Here are the results from last week’s prompt. As this is the very first Flash Fiction Friday prompt, I decided to post all of the submissions I received.
I knew a girl whose brother had drowned. Not on this beach, but on another one probably exactly like it. I thought of him as I paced leisurely–too leisurely, really–down the bank of the disinterested ocean, waves lapping hard at rocks somewhere down the coast. People stroll down the beach, people scowl at seagulls, people drown. I was never friends with her, though she perhaps thought of me as one, our mutual awkwardness and bad skin binding us together like cousins. When he died, she flew back into town and called me. I met her at a suburban coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon, enormous faux-Italian vases bookending our table. She told me about her life since high school, gesticulating with her slender hands, which were tipped with long, untended and slightly yellowed nails. Up and down her hands and arms, clusters of warts fought for space. I felt pity, and empath really, listening to her talk about her askew life, feeling a little strange every time she used the phrase “baby brother.” I felt bad, but I also felt angry. I felt an urge to clean her up, buy her conditioner, replace her flared pants with a smart pair of dark-wash jeans. “We are supposed to get better,” I wanted to yell at her. “We are supposed to buffer our edges and prove everyone wrong.”
–“Alisha”, Nataliya Pirumova, Portland, OR
Steven listens to the waves fall on shore like the sound of feet slapping against asphalt, and to the water run out over the rocks and sand back to sea like the sharp intake of a runner’s breath. He wonders how long this will continue — the relation of every experience to being on the lamb. A fugitive’s mentality. Probably until he is behind bars. For the past two weeks it’s been like this, westward motion in a zigzag across the countries forgotten roads, doing anything to anyone just to get away. Steven went west because it was the only direction to go away from Plainview, New Jersey, where he’d left three dead in a liquor store robbery. He’d shot his way across the breadbasket states. Burned rubber through the Wyoming, Utah, Nevada deserts. Finally, this morning, as the sun blinded him in the rearview mirrors, he’d made his way into California. In a way, California had always been a promised land, a place in stories where people could abandon their miserable lives for success, freedom, a new life. But Steven doesn’t feel any different as he sits in the crusted sand. Even at high noon, the air is cold, the water colder. He listens and he hears sirens, faintly, in the distance from the east. -“Fugitive”, James Grange, Spring Creek NV
“I canned it.” He said, looking out at the sea.
“What do you mean?” The little girl said, without taking her eyes off what was in her daddy’s hands. “I thought only fish came in cans.”
She thought of the tasty canned-fish sandwiches her mother made for her. Her mother would make them and then take the crusts off with a big knife, cut it in four—and throw them out the window, onto the deck. Then she would eat the crustless, and quartered sandwich while watching the seagulls feed.
“No, not just fish. Almost anything. It’s a way of saving. That what I was doing. Saving this for when we don’t have it anymore.”
“Don’t have any what?”
“Any ocean.”
“Is it going away?”
“No. We are. We’re going away from here, into the land. We won’t hear it anymore.” He looked again, out at the sea.
“Will the birds still eat my sandwich crusts?” This seemed important to her, more important than the ocean. She pictured herself watching them lie there while she ate. She pictured uneaten crusts in piles, and she pictured her father,finally, pushing them away with a big broom.
“Maybe the raccoons will eat them…” He said.
-“Inland”, Isaac Mayo, Portland, OR
she pulled out her dick and took a long, contemplative piss into the great pacific, turning it a bit more yellow than the gold of the sunset conspired. it had been a long day, and bucked the recent trend of feeling like a mute hourglass, sand bleeding out like the proverbial hole in the dike. time rushed callously on, and she awkwardly shivered through the nights like a little dutch boy with cold fingers. this, compounded by fear that everyday day was slightly shorter and less remarkable than the last, had really put a kink in her bladder, so to speak. thus, overlooking the grandeur of the moment, mingling salt with salt, giving the balls a scratch, really stoked the fires of friday night ambition. with a flip of the wrist, shaking the last few drops, she packed it up, lit up a smoke, and turned her back on the sparks playing in the flotsam. driving back, driving fast, the radio was an oracle. all the songs were about summer nights, all the women were beautiful, and everyone got their rocks off. and, as she lit up another, she knew tonight she would be no exception. -Madeline Enos, Coos Bay, OR
Swish, swoosh, crash. The ocean was a puppy licking his feet An ice cold puppy that sounded like a toilet flushing. It was one of the sounds that brought him back to childhood. His feet sank into the wet sand. He wondered if the beach was still populated with the same sand from his childhood. The sand he had built his countless castles out of. Or was it like everything else in his past, gone, dispersed, scattered over a thousand miles by time and lunar cycles and other geophysical phenomena that rule the heavens?
He had built them like a zealous little Templar conquering the holy land. Every night, under cover of darkness, driven by the influence of the golden crescent, the tide would reclaim them like a horde of angry Saracens. Beneath the slurping and the splashing he heard the cacophony of seagulls. Beneath the shrieks and cries of birds he heard laughing, soft and silly. He opened his eyes and saw the carefree young knights, on the road to Jerusalem, armed with buckets and spades, starting a new crusade. Swish, swoosh, crash.
-“The Road to Jerusalem”, Dan Adler, Portland, OR
Here’s my own (exactly) 200 word flash fiction piece. My creative writing skills are a little rusty, so hopefully these weekly prompts will assist me in getting back my groove.
It’d been years since she’d seen the ocean. Megan had loved it once, the hiss and crash of the waves, the way the salt in the air clung to her skin. She had often spent time sitting in the sand and watching seagulls scream at each other before the hard ocean winds threw them hard against the cliffs. They’d fall in a jumble of broken wings to the beach below, where sand mites and other scavengers would pick at their bones. She would try to bury them, sometimes. But Megan learned that the wind, the waves, and small children would quickly unearth them. She knew she would have to dig deeper, deep enough so nothing would disturb their rest. It took her a month of digging before she reached a depth suitable enough for her needs. She dug in places where the sand was damp, so it wouldn’t continually spill forward into the hole. The place was set back from the shoreline, deep in the brush where a creek ran towards the ocean from the mainland. But by the time she had dug as deep as she wanted to go, it was no longer seagulls she planned to bury there.
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