'How We Could Have Met' by Melissa Flores Anderson

I look at him in quiet moments, the potential energy between us almost visible around us. I play out scenarios where we might have met 25 years before in a university town. It might have been at the first Starbucks I ever went to on Telegraph, where I got free drinks from my friend’s friend, the barista. Him in line in front of me, turning too swiftly, and spilling a drop of coffee on my Doc Martens.

Or that rave in a San Francisco warehouse where my heart was broken, but I danced like it was whole, like I hadn’t discovered the half-life of love is so fleeting. Bumping into him as I twirled, him in a Pearl Jam T-shirt and tattered sneakers.

Or maybe walking across campus with my friend to her science lab and catching a glimpse of the cute TA. “What’s his name?” And when she tells me it, it seems like fate that he has the same name as my first love.

But there is friction between the possibility and the reality that if I had met him then, he would have seen me as some 18-year-old kid. Too young. Too dumb. Too awkward to notice.

He notices me now. As an equal. As a friend. The decade between us inconsequential in middle age. Our attraction is luminescent, but on an invisible spectrum to everyone else but us.

'The Boyhood of the Musician' by Ruth Follan

His father, a physics teacher, had named him Newton, which felt like a curse to a boy who knew he was destined to fail Combined Science next week. There was always tension between them. His older brother Kelvin did his best to field the questions that Dad threw at them across the dinner table. Kelvin had got an A and was able to answer some of them. Newton hadn’t a hope. His father had a short fuse, so if either of them made a mistake, he would turn the laser focus of his rage on them both, turning scarlet, as though his thermostat had broken. They called it his red shift. Sometimes he threw things. There was a dent in the wall where a teaspoon had reached its terminal velocity.

Their mother would try to divert his attention by using the vacuum nearby. It was an old model: