when I was young I fell in love with story

wolf, 21, he/him. i'm going to learn to love blank pages again.

[sheepsclothings]

flash fiction practice for nycmidnight • 2/?

wordcount: 247

prompts: complain, pattern, comedy

cws: n/a

time taken: 17 minutes

The couple stood in their living room, locked in an embrace.

“Sarah, you know that you’re the love of my life, don’t you?” he said softly. “What’s mine is yours.”

“Aw,” she smiled up at him, snaking a searching hand around him. “... Even the remote?”

“Nope!” he laughed, snatching it from where he’d hidden it behind his back to hold it over his head.

“Rahul!” she complained, standing up on her toes to grab for it. “It’s my turn!”

“Not if I have to hear David Attenborough drone on about the fascinating life of the slow-th,” he said in a mock-British accent.

“You’re a slow-th,” Sarah said petulantly, sticking out her tongue. Quirking an eyebrow, Rahul grinned.

“How about this- you can have it…” he began to lower the remote- and then jerked it back up when it was just within her grasp. “If you can catch me,” he winked, and sprinted off.

“Hey, that’s not fair!” with a laugh, Sarah dashed after him into the hall.

“Who’s the slow-th now?” Rahul taunted over his shoulder- stumbled, and crashed face-first into the carpet.

Sarah hurried to his side.

“Jesus Rahul, are you alright?” she panted.

“I think I fell on the remote” he groaned, straightening up, and Sarah clapped a hand over her mouth.

The pattern of buttons indented on his forehead was visible for the rest of the evening, and Sarah couldn’t help but snicker at the sight every time she glanced away from Blue Planet.

[sheepsclothings]

flash fiction practice for nycmidnight • 1/?

wordcount: 248

prompts: embryo, swallow, ghost story

cws: death, implied pregnancy, implied cardiac arrest

time taken: 45 minutes

Humans have always clung to their words. At seven weeks, you call it an embryo. From the Greek, swell into. It is a cluster of cells, defined entirely by what it might mutate into. And at eight weeks, it is still entirely animal: webbed digits, a shrivelling tail, a hare’s skipping heartbeat. But quite suddenly, you deem it foetus, from the Latin, offspring. Human. With an arbitrary incision, you make it yours.

Or by the same token, you cleave it from you.

When do you call a person dead?

When you see a body without breath. When the hum of the brain-hive is hushed. You want death to be a threshold you can step over, a house you can lock the door to. I will tell you this: when the cardiograph collapsed and the doctor called out, clear, I was there. My electromagnetic echo a twist in the tide of your brainwaves, a flicker in the current of your nerves.

Perhaps you need another word. Perhaps when you see death, you see instead what I will turn into: a milk-white bundle of bones, a weight in your arms to be lowered tenderly into a bed.

But on the gurney, I am at least partly alive. Listen to the quiet creak of my tendons. Hear the whispers of my wandering white blood cells.

Dead, alive, both, neither. Too difficult for you to swallow, perhaps, without one of your words. Try ghost, then, from the Old English, gast. Human being.

[sheepsclothings]

I'm entering nycmidnight's 250 word flash fiction challenge in eighteen days. I'm pretty new to flash fiction so I made this wheel of genres to practice, in case anyone else would like to use it, whether you are participating or not. nycmidnight explain each genre in depth here.

I am also currently using this random verb generator and this random word generator to practice incorporating the randomly generated word and action.