'Still Life with Aging Fruit' by Thad DeVassie

Silently they sat, patient and awkward with their red-dotted freckles and crooked hat stems, revealing small hints of growing old: some discoloration here, a bit of mold there, a slight turn toward the mealy – produce equivalents of bedsores. Long after things felt juicy and alive, neither the pears nor grapes saw it coming: an abandoned canvas, a disheveled chambermaid, her petite paring knife. A scene so ripe for possibility, for immortality, only to be snuffed out along with the candle’s last burn.

NFFD 2021: Prompt #14

 

Ripening

National Flash Fiction Day's seventh anthology, Ripening, was published in 2017. 

For this prompt, write a flash in which an irreversible process reverses.  Someone gets younger instead of older.  Clouds reclaim their raindrops.  Ripe fruit reverts to the seed.

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If you’re submitting this to us, make sure to note that this is a response to Prompt 14: Ripening.

You can submit responses until 23:59 BST on Sunday, 27 June 2021 for a chance to be published here at The Write-In.

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Past National Flash Fiction Day anthologies are available at the NFFD Bookshop.