Flash Club July Flash Club 2020

[Barbara]

Hi all.

I hope everyone is well and that your writing is going grand.

Prompt: She stepped out of her front door and walked down her drive. Despite having a heavy heart, she had a spring in her step. She knew that ...

Word Count: 300

As always, use the writing prompt as well as the word limit given to write a piece of flash fiction. To enter the competition, simply post your entry in this thread. The competition is open to all members. Feel free to enter more than one. The only rule here: we ask you not to critique.

Please note: The new voting system; well, we're going back to the old voting system of counting 'likes'. We didn't feel the end-of-month poll quite got the interest it deserved. We hope that counting votes will be more immediate, generate more interest and be altogether more flash! We're not sure if this is the best way to go, so if anyone has a glorious suggestion of how we best determine a winner, please let me know.

And this is how to do it: if an entry grabs you, please click 'like'. At the end of the month, I will count up the 'likes'. The entry with the most 'likes' will be the winner.

That's it. Any questions, PM me.

See you next month.

 

[Dean Baxter]

Alex’s parents had left their door ajar, presumably in order to listen out for her escaping. She tiptoed into their room and crouched down next her father. There was a bag stuffed full of cash, right beneath him. Alex had found it once, when she'd been made to clean the house as punishment for one of her misdemeanors.

She lifted the mattress and got one hand under to support it, so her father wouldn't notice when she went in with her other hand to pull the bag out. It was made of paper, so it wouldn't rustle much. If he woke now, she would grab her hockey stick and knock him out with it. Her mother would likely lay there, useless, as if frozen, and Alex would say to her, “That's what you get for being a bible basher.”

Neither of them woke up. She got the bag free, but kept the mattress slightly lifted while she slipped the bible in to the place it had been.

She got out of there, cleared the stairs and made it to the front door, but she paused as she passed the kitchen. She could go over to the range and turn the rings on, but not light them, leaving them to fill the house up with gas. When her parents get up, they'll switch on a light, or the hot water will come on, and that will cause a spark, and they will be vaporized.

Or not. Maybe they'll smell the gas and get out. Maybe God will save them.

Alex didn't turn the gas on. Instead, she took her mother's cigarettes and lighter from the biscuit tin they'd been hiding in. She took the keys to her father's Honda Legend too.

She reversed it out of the drive, spun the wheel, and gunned it up the road.

 

[Matthew Snoding]

She stepped out of her front door and walked down her drive. Despite having a heavy heart, she had a spring in her step. She knew that . . . this was the right thing to do.

And another time, she stopped outside her front door and looked back down her drive. Despite having a spring in her heart, she had a heavy tread. She knew that . . . this was the wrong thing to do.

And in between? There was a life she couldn’t have imagined, a life away from everything she knew, a life not nudged by others but shaped by her. She made decisions on the toss of a coin, she took her life onto ships, airplanes, boats, and into cars - so many cars. She met more men than she’d ever imagined, and each proved to be a comfortable disappointment, somehow a crushingly bad replacement. But she stopped at love, she had to stop there. She couldn't . . . She heard interesting, no fascinating stories, from these people she met on the way, stories she envied for their detail, their colours, their daring. She tanned herself on hot beaches, with dark skinned men with fans in their caps bringing cocktails. She was sucked dry by bugs in green darkened jungles, she hid herself in caves whilst madmen in scarves searched above for her, calling her name, telling her there was no escape, no escape. She walked and walked and walked, and those words echoed again with each step. No escape.

She turned the key and went into the house, and the ghosts, lined up against the wall, regarded her with beady eyes.

“Where have you been?” they asked, they whispered.

She smiled, home again, and went into the empty kitchen to unpack the bags.

 

[Jake E]

She stepped out of her front door and walked down her drive. Despite having a heavy heart, she had a spring in her step. She knew that the body wouldn’t be found for at least a week.

She reached the street at the same time as the car. It rolled to a stop with its door open at the curb, “All go to plan?” asked the driver, his face hidden by the trilby squashed over his ears.

“Oh yes, textbook,” she answered as she removed her fake contacts in the mirror, “I’d say it was one of my easier jobs, even though I had to marry him first.”

The driver nodded and turned the car out of the suburbs. The city loomed ahead of them like a giant’s graveyard. Great black spires reaching into the night sky. They passed an alley. He stopped and reversed into it, killing the engine once off the street, “You seem…” he stopped and reached into the glove box, “Your new assignment.”

She took the manila folder and set it in her lap before pulling the blonde wig from her head. Long black curls unfolded from underneath and bounced to a stop just above her shoulders. She gave them a shake, “Damn wigs,” she cursed, “Just once, I’d like to do a job without wearing a wig.”

“Assassins don’t have that luxury,” he said, “If you screw up, it’s not just you that becomes a target.”

She nodded and opened the folder, her eyes widening as she took in the text. He must have screwed up.

“I hope this one doesn’t take as long,” he said.

She slid the paper back into the folder and smiled, “Oh hunny. It’s going to take no time at all.”

 

[gbhunt]

One Step Off The Ledge


You step out of your front door and walk down your drive. Despite a heavy heart, you have a spring in your step. The world awaits, and you have promises to make.

One small step for a woman, one giant leap for Maribel.

You giggle.

You’ve never taken a giant leap in your life, you think. Maribel—Oh, you’re small for your age—Lewis.

And not just a giant leap. A giant leap into the void.

And what will meet you in the void, Maribel—first leap of your life—Lewis?

A ledge?

A drop?

An intimate embrace?

“Find it somewhere else,” your partner said. “This thing you’re after, I can’t give you.”

In the once-read musings of a mountaineer, “Find a stable platform before taking your next step.”

