Urban Volcano

Fiction by Börkur Sigurbjörnsson

Flash fiction

Comfortable silence

The three of us sit together in the living room — my hosts and I — each in our own world. She reads a newspaper. He plays a video-game on his tablet. I write. Silence is in the foreground and a low-volume jazz in the background. Every now and then she tells us news from the paper. We listen, discuss and then go back to our own worlds.

Comfortable silence — Illustration by Börkur Sigurbjörnsson
Illustration by Börkur Sigurbjörnsson

The flash fiction story Comfortable silence is part of the flash fiction collection Flash 52.

Börkur is an avid storyteller with a keen eye for quirky characters, funny dialogs and vivid scenario descriptions. Much of his writing falls within the genre of realistic fiction and his stories are more often than not based on real events in the author’s life. Although the tales contain grains of truth, they are melded with fiction, making the reader curious to know the line between reality and fantasy.