Use the photograph above as the inspiration for your flash fiction story. Write whatever comes to mind (no sexual, political, or religious stories, jokes, or commentary, please) and after you PROOFREAD it, submit it as your entry in the comments section below. There will be no written prompt.
Welcome to the Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge. In 250 words or less, write a story incorporating the elements in the picture at left. The 250 word limit will be strictly enforced.
Please keep language and subject matter to a PG-13 level.
Use the comment section below to submit your entry. Entries will be accepted until Tuesday at 5:00 PM Pacific Time. No political or religious entries, please. Need help getting started? Read this article on how to write flash fiction.
On Wednesday, we will open voting to the public with an online poll so they may choose the winner. Voting will be open until 5:00 PM Thursday. On Saturday morning, the winner will be recognized as we post the winning entry along with the picture as a feature.
Once a month, the admins will announce the Editors’ Choice winners. Those stories will be featured in an anthology like this one. Best of luck to you all in your writing!
Entries only in the comment section. Other comments will be deleted. See HERE for additional information and terms. Please note the rule changes for 2018.
FOR EDITORS CHOICE ONLY
Reese blinked in the frigid air, the wind a frenzy, whipping his face red, tears forming, nose running. Using his sleeve, he wiped both, wondering how many steps he’d get before having to wipe them again.
Desolation, as if all color had been leeched from the world, he trudged along, hoping to see someone, something. Abandoned houses behind him had held no food, no water, no clothes or furnishings, not a single soul. No cars or trucks in their garages, he’d warmed himself, slept for an hour and set out again, sure he’d find a town, humanity before sunset.
His boots afforded little protection from the chill. He’d crossed the ice, but a misstep cracked it, plunging both feet into icy water. Reese stopped, briefly considered returning to a shell of a home but decided against it. What good would not freezing to death do if he starved? He was already ravenous, already delirious, lightheaded.
Feet leaden, he pushed on for a time before reaching into his pocket, his icy fingers pulling out a matchbook. Needing a moment of warmth, of color. Fumbling, he tried first one, then another. Turning his back to block the howling wind, he tried one last time but got no flame, not even a spark. Falling to the ground, he lamented his life, his choices as his last tears congealed on frozen lashes.
Reese woke, blinked in the frigid air, the wind a frenzy, whipping…
Some say Hell is hot. Reese would soon know better.
As I fled through the pouring rain, the first arrow whizzed past my ear. The galloping horses, splashing through the water, were closing in. My soaked clothes slowed me down. Too late.
In a flash, I was surrounded by a dozen redskins in their ceremonial
loin cloths, naked thighs glistening with raindrops. The one on the white stallion loped forward, pointed at me, and laughed. Nervously, I stomped from one foot to the other, sending circles of watery waves to the shuffling hooves of their mounts. Soon, his little tribe joined in laughter. I assumed they were amused by my footwork, so I hopped a little faster, making bigger waves. They laughed even harder. I seemed to have relaxed their hostility and began waving my arms in rhythm with my footwork. The redskins, roaring in laughter, jumped from their horses and began circling me, imitating my movements wile chanting in a beguiling chorus of song to the beat of distant tom-toms. I couldn’t believe my ears.
“No!” someone screamed.
It suddenly stopped raining. The men stood speechless beside their snorting horses. The drumbeats faded away. Silence everywhere.
“Sorry. We’ve gotta cut out that scene. It doesn’t work. I just had lunch with Artie. He gave me a copy of a wonderful song. We’ll change the scene to a city street while you, swinging umbrella in hand, give us another of your brilliant routines, splashing through the puddles, happily singing in the rain. It’ll be a winner. Whaddaya say, Gene?”
Winter Mud
Mama would forgive a lot of actions, but muddy boots through her house was not one of them. She would get over my tone, or my back talk but not mud footprints laced with blood on the floorboards of the shack.
Mama’s moods were like that. They made no sense.
