One Drop, One City, One Last Second

The Minute Fiction is a series of small immersive fiction stories created to give readers a quick daily mental break. How many minutes are in a year? Borrow one for yourself and have an adventure.

Waiting in the White

You are small and shivering with gladness, swaddled in a cathedral of vapor where light sifts down like spilled flour. The cloud hums—soft thunder in the bones of the sky—and you hum with it, fattening minute by minute as whispers of water gather around you. You tell jokes about gravity like daredevils at the top of a bridge. Below, hazy geometry hints at the city—squares and veins and shining threads—while up here everything is breath and brightness and the sound of silence being woven.

The Shiver Before the Drop

You think you might become a crystal. For a heartbeat you feel edges trying on their angles: a hexagon’s ambition, the clean grammar of snow. Cold licks over you, a silver tongue, but a warm exhale rises from the world and smooths you round again. A neighbor taps your shoulder, merges, and now you are heavier—music-note heavy, ripe with falling. The cloud loosens its grip. you loosen yours. Together you trade certainty for motion. It feels like a promise you make with your eyes closed and your whole heart open.

Slipstream Choir

You break free. The first gasp of the sky is wild thyme and ozone, and you plummet singing, a beaded choir in perfect, wobbling harmony. Around you the air combs your sides, slicks you into a teardrop, spins you with a gentle, bossy hand. You gossip in streaks: Which rooftop? Who’s lucky enough for a leaf? You spiral through invisible hands—shears and swells—laughing when you sidestep a dragonfly, ducking a scrap of cloud, hearing your own voices thin into the long hush of speed.

Skyline Rush

The city climbs to meet you: spines of glass catching the sun in teeth of gold, billboards smearing color like wet paint across the morning. Windows wink, a million eyes. you can taste the street already in the air—metal-bitter and citrus-bright, the sweet breath of a bakery, the river’s cool coin. Sirens smudge their red song through the haze; a bus sighs somewhere far below, a bass note you can feel more than hear. You are a lens and everything burns inside you: the sky flipped, the ground rising, yourself a tiny planet with a city for a moon.

Feathered Near-Miss

Then—feathers. A pigeon rockets up, a gray thunderbolt with a throat the color of oil-slick rainbows. His eye finds you, your round self reflected as a quick star. The air buckles as his wings punch it; a gust palms you to the side. You skim the tremble-edges of his flight, so close you can count the barbs on a single feather, the tiny zipper of it. He tilts, and the world tilts; you thread the needle between primary and secondary, hitch a ride on his wake, and feel the hush of almost-touch ripple through you. Another drop clips a feather, shatters into glitter. You do not. You tumble past, laughing your small, stunned laugh.

City’s Breath

Below, steam unrolls from a manhole like a white flag. The corner vendor lifts a lid; cinnamon ambushes the air, wraps you in sugar warmth even as the wind needles your skin cool again. Neon scribbles its gospel on a rain-polished sign. You pass a rooftop garden—basil, tomato, a blue chair no one sits in—and then freefall past a window where a child presses a palm to the glass, tracing your descent with a fingertip comet. You swell, rounder, as wisps merge into you; gravity tugs like an old friend who loves hard hugs. Every story flashes up: a lover rushing, a cyclist leaning, a stray dog dreaming in a doorway. You want to bless them all.

The Sidewalk Looms

Concrete, at last, reveals its secrets: galaxies of aggregate, hairline canyons veined with the green threads of moss, constellations of gum in faded pink orbits. A chalk rocketship aims for your throat. The city shouts up through you, bigger and brighter, your curved skin turning grit into glitter. You can feel the last foot of air like a drumhead under your belly, taut and trembling. You flatten a fraction, a silver coin about to spend itself. The world holds its breath with you—every horn, every footstep, every bird wing—and you let go of everything you were in the cloud to become everything you might be on impact and—