'Found Flash' by Gina Dantuono

Snow announced dark brambles as night clocks through his marriage.

'Each Avocado has a Life' by Brenda Jacobsen

Each contemporary mother ate dozens of avocados on the same day. Your mother ate some but threw dozens away. It's not about the avocados that they ate. It's about the avocados they threw away. I have told your mother dozens of times not to waste food, but she said I am not contemporary enough to be handing out avocado advice and walked away.

'Magpie' by Rachel Canwell

Bring me a song, a stolen breath and single shoe. Bring me the sun, sweet briar and summer’s dying embers.
Bring me the lost words; his discarded poetry, the lines left unsaid. Bring me the youngest heart, the widest smile and the tears we all forgot.
Set these things beside me, gather them in stripes upon my palms. Simple lines that twist and merge with mine.

And from these golden threads I will weave a story. Craft a feather, shape a kite.
Watch me, wave me off, as I float above this cell. As I escape this place of final days.

'The Way I Choose to Grieve May Look to Some Like Dying' by Laurie Marshall

When I pulled my heart from my chest and left it cooling on the marble counter, you asked me why. What did it mean when I filled the empty cavity with yellow dandelions and blue dog-foot violets? What would I do when they wilted and died? 

I know the world will call me broken. Putting words to my silence, they will whisper their own fables about the heartless mother. The mother with moss and mushrooms pressing against her buttons and crabgrass tendrils slinking out from under her sleeves. 

You asked me what I expected to happen now—how the absence of my heart will change anything, anything at all. Letting it shrivel and rot will not reanimate the child I lost. I could try to explain, couldn’t I? Perhaps I should draw a picture or make a numbered list. I could explain until my throat is raw and bleeding, and yet, there is no way to understand unless the blood no longer pumping through the thing is your own.

'Fur' by Shahema Tafader

The chair is the colour of baked beans - red with hints of brown. Its seat is covered with the fur of a wolf who was slain by my grandpa that year when the snow piled higher than a two-year-old child. 

I was that two-year-old child.

My fondest memories are of those winter nights, sitting at my grandpa’s feet, the hearth filled with crackling flames, my face red and prickly, my grandpa sitting on his fur-covered sofa, smoking a brown pipe. 

We didn’t have a care in the world then. 

How times change. 

Now I sit on the same floor, with the same fireplace and sofa behind me; but my grandpa is gone. Left in his place is the flattened fur, moulded through his years of sitting. 

His years of living. 

'On the Threshold' by Maria Thomas

On the threshold of the garden Lesley found the cursed beetle, crushed the carapace into gold-dust, poured it into the man’s burgundy, and watched, with relief, safely, as he got young, younger, youngest.

'Crime Ingredients' by Lucienne Cummings

‘The English are nothing more than a nation of professional butchers,’ declaims the blue-suited Frenchman across from me, triumphantly. I know he has the smallest wagon-lit on the train, and so do not deign to answer. As the dining car enters a tunnel I see myself reflected in the window glass – pink silk blouse and immaculate Chanel scarf, dagger barely visible in the waistband of my woollen trousers. The professional assassin in me knows that my smallest movements will be noted and regurgitated later by the plain clothes detective with the moustache two tables down. But still the author of this novel insists I should kill my employer, Count Orlov, before the end of the chapter.

By the end of the book I will also be dead.

NFFD 2022 Prompt #4: Found Flash

Found Flash

This is National Flash Fiction Day's eleventh anniversary, so this year, all our prompts have something to do with the number 11....

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For this prompt, find 11 books, flashes or other written materials.  Find the 11th word of each.  Weave these 11 words into a flash...the shorter the better!

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If you’re submitting this to us, make sure to note that this is a response to Prompt 4: Found Flash.

You can submit responses until 23:59 BST on Sunday, 19 June 2022 for a chance to be published here at The Write-In.