I had been walking what felt like days, trying to muster the courage to face her.
She wouldn’t trade muddy prints for me leaving easily but it was time.
It was the one decision I was gonna make in my whole life that went against her. I had carried all the curses from my family and it was time to come clean.
I stood in the doorway facing her back stirring the venison stew.
“I’m not coming back. Authorities will find me here and I cannot put you in danger.”
I saw her spine tighten and her stirring hand holding the spoon become a fist. She couldn’t punch the stew but she could punch me, which shaded my choice of staying put.
“I have to Mama. I have carried the curse and I have to break it.”
“This isn’t the way,” she whispered to the ceiling.
I waited.
“Are you comin’ in to eat?” She turned and looked at me from top to bottom settling on my boots.
“Too much mud,” I turned to leave.
Mama nodded. She waited til we lost sight of each other. Her scream forevermore stayed with me – part of my curse I had to carry.
We used to complain that our throats were dust. Everyone I knew had a cough.
There were many souls lost to the clutches of parched soil.
“Glen, do you think those clouds will cry today?”
I looked down to my sister’s dirty little face. She was still full of hope, I couldn’t tell her true.
“Betsy, they are for sure gonna weep like a babe!”
The little girl squealed and clapped her small hands together.
At that moment, for the first time in three years, the sky wept. Betsy and I shed tears of our own. Flowing salty orbs of joy.
For some time after I walked barefoot in the mud of the fields. Betsy danced ahead singing and laughing.
I saw then, as her small form twirled, a different glow in her eyes. A brilliant blue light.
I shook my head and searched her face as she paused.
This girl was one I’d never seen before.
Jake walked along the dry ridge of land. Where did all this water come from?
As a farmer he loved water—his livelihood depended upon it. But not here—not in this field.
His co-op agent had answered his call for help. “Ya may want to take up trout farming.”
“Ha ha. Very funny.”
“I hear this is how they grow rice in China.”
Jake bit his tongue. “You’re not helping, Ed.”
Ed chuckled. “Ah, c’mon. It’s early in the season; you haven’t even begun planting yet.”
“You can’t plant in mud.”
Ed tried for one more joke. “Ever think of pig farming? Ya got enough mud.”
“Enough!”
The county surveyor drove over to where the men stood, carefully avoiding the soggy field. Under his arm he had long rolls of parchment—maps of the county, of Jake’s farm, and the watershed.
He cleared his throat. “The good news is you managed to find an underground spring. All the water under—and on—this land legally belongs to you. You can use it to irrigate to your heart’s content.”
Ed moved the toothpick to the other side of his lips. “If that’s the good news, that means there’s bad news.”
The surveyor nodded. “Yup.”
Jake braced himself for the worst. The water was indeed too good to be true. “So,” he asked, “what’s the bad news?”
“You struck water. Not oil. Afraid you won’t be moving to Beverly Hills anytime soon.”
At that, Jake had to laugh.
Mary flew out of the time vortex sliding fifty yards on to some primordial mud flats. Covered in ooze, slipping and sliding, and somewhat wobbly she finally maintained her balance and stood up.
The face of her wrist time monitor was covered in mud as was most of her protective time space suit. She tried pressing her emergency recall patch, and nothing happened, “Oh this is just great! I’m probably stuck at the dawn of time again!”
She flipped open her mud covered visor, “Well it sure looks and smells primordial. I might as well get onto dry land.”
With every step, She tried to take towards dry land she slid back down the steep mud flats. She heard the familiar sound of a man yelling behind her, “Quick! Come back this way! Hurry, or you ‘ll die!”
Mary turned to see another time vortex open near her with a stranger beckoning to her. She also spotted a huge tidal wave rolling towards them. When she reached him, she snapped her helmet shut. He pulled her to safety in the time vortex.
Back at base, Mary discovered she had been gone for twenty years, and there was all new personnel, she asked, “Can I return to the time I left?”
