#flash fic february

[cobbledcrossroadtavern]

Flash Fic Feb 2025, Day 3

Posted on 8 Feb

Prompt: TRUTH

“I’m trying to speak — to write - the truth. I’m trying to be clear. I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and the truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.”

From one who did not walk away:

We know what we are. But we do it anyway. If we stopped now, nothing would be better. The poor brute wouldn't suddenly know freedom, and we wouldn't suddenly be resolved. It would just make everything bad.

We aren't the first, you know. We aren't the first community to destroy one of our own for selfish reasons. We aren't even the first ones to consider stopping. One community did stop, not far from here. It's gone now. Nobody remembers its name.

[There's something here, but it doesn't really work for a response to "Omelas." There's no simpering self-justification that I could write which Le Guin hasn't already done better.

The original concept was the portrait smashed in an earlier sketch, justifying its existence. That didn't really work because I'm not really ready to commit to the kinds of oppression that community committed, so it ended up as a vague heartless self-justification for something unpleasant-sounding, but not necessarily evil.]

[cobbledcrossroadtavern]

Prompt #8: Elemental spirit intrudes

First the water fell. Then it froze. Then it kept falling.

Rains fell first on feet of snow, then on rock-hard ground. Drops of water the size of candle flames bounced off 6 inches of underground ice. The snow had never melted so fast, like it was trying to beat the rush.

The river took as much as it could swallow, and the rain kept coming. The river began throwing up, then, throwing up all the water that forced its way out of the sky and that the frozen ground refused to drink.

It didn't take long for the river to show its disdain for our back yard. The marshy border, normally hundreds of feet into the woods, emerged out of our lawn in a matter of hours. The space under our house was next, with the river flowing from above and below. The pump couldn't pump fast enough, because there was nowhere to pump to. Every gallon pumped out of the crawlspace just became part of the river which now flowed through the yard.

This was not the civilization-ending rage of the hurricane, the mindless violence of the tornado. This was not the deceptively peaceful snow blizzard that buried the world in silent white that started all of this. This was just a gentle rain, that didn't stop, on top of a foot of snow pack, on top of frozen topsoil. It was just an utterly indifferent river, flowing from everywhere to the lake, not caring much what was in between.

Cinderblock houses aren't really supposed to have currents. Living rooms aren't designed for upstream and downstream.

[cobbledcrossroadtavern]

Prompt #7: Unnatural life in a picture

Jeremy enjoyed his wall calendars. He wasn't weird about it, he didn't collect them or have a closet full of them or anything. It wasn't a point of contention in his marriage and his children didn't make fun of him for it. It was just every year he found a calendar that he liked and hung it up on the wall and wrote important events on them, like one does. Nobody in the rapidly-approaching-mid-21st century used wall calendars. But Jeremy did. He looked forward to the changing of the months so he could see what the picture for the next month was. He didn't stay up til midnight on the last day of the month; he wasn't a weirdo. He didn't even rush over to it first thing in the morning. Sometimes he'd even forget until after work. But whenever he did get around to it, he'd enjoy seeing the picture he flipped up.

So it was with some surprise that his entire family woke up on June 1, 2023, to a shrieking sound none of them knew Jeremy was capable of making. His wife Margaret leapt out of bed and sprinted down the stairs. Jeremy stood in front of this year's wall calendar, one hand claw-rent over his mouth and the other pointed at June's picture.

This year's calendar was something silly--Nuns Having Fun. It was, as they say, all there in the title. June's picture looked more or less like all of the others to Maggie: a woman in a habit and a wimple in an improbably whimsical situation. In June's picture, a very white nun held a trombone among a street jazz band. It looked like they were really swinging together. And for some reason Jeremy stared at it in utter terror.

"What on Earth is the matter with you?" Maggie slapped his arm. "You scared me. You scared the girls."

Jeremy looked in terrified confusion back and forth between his wife and the painting. "You--you don't--you can't see it?" he stuttered.

"See what? It's a trombone-playing nun. No more terrifying than the nuns playing soccer in their convent or the nun being chased by seagulls at the beach." Maggie suppressed a shudder. That one had actually given her the willies. She did not care for seagulls.

For a few more moments Jeremy looked dumbfounded at the calendar picture. "It's gone! But I saw--in the picture--they were--"

"Come on, Jeremy. It was the remnants of a nightmare. Come make toast while I put coffee on." Maggie made a mental note to change the calendar over to July after Jeremy left for work. She didn't know what got him so bent out of shape, but she didn't want it to happen again.