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.
End of Day, Dark of Night
Against the blackened earth, the lavender sky glows with a furious flame. Our noses pressed to the windowpane, arms clutching each others’ waists, we can not look away.
“Do we dare?” she asks.
Do we, I wonder.
I cannot answer her, though I know I will.
I must.
I so want to step out into the settling dusk, but fear slithers over me, a cowardly snake of my own creation.
It is always this way with me.
“We should stay safe,” I finally declare. “That is what we are told to do. Stay inside. Risk nothing.”
This is not news to her, my trepidation, my acquiescence to authority. I have massaged this submission, this compliance, over decades. Early in my life, I saw a tendency to object, to place my transient resistance to guidance above all else. I also sensed that while it might provide temporary pleasure of the sort that fuels rebels and malcontents, that ultimately it would make me a social pariah. In time I reveled in the comfort of passivity, the steadfastness of docility.
She looks at me. Safety is not her principal concern. She needs adventure, needs her curiosity satisfied.
I know this about her, and it frightens me. The earth is afire at the moment, irretrievable, the thick smell of war smoke, of combustible forests, of a trembling earth, all combining to create a cataclysm of collapse.
We have likely waited too long.
Inside!
Outside!
It matters little, now.
Stormy Sunset?
“Take a gander at that crazy sunset. Should we be worried that the winds shifted? Are those burning wildfires heading our way now?”
“That’s the dual-edged sword we deal with, babe. We can’t relax for a weekend at our remote cabin and still pay attention to the news.”
“The forest fire was over five miles away when we got here Friday night. The Forest Service still didn’t know what caused the blaze.”
“Hon, go start the car and sit inside to listen to the radio. That should calm your nerves after you hear an update on the fire.”
His wife did just and settled back as she fiddled with the tuner knob until she found the all-news format station. The worried announcer called for emergency evacuations for the entire wilderness community to the west of their tiny cabin. The broadcaster described fiery waves of destruction consuming everything in their path. Their remote getaway spot was right in line with the current trajectory of the emergency.
“Dude, you need to hear this,” she shouted, and her husband trotted over. “We need to go, now!”
He held up his hand to ask for a moment to listen to the newscast. The out-of-control announcer repeated his call for an emergency evacuation to the east. The enormous alien craft continued to fuel the incendiary wall with an unknown weapon. He looked at his mate with wide eyes and repeated her earlier words.
“You’re right. We need to go, now!”
With a rumble of thunder, the day ended.
Dolores was inside her cage, already restless, her angular face against the bars. I’d promised her more exercise tonight. I didn’t know how much she understood me: our conversations were generally one-way, my voice prompting a wordless response.
Tonight, she would be free for a while.
We travelled together – I always drove, Delores remaining out of sight. It brought back memories of our earliest days as a couple: the pair of us together, sharing experiences. I wondered if she still dreamed: she was much more different now. There was so little of the woman I’d known.
I opened the door and stood back.
She drove forward like an express, a blur of motion and colour, her vestigial limbs smaller than I remembered. The moult she’d left behind looked like a ghost, a pale empty shell of what she’d been, her humanity sloughing away a little more each time. I wondered how much of the woman was in there now. Was she still inside, or had the animal finally taken over?
Delores reared up, her coils giving her extra height. When she ate, she was voracious, her appetite driving her growth to extremes. She had strength in abundance, but there was tenderness too, the loops she wound around me capable of crushing me like toothpaste in a tube.
And then she was gone. She released me, leaving me stumbling ineptly; her violet eyes, the highest cheekbones, and an insatiable appetite for life.
ELIGIBLE FOR EDITORS’ CHOICE ONLY
My Neighbour Built a Time Machine
Shhh…
Can you keep a secret?
I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I feel I can trust you. So understand, this is just between you and me. Okay?
My neighbour built a time machine. I know. It sounds crazy. But it’s true.
I had only known Bob for a short time. He was a nice guy, but he mostly kept to himself, was into computer games, read a lot, and built gadgets in his basement.
Then, one stormy sunset, we arrived home at the same time and struck up a conversation. He told he was building something special.
He took me to his basement and showed me the strangest contraption I had ever seen.
He told me it was a time machine, which he had been working on for two years. His goal was to travel to the future. He was a big science fiction fan and he wanted to know what the future would be like.
I was stunned. I told him it would never work. Time machines were just make-believe.
But he assured me it would work. He was going to visit the future.
Time passed, and I noticed Bob wasn’t around anymore. His family told me he had moved to another city in search of work.
I didn’t give much thought to Bob after that. I was busy with my own life and job.
Then several months later, a cryptic message appeared on my cell phone.
It read:
Orwell was right. Bob.
Wild Ride
The storm lit sky warned her not to go. “Tommy, I can’t.”
“Sure, you can, it will be a piece of cake.” However, his arms ached inflating the raft.
“I’ve fallen for those ‘cake recipes.’”
“And you’re still with me! This will be our night, and we don’t even have to pay for the WILD ride!”
A sudden gust of wind caused the inflatable raft to blow out of the water. “Even the six-foot raft is trying to tell us not to do this.”
“Don’t be such a spoilsport, and besides, it’s almost ten feet.”
“Can’t we just go ‘parking’ instead?”
“We’ve done that before; this will be an exciting adventure.”
“I should have listened to my friends. They said you were very different and would get me into trouble.”