Her rescuer replied, “No, after you disappeared, we found the flaw in the system, and it took twenty years to fix it. It would really mess things up to return. Besides, don’t you want your twenty years of back pay?”
“Caleb! Git outta that mess and come back up here on the porch”
“Early wet don’t grow much corn, Rachael. We gotta figure something here. Don’t know how we’re gonna make it this year.”
“Over said and underdone. Caleb, we talked of this three springs going and you’ve done nothin. Nothin! It’s high time we up and moved.”
“Shucks. Ain’t no one gonna buy it with the Missouri so close and the spring melt from the ‘Breaks’. We’re stuck.”
“Onliest thing stuck here, Caleb is YOU. Worry not, some hoosier will sho ‘nuff buy it from us and we can move on. New Mexico, and grow pecans or Florida and grow citrus and git away from this cold and wet.”
“Yeah but what about my. . .”
“Your Pappy? Pappy’s dead”
“But I promised. . .”
“YOU promised. I didn’t. He’s gone and we should be gone from this place too. You know we can’t make it on late corn. Frost comes too early up here.”
“As you say, but you know you are as much a part of this land as me.”
“Indeed, a reluctant part. My heart is not in it. But my heart is with you and for both our sakes we need to move on. Now stomp the mud off those boots and git down to the Bureau and see who’s buying.”
“God woman, you got more moxie than both my ex-wives put together. You’re coming with me.”
“Are you sure it’s out here?” I yelled to my guide, Major Gilbert Lambertson (ret.), a former fighter pilot with the Royal Australian Air Force.
“Sure ’n’ my name is Gil,” the elderly man replied, plowing on through the rock pools that remained at low tide off-shore of Darwin.
“Come on, mate,” he yelled. “You’re lookin’ a mite stuffed at the moment!”
He laughed at my inability to keep up, all the while moving ahead at a pace that put me, some 30 years younger, to shame. Working a desk job with coffee and a Danish for breakfast obviously was not the best training for this excursion. Regardless, this early morning trek was a “must do” effort on my part.
Lambertson took a glance at his cell phone’s GPS, made a small correction in the direction of our heading, and together, we trudged off down the coast until there it was, just around the bend: the exposed remnants of a B-25 Mitchell Bomber that again had been exposed in Darwin Harbour during a recent, violent storm.
I stood transfixed by what I saw. Before me were the remains of what surely was one of many of these twin-engine bombers to be found around here, the standard equipment for the Allied air forces in World War II.
“This one,” said Lambertson, “carried two Australian and three Dutch airmen. Sadly, they never made it out alive.
“C’mon, let’s go back; I’ll take you to where they’re buried.”
I watched my grandfather standing out among the receded river bed. He did this every time the current slowed to a trickle, swearing before all that would hear that he would find it.
“It” was never specified, but it wasn’t hurting anyone, so who cared?
One day, he decided to tell me what it was. But not in so many words. And I thought he’d finally gone around the bend.
“You have her in your blood, Cait,” he said, “Aren’t you curious where I met her?”
“I’ve been lonely for too long, Cait,” he continued, “I’ve got to find my way back.”
I loved my grandfather, so I just went along with it.
One day, he went out again when the waters receded.
This time, he didn’t come back.
Until five days after his funeral, wanting me to go along with him.
WET
My girlfriend Marjorie Hahn lived two blocks from me. We would walk to and from high school together which was another four blocks. Her dad Ralph Hahn owned and ran the local icehouse in Chowchilla, California, in the 1940’s and 50’s. Marjorie worked with her dad. She was 5’10” and could sling those ice tongs over her shoulder with 50 pounds of blocks of wet ice as well as any of the men. She would go home dripping wet on many days.
