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.
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.
My real close friends call me Dick Teter, but that is not even close to my real name. For example, my first name is Paul.
I don’t really mind that my friends call me by different names. When we are with strangers, it gets a little confusing. It’s now a standard joke they like to play when we are out socializing. We don’t call it by that name, but that’s the polite way to say what we are up to.
The standard practice are the introductions, “Hello, this is our friend Paul.” Five minutes later, “Hey Dick, are you picking up this round?”
Keeping a straight face is the hardest part. After an hour, we clue the girls in to the ruse, and it helps to break the ice. Nobody has told us to get lost, that is for darn sure.
So, like them, maybe you would like to know why my friends gave me different names?
Let’s start with Teter. Have you ever done any remodeling on something like an 1852 home? Nothing is straight and even. Shims are a carpenter’s best friend. Leveling a floor is really difficult, and if you can’t get to the actual beams, forget it. However, if you are lucky enough to expose the beams, the shims can help to bring things in line.
After many renovations, I was particularly good at it. They started calling me – Dick Levelor, but that eventually changed to Dick Teter.
You ask, “What’s the rest of the story?”
Teeter-totter
On balance, it was going to be a restful day, a walk-in-the-park kind of day. All I had to do was follow the Gimlet. I’d taken to calling her that, name all my pigeons. Keeps the old brain cells fresh if you get my drift. Gimlet was easy to get to. Came from all sorts of directions. First off, they said her first name was Ginny. Virginia…so like old Santa Claws, that was a slam-dunk.
“She’ll be dressed in green finery,” they also said.
And she was.
No idea if she was a Brit.
But I loved the lime-green ensemble.
She glowed in the tight slacks and blazer.
My little green glow-worm.
“Complex pedigree, we think,” they added. “A mix of races. Sort of a universal soldierette. Watch yourself. You’re not the first we’ve sent.”
I tagged her early, bunked in at a little Air B and B on the east side of the city. Out of the way. A few blocks from the heart of the city.
I’d followed her for two days.
Each day a different outfit.
Each day a long walk in a different neighborhood.
Little Miss Tourist.
Having a ball.
But here we were. Pigeon Park.
An older guy was sitting on the teeter-totter.
Pushing himself up.
Then down.
Silly bugger.
In a flash, she was on the other end.
He smiled.
She giggled, went up to him.
It was quick.
He fell forward.
She’d taken out my meal ticket.
I was green with envy.
Wedges
The floor in the kitchen was uneven, but it was still the best place. The hallway was too narrow, its walls too close, offering sufficient opportunities that could interfere with proceedings, delaying the finality of the exercise. There was only one room in the house that would do, a place where we could guarantee we’d not be interrupted.
We took our time with the arrangements. We practised for weeks, trying stools of different heights positioned in various locations, looping the ropes over the beams. The house was an ancient property, set in its own grounds, remote from anyone who’d hear anything untoward. We tried sacks filled with sand, suspended from pulleys, letting the load swing like a pendulum until it stopped. And then we decided we’d delayed long enough.
It was better that we stop before we overthought things too much.
We carried the table toward the wall, taking care to raise its feet so they wouldn’t scrub across the earthenware tiles covering the floor. We’d noted that during one of the rehearsals, the noise it had made enough to disturb the cook in her bed, sleeping in her lair to the rear of the house. We’d had problems that night, blaming it on high spirits, our usual over-excited laddish behaviour. But we were never sure how much she had suspected what we’d been planning, her manner becoming decidedly uncool.
And so, she’d be the first after I’d stabilised the stool.
Ready to kick it away from beneath her.
“Honey, I can’t find my doorstop. Did you do something with it?” Amanda hollered from her art studio.
“Ah, I borrowed it when I was stacking the beams,” answered Jim.
“Just what does ‘borrowed’ mean?” Sounding more irritated than inquisitive.
“I needed some shims so I borrowed your doorstop and the one in the laundry room,” Jim answered.
“What? What the hell, Jim! Don’t you have shims? Can’t you simply cut some from all that scrap lumber you have?” She sounded pissed.