You thought you had a stable platform, but it was just a crumbling ledge.

He was shocked, when you said you were leaving.

“Find it somewhere else,” you said. “You told me.”

“I never thought you would!”

“You’re cruel,” he sobbed. “After all these years? How could you?”

How could you not?

Will you fall? you wonder, as your taxi arrives. Or might you catch an updraft?

The sun sets on all things as you pull away. But the night will bring another day. And you’ll never catch an updraft if you don’t step off the ledge.

You would giggle again at the triteness of that thought, but you are crying.

You don’t mean to cry, but the void stretches deep and cold and dark, and you fear you may never reach the other side.

 

[Julie]

Her time with that family was done.

The neighbours were better company. They always invited her in, and with their bigger sofa, softer bed and generosity, what was there not to love? Why be two when three offered so much more? The husband knew how to give her a good time. She would stretch out across his lap while he stroked her. He thought he was the master. But when she rubbed against him, she knew she had all the power.

His wife was into her too. It wasn’t easy finding a couple that enjoyed the same thing. She’d still be in her dressing gown at this time of the morning and getting the milk in off the doorstep. The anticipation! The gown slipping open, the milk clutched to the bosom, the beckoning in. The promised land awaited in their kitchen.

She shimmied through their gate with the thought of all the attention, her scent lifting into the air around the hydrangea. Ah, the milkman had been. Anytime soon, the door would open and she would slip into her new life.

‘You know they’re only using you.’

‘What would you know, dog breath?’ She spat, flashing her arse. ‘Jealous?’ she gave a sideways glance at the big idiot leaning over the wall with his tongue hanging out. He tried it on once. Only once mind.

‘You’re a convenience until the shine rubs off.’

‘They love me.’

‘Sooner or later, you’ll fuck up, leave something disgusting on the step, then game over.’

‘If you didn’t have balls, I’d say you were a bitch.’

‘Beats being a cat, that’s for sure.’

 

[Hannah F]

THE GREAT ESCAPE​

She stepped out of her front door and walked down her drive. Despite having a heavy heart, she had a spring in her step. She knew that she could choose never to walk through this door again, never to walk over the red carpet where blood didn't show, or tears. White-washed walls, easy to clean, would no longer trap her, nor the ivy that covered the windows like a growing, thickening cage.

She had a rucksack, heavy on her back, and a suitcase, heavy in her hand, and a heart that was leaving her friends, some, perhaps, forever.
They’d held a party for her yesterday. She’d arrived fifteen minutes late, had stood one step off the pub’s welcome mat and wondered whether anyone would turn up.

They were all there and, all together like that, more friends than she’d ever dreamed she had.

The card was in her suitcase – a big card – signed by every one of them, and a special little message from one, a message she would cherish and kiss and hold to her breast until next time they met . . . or the feeling wore out.

But she wasn’t going to think about that now; she had a bus to catch, manoeuvre into, a train on which to find her ticketed seat, pray no one raided the bags she would squash into the pile on the luggage rack. There would be a reclining seat on the ship where banal films would play in front of her and children would cry because they were bored and she would stare at the waves splashing against the window, or stand on the deck and watch her past recede behind her, a new coast loom in front of her – new mountains, new secrets, a new life.

 

[David Y]

Donna

She stepped out of her front door and walked down her drive. Despite having a heavy heart, she had a spring in her step. She knew that it was the first day of the rest of her life. Her second life.

She’d put on a couple of extra pounds since the operation, the same again convalescing. Her appetite had returned. For cream cakes, for life and for exercise but she wasn’t as spritely as Captain Sir Thomas Moore. For months, more than a lap of her garden might have killed her. Her life remained in the lap of her god.

He hadn’t been so lucky. Name, age, occupation? She only knew him as her anonymous benefactor with a big heart and a gift for life.

If she hadn’t been so lucky, she might have met him by now. She had kept her faith, but she doubted if he possessed any. Wouldn’t he have wanted to stay intact up there?

She breathed his spirit inside her. He breathed there still beyond his death. His second life.

It was a miracle. It shouldn’t have worked, but she was the living proof you could transplant a heavier man’s heart into a female’s body. Her heart may have stopped once, but she hadn’t stopped clapping medical science since.

 

[Jonny]

Roisin's Day Of Reckoning

Roisin stepped out of her front door and walked down the drive. Despite having a heavy heart, she had a spring in her step knowing it was the last day she’d be attending clinic, well she hoped so anyway. Fingers crossed. She preferred crossing fingers now as praying never seemed to work anymore. It never really had. She gave it up over ten years ago when her dad died.

Standing waiting for the bus she was simply relieved the last four gruelling months were coming to an end; for good or bad. Within the hour she’d have the results. The scan had been two weeks earlier and today she got the feedback and the “ze plan of attack goink fawvadz."

She'd dealt with the patchy hair loss with Brendan’s razor by going fully bald. Mr. Kempner, her oncologist, had warned her about it in his soft German accent before treatment began, but she was strong and certain it would grow back. Because she would beat this thing. It only required a positive mental attitude and Roisin had that in spades. She inherited it from her dad. He'd never once given in or failed to see the bright side of any challenges or setbacks he faced.

After the consultation she was meeting Una for a coffee. Una had been there for her throughout the whole business, right from finding the lump, the weeks of exploratory investigations and then chemo. Roisin wanted her to be the first to hear the good news.

In the waiting room she skimmed through a year-old copy of Hello. Ironic. It was from around the time her nightmare began. She actually remembered buying that very edition herself one lunch-break.

“Roisin, would you like to come through, Mr. Kempner’s ready to see you,” said the nurse.