We took turns on several occasions sleeping out in our back yards in what we called slumber parties and other girlfriends joined us in sleeping over. The skies are very dark in small towns, so the stars are vivid. We would lie on our backs looking at the sky full of what looked like tens of thousands of stars. We would count them until we fell asleep usually around five thousand. Those slumber parties continued until the summer before my senior year when some strange boys discovered us in the front yard of my house. For some reason we didn’t have any more.
Marjorie majored in home economics and won for the best student in that department on graduating from high school. She might have soaked up water from the summer heat beating into the ice she carried, but she was never a wet blanket.
FOR EDITORS CHOICE ONLY
Second Chance at Love During the Winter Thaw- by, Pat Mill
Donna first spotted him at the fundraiser. Kent and her husband Bill loved to golf. Donna had her horses. Everyone was content, until Kent’s wife became ill and died, a year before Bills fatal car accident.
She hadn’t seen Kent since Bills’ funeral. He’d been in California with his grandchildren.
“Hello gorgeous,” Kent said, smiling and taking her hands, to kiss her on the cheek.
“Kentyou look great! I guess that California Sun!”
“Running after grandkids,” he laughed.
“Are you going to settle in California?”
” I’ve never felt so old in my life! I came back here, to be called a- youngster- by the men in their 80s.”
“We should get together…” Donna said smiling, “…while I still can.”
“That’s right your front five acres, flood every year during the thaw.”
***
They got together for a couple dinners, and a couple movies. Donna wasn’t sure if they were dating…
Maddie, her young hair stylist said, ” If he hasn’t made a move by now, you are stuck in the friend-zone .”
***
Every year, Donna was stuck at home for a week or so, until her land dried.
Kent called, ” Hey, I coming over on a rescue mission.”
“Okay…” Donna said happily.
When she didn’t hear an ATV she looked out the window. There, trudging across her wet, muddy land, was Kent-making his way to her homestead.
” I think we are coming out of the friend- zone,” Donna smiled.
“These rivers been dryin’ up faster ‘n we can document,” said the park ranger, “People say it’s global warming, but this ain’t the North Pole, it’s Wyoming!”
“I think it’s just a very hot, dry summer,” said the detective.
“You’re prob’ly right,” said the ranger. “Now what do you s’pose are those large structures off yonder? Me and the guys can’t make heads or tails of it.”
The detective gazed into the distance and saw these buildings that looked like igloos, but much larger. He got into the ATV with the ranger and went off to investigate.
As they drew closer, the detective thought he saw the side of the building crack open slightly, then close again. Otherwise the buildings were completely solid, lacking any detail.
A young woman came running up the road, breathless. “Ranger, don’t come any closer! Those — things in there are extraterrestrials!”
The detective was stunned. “Are you Maxine Phillips? Everybody’s been looking for you!”
“Me!” she cried, “Don’t worry about me. They’re draining all the water. Those aren’t just buildings, they’re flying reservoirs! I was just a hobby to them, to check me out, when they got bored!”
“Detective,” said the ranger, “Young lady’s right. We better stay away. I’m calling in the military.”
We were desperate for the drought to end. The sun beat upon our backs, made us feel like we were melting. Crops withered in the fields. Livestock died of thirst. Our children were going hungry. Every day we watched helplessly as the land turned barren, and we prayed for rain.
When the clouds finally gather and the first sweet drops begin to fall, we race around like maniacs. We laugh and dance in the puddles. We watch the desiccated plants for signs of life and quickly plant new seeds.
But after several days our joy becomes fear. The rain continues to fall without let up. The dry earth soaks in as much as it can hold. Now the fields turn into muddy swaths. The rivers and creeks overflow their banks. Dirty waters flood our homes and barns. We still cannot farm our fields. Now we pray for sunshine.
It does not help to know that we’ve brought these horrors upon ourselves – that we have polluted too much and created unlivable weather. We wonder how we can survive. As the rain chatters upon our roofs, we sit listening to the grandparents. They tell stories of a world where weather actually helped humans instead of destroying them, a world long gone.