“Who, said that? Never mind! You’re here and you’re going, one way or another. Grab that oar before it floats away, and give me a hand putting this back in the water.”
“I don’t like your attitude. I’m going back to the truck.”
*.*.*
Campers visiting the shore the next day found a young girl tied to one of the raft’s seats, cold but alive.
She told the story of her boyfriend insisting they were both going out in his inflatable raft. He forced her to go and when they were an hour into the journey, he lost one oar and then the other. She could only watch as a huge wave bumped him off his ‘wild’ ride.
Stormy Sunset
Autistic summer sunset. The tempestuous sky hurled greys filled with anger. The sky mirrored my emotions. I was the psychotic, precocious, psychedelic sky. Hope in the guise of the sunset was vanishing. Peeling back my emotions was chaotic. It was like scraping away the colours of the storm and finding another picture underneath. What would pentimento have revealed underneath the mammatus clouds? Damn, why was pyrrhonism filling my skull?
She said she was attracted to me because of my bubbly optimism. My spontaneous behaviour, she found captivating after years of moulding and being told how to act. As opposites we both attracted and repelled each other. Breaking from parental bounds, her artistic talents burnt furiously and were often at odds with my logical scientific mind. Wanting to save the world was the glue which bound us together. Logically our wedding theme was based on the three Rs. Our wedding clothes were charity store purchased, the food was left overs and our venue was a protest march against ocean pollution. As young utopianists our wedding night was spent in jail. The guards’ headaches throbbed with our repeated protest songs.
So why was I full of spit and vinegar? I felt that years of demonstrating, scientific research and pollution eating inventions had achieved so little. Then…. Yes, I had achieved so little but it was a step towards conservation. As the storm died so did my moodiness.
Time to launch yet another litter catching boat.
I’d been so focused on searching for mushrooms that I neglected to look up. Now I notice the sun sinking toward the horizon and the clouds darkening the sky. I must hurry home to our underground storm shelter.
History cubes speak of a time when storms were benevolent, welcomed for their moisture. Not so now. Rainstorms drop acid to blister your skin. Hailstorms pelt you with egg-sized ice balls. To the unsheltered most storms are lethal.
I stuff the last mushrooms into my pack and rush toward our village. When I hear a deafening crack of thunder, I glance upward and stumble over a tree root. The first icy pellets begin ripping leaves off the trees.
Lying face down, I spot a dark opening through some willow bushes. I clamber to my knees and crawl through the brush. I’m rewarded with the entrance to a small cave in the rocky hillside. I squeeze inside and scramble far back. I wrap my arms around my knees to huddle there for the night. Storms rarely end before sunrise.
By morning the barrage has ended. I creep out of my shelter. As I gaze down at the village, I see rubble. Several homes have been demolished. From this distance I can’t tell if one of them belongs to me.
I hoist my pack and walk down the hill. Shortly, I will find out if my neighbors will be helping me rebuild, or if I will be helping them.
In the distance the skyline blazed, as if the whole city were on fire. We knew it wasn’t, but we all agreed the image made a perfect symbol for the current situation.
I was the only one of us old enough to remember the Lanakhidzist Revolution, which brought down the Soviet Union. One of its chief turning points had been the so-called “Stalingrad Firestorm.” It wasn’t a literal firestorm — the city on the great bend of the Volga River is too long and skinny for that. But when Danikidze announced on the thirtieth anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad’s end that the city would return to the name by which it had earned immortality, it ignited a celebration half block party and half riot that had not ended until the “fuel” – that is, the booze – had been exhausted. It was the moment the unrest went from a purely Georgian phenomenon to one that would sweep the length and breadth of the world’s largest country.
The fire burning in America’s belly was not the same. Instead of the Brezhnev Stagnation fueling nostalgia for remembered glory days, we had a vast national divide that had developed in response to the revelation of our government’s Cold War human biotechnology projects. Each side saw the other as wrong, not merely incorrect but immoral. Each incident only hardens resolve, and we are caught in the middle, feeling punished for an existence we did not choose.
“Look at how far we’ve come,” said the old man’s son. “A little optimism, please.”
The old man halted the ragged group. They’d come a vast distance over rugged terrain. “Look ahead,” said the younger man, interrupting the old one’s thought. “The sunset is brilliant, a new beginning beckons.”
Dark clouds, almost purple, hung over them except for that golden band on the horizon. The old one heard the muffled explosion, felt unaccustomed warmth bathe his face.
“That’s not supposed to happen,” he said to himself, agitated, walking in circles.
The young man grabbed his father by the shoulder. “What is wrong with you?” he practically screamed as the others milled about. “We’ve escaped the past. Our rescue is ahead.”
“My dear son,” said the old man in an agonized voice. “There is no escape. Killers are still chasing us and ahead is only the bomb.” He hugged his son, holding him close, tears streaming down his ravaged face. “I’m so sorry.”
“What are you talking about?” asked the son, drawing him away from the others. “We need hope now.”
“I know, my son, but it’s hard, this hope you hunger for.” He pointed to the glowing western sky. “That’s not just a sunset. That’s the bomb’s after-glow. Our hopes are dashed.”
Of course, the old man was right. It was the bomb that was never to be used. Until it was.
The glare from the bomb blinded them. The pain was fleeting.
But then the rain fell.