morality?
• Mechanical Monster: The mice in "The Mice Will Play" construct a war-beast of cogs and levers to take on the cat.
• Message in a Bottle: "Message in a Bottle" plays it very straight, with a request for help being answered by another bottle, sent by the ocean itself: "No."
• Metaphorgotten: A frequent theme.
  • "The Grind":
    "Some days, trying to write feels like forcing your own arm through a meat grinder."
  • "Where Do Babies Come From" takes the titular question in a sad direction.
  • "My Love is Like The Ocean" finds new oceanic metaphors to describe love, not all flattering.
• Mundane Utility:
  • "When Life Gives You Demons" finds a new use for an indestructible cursed doll, namely power generation.
  • "Public Time Transit" finds a new use for time travel — buses that will never make their passengers late.
  • "A Deck of Cards That Tells The Future" uses knowledge of the future for very mundane purposes — while there are no surprises in the speakers life now, at least they know which generations of iPhone to skip.
  • The Vampath uses its Emotion Eater abilities to open a mental health clinic where it rids people of their negative emotions in exchange for eating a few happy ones.
• No One Gets Left Behind: "The First Healer":
  "You did not think I would leave my brothers and sisters behind?"
• No Party Like a Donner Party:
  • "Resorted to Cannibalism":
    "What if we were the stranded hikers who embraced cannibalism?"
  • "Does It Count As Cannibalism?":
    "Does it count as cannibalism if you're hallucinating the other person as food?"
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: Played with in "Reality Manipulation".
  "The reality manipulation booth appeared in the town square overnight. (...) No one can figure out if it's been used yet."
• Oddball Doppelgänger: "Kalmar the Bloody" provides a doppelganger that the rest of the team prefers.
• Ominous Fog: "The Fog" shades into Fog of Doom, with memory manipulation added.
• Once More, with Clarity: I Woke Up in the Wreckage's first and last paragraph, a.k.a Bookends, starts with "I woke up in the wreckage with your name on my lips and bodies all around me"
• Our Vampires Are Different: Vampaths feed on emotion, but they don't have to be negative emotions.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: "After The Man-Wolf Bit Me" reverses the normal werewolf myth.
• [Popular Saying], But...: Used occasionally.
  "The curiosity that kills the cat need not be its own."
• Preferable Impersonator: Kalmar the Bloody's party likes the impostor over the real one, to the point of ignoring the pounding coming from inside a locked chest that is assumed to contain the real one.
• Prank Call: "Refrigerator Running" plays with one of the classics, "Is your refrigerator running?"
• Pun: The description for "The Devil is in the Details":
  incantations and in-canine visitations
• Resourceful Rodent: In "The Mice Will Play", while the cat is away, the mice think up ways that they can take on the cat, including traps and a Mechanical Monster.
• Riddle of the Sphinx: Played with in "The Riddle of the Sphinx", where the solution is a bit more concrete.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The COVID-19 Pandemic has inspired several of the stories, like "Count to 20".
• Runic Magic: "The Ocean Trench" mentions "ancient glyphs of power" that related to "spells that can call thunder down from the skies or awaken the old and massive creatures sleeping in the deep."
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Magic in the Air: "a short story about holiday magic and trapped demons"
• Shadow Government: With Sinister Surveillance in The Heart Beats Faster:
  The shadow government spraying secret mind-control chemtrails on the unsuspecting masses as their deep-space death satellites take your facial scan.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Discussed in "Like a Ringing In Our Ears".
  "We had not died, but this did not feel like life."
• Shout-Out: Frequent.
  • "If I Only Had A Heart" is a dark take on The Wizard of Oz (1939).
  • "Taking Flight" is a heartwarming take on "Puff the Magic Dragon".
  • "Baby Shoes a.k.a. Suck It, Hemingway" gives a 5-word version of "Hemingway's Six-Word Story".
  • "Last Christmas (I Gave You My Heart)" turns the Wham! song into a horror story.
• Sleepwalking: I Won't Be Afraid mentions sleepwalking by supernatural causes:
  I hear them calling in the pipes after sundown, their voices too sticky and too sweet, like plums gone to rot.
  One night I awake to find myself sleepwalking toward the sewer. The next time, my fingers are wrapped around the cold metal grate, poised to lift.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Deconstructed in "Speaking with the Fishes". Turns out that having the animal like you is a Required Secondary Power.
• The Stars Are Going Out: "Fireflies":
  "I followed your finger, watching as the next star you pointed at sputtered and went out."
• Supernatural Phone: "The Telephone", "a very short science fiction story about telephoning parallel worlds".
• Surprisingly Shared Secret: In "Summer Diary", a young boy spends a summer at his grandfather's house and kisses another boy, writing about it in his diary which he leaves behind. Years later, after his grandfather dies, he finds the diary again with a note telling him he'd loved a man too once, and the grandson shouldn't hide it.
• Take That!: Several.
  • "The Maybe Mirror" pokes at smartphones and their effects on society.
  • "Cursed Monopoly Set" satirizes modern capitalist society.
  • "Life On The Surface" is a take that toward corporations that deny climate change.
• The Talk: "Where Do Babies Come From" starts here before wandering into Metaphorgotten.
• Technical Virgin: Discussed in "The Questions of Magic" in relation to Virgin Power. "Does butt stuff count?"
• Thirsty Desert: It's 'cact-US,' not 'cact-I', "a short story about grammar and dying in a desert", dying of thirst, specifically:
  But we still have to share our water until help arrives.
• Time Machine: The Time Machine
• To Hell and Back: In "The First Healer", those rescued by the healer return to free him for the warrior's afterlife.
• Truth Serums: "Never Have I Ever" combines it with I Never to find a culprit.
• Unnaturally Looping Location: "The Intersection" is a dark karma-laden take.
• Unwanted Rescue: "Alone On My Island" involves a Deserted Island resident who doesn't want to leave.
• Virgin Power: Discussed in "The Questions of Magic", about how this relates to Technical Virgin.
• Virgin Sacrifice:
  • The Volunteer involves sacrificing virgins for money, power, and eternal life.
  • Played with in "The Ritual Won't Work", with the sacrificer misreading it as 'Virginians'.
• Warrior Heaven: Downplayed in "The First Healer"; warriors go to an eternal feast, while those who are not warriors go to a pit of demons. However, it is possible for the warriors to fight their way to the demon pit to rescue those they wish to save.
• Whatevermancy: "Mnemomancer", about a type of magic powered by consuming memories, and the dangers of such.
• When Life Gives You Lemons...: When life gives you demons, give 'em hell.
• Wishing for More Wishes:
  • "The Reef of Wishes" combines this with Head-in-the-Sand Management.
  • "Wishing for More Wishes" has the genie's master try to get around this rule, to no avail.
• Witch Hunt:
  • "Witch Hunt" plays with it, with an actual witch.
  • "Season For Witches":
    "It was a dangerous season for witches. But a prosperous season for torch salesmen."
• Your Mind Makes It Real: "Thank You For One Year Of Stories" weaponizes this.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Used often.
  • Implied in "The Welcome", with a welcoming lighthouse providing a frightening message.
  • "Aptitude Test" discusses choosing who survives.
  • "Hide and Seek" seems like one, with a personal twist.