“I’m sorry. I’ll replace them now.” He was tired of her constantly blaming him for all her discomforts in life.
As he approached his table saw, he thought of how their relationship was also uneven – like the beams he stacked. The problem was, their relationship of nine years didn’t have shims to make it even again. It just teetered more and more.
He grabbed a three-inch 2X4 from the scrap bucket and flicked on the saw. Halfway through it, he hit a knot. The wood jerked left. He didn’t get his hand out the way quick enough.
“Damnit!” He felt a jab and grabbed his right hand with his left. He saw the bloody end of his index finger on the table saw.
He wrapped a rag around it and walked back into the house. “Amanda, I need some help.”
“What is it now? Why can’t I have a few minutes of uninterrupted time?”
Their relationship had definitely reached a tipping point.
Grandpa could make anything with his thick, calloused hands. Running a small cabinetry business from his woodshop off the side of his and Grandma’s house, it smelt either of sweet sawdust or mind-numbing lacquer. On lacquer days he’d open up all the doors to let fresh air billow through to keep his “wits” about him. Standing over the finished clinquant project, I was enchanted. I loved to trace a finger over the different squiggly lines of grains that ran like a river through the rich wood imagining it was leading me to secret buried treasure.
Grandpa’s shop had tools and pictures of family, friends and favorite finished projects peppered throughout the muted gray walls. The teeth of the saws seemed like fantastical monsters but never scared me when Grandpa guided wood through their chompers. Everything was covered in dust, illuminated by the large windows and skylights; the entirety in its place.
Slabs of wood were stacked on shelves or leaning up against the walls on either side of the front french doors. Cardboard boxes with scraps of wood -set aside for kindling for me to take home- and another one for shims, sat on the concrete floor by the back door.
I think the first thing Grandpa ever showed me was how to use shims to wedge a door into place. We had been installing it in my parents’ laundry room. I wondered why Dad hadn’t done the work himself. Hadn’t Grandpa taught Dad how shims worked too?
Fish Food, Any Way
The race started in the parking lot. Tuzo slammed the car door and was twenty feet closer to the pier when the other car door slammed behind him. Tuzo had a favorite spot and he wasn’t about to let Ardy near it.
With one hand Tuzo yanked the fishing pole skyward each time it grazed the ground. A small orange tackle box wedged tightly under his curled arm rattled with every bounce of his step. His feet clapped the tarmac then pounded the gray decking of the pier.
Ardy saw no need to run. He didn’t want Tuzo’s spot, anyway, didn’t like fishing, anyway, and was only there to watch the seagulls, anyway. Though his pace was hastened by the hot pavement he slowed to a distracting pace on the pier to look at all the bird poop on the handrails, counting the spots in groups of fives.
A seagull teetered on the rim of a fisherman’s pail, ducking his head in and out and thrusting his wings about trying to grab a morsel without falling in. Ardy poked at the bird with the tip of his pole hoping to upset the gull’s balance and plunge it into the fish feast, only to have it fly away.
Disappointed Ardy turned his attention to Tuzo, teetering over the middle wheel rail, looking under the pier for a mysterious floater he spotted just as he had cast. Ardy pointed his pole and marched forward knowing Tuzo couldn’t fly.
Redemption
“What’s up?” asked Prometheus.
“What does it look like?” Atlas grunted and shifted the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Earth weighs a ton. And it doesn’t help with all those humans running around on it.”
“Why you?”
“I got the short straw.”
Prometheus nodded and wiped his brow. “Damn, it’s hot here.”
“Don’t blame me. I keep asking for air conditioning.” Then he raised his voice. “But nobody listens to me!” As his words trailed off, he looked at Prometheus. “Dude, what happened to your teeth?”
“I lost a few during my confinement on the Caucasus Mountains.”
Atlas looked at his friend. “You need counselling.” Changing the subject, he asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I’m on a redemption arc. After fouling up with the whole ‘giving fire to Mankind’ thing, I needed to redeem myself. Do a good deed.”
Atlas thought for a moment. “Well, I could use more stability. Would you mind placing a wedge under my left foot?”
Prometheus saw his opportunity, grabbed a wedge, and placed it under Atlas’ right foot.
“No, dude! That’s the wrong foot!”
Losing his footing, Atlas teetered precariously on the edge of a precipice. Before the Titan could say another word, and before Prometheus could grab his friend, Atlas disappeared from view.
“Oops.”
Prometheus watched in stunned silence as Atlas and the Earth plunged into the abyss. He shook his head. He knew he was never going to hear the end of this one.
Teeter
I teetered on the edge of the precipice. For decades, I had felt that men were deranged lemmings racing towards self-destruction. Foolishly we had polluted the oceans, smogged the air and littered the ground. Earth had degenerated into one huge cesspit. The fetid toxic waste caused the apocalypse. It truly doomed humans! The foul stew choked the flora and strangled the fauna, almost completely assassinating what men had begun.
My toes shifted and some dirt rushed into the hellhole below. Teetering like the wall that I had once built, which required shims to plumb and level it. What I needed was a shim to adjust my balance. Suddenly, I saw it! Falling to my knees, I gasped at the loveliness of a dusty feeble flower. It was so fragile, frail and flimsy yet against all odds it was pushing its way into the world- an heroic statement of beauty. If this pathetic flower could grow in a polluted environment, then surely I should make an effort to better the dystopia.
Before, I became disillusioned with life, I was a top scientist working for a pharmaceutical company. Far too late, I realized that their goal was to make obscene profits at the expense of mankind’s betterment. If this one flower could add beauty to the world then I too could make a difference. I could strive for a better tomorrow by working towards environmental remediation and conservation.
It started as a team-building exercise, until it went horribly wrong. At that point it turned into a circular firing squad of finger-pointing and blamestorming.
For the record, I had been against the idea from the start. Maybe it would be a good idea for adults on a retreat, but I knew teenage boys far too well. However, I was overruled, and ordered to help oversee it. Obey or be fired for insubordination.
So I was there when one of the kids pulled out the wrong wedge and the whole structure started to teeter. I barely had time to shout for them to get off. Maybe that decision made things worse when it collapsed on them.
All I could think was call 911. While I hunted for a phone, the other teachers tried to pull the kids out of the wreckage.
I’d expected disciplinary action, even dismissal, but not lawsuits. Nothing to do but lawyer up.
It should’ve been open and shut – except I didn’t have written proof of my objections. No, my e-mails and concerns aired on social media didn’t count. Only a formal letter, printed up and signed, would’ve spared me a ruinous judgment.
Now I live on the margins of society, working under the table and moving from one cheap motel to another. Even if I could get a better job with my teaching certificate revoked, there’s no point in toiling just to have my wages taken by the court.
NO MORE TEETERING
“This’ll last forever,” I shouted with a smug smile, firing my Irwin 16-ounce claw hammer into the steel toolbox. With two precisely-chiseled cedar wedges, finally I’d stabilized the wobbly steps to the A-frame cabin I was building in Vermont’s Green Mountains. “All is good.”
“No, Ethan,” my fiancee’ Olivia hollered, holding an ice pack to the black and blue mark on her rosy cheek. “I am not good.”
“I’m sorry you fell.” I stroked her hand. “It won’t happen again.”
Her manicured fingers pulled away. “But something else will.”
I’d thought moving us from Bushwick, Brooklyn’s incessant noise and crowded streets would make us both happier. She’d paint more and I’d finish my novel.
Instead she’d painted nothing while I produced page after page.
“The silence freaks me,” she wailed. “There’s no people here.”
The air had ignited daily with spats over problems in my cabin.
“I gotta’ have a super,” she’d whined.
She stomped up the steps.
Shaking, I followed.
“Where’re you going?” I said, watching her stuff clothes in her backpack. Sweat broke out on my forehead.
She slipped off the tiny diamond solitaire ring, and placed it with delicacy on the pine box repurposed as a bedside table.
“Back to Bushwick.” She stroked my cheek. “Moving here works for you, not me, Honey. Just like those wood things you made, we’re two different pegs that only fit in our own holes.”
Though my heart was broken, I had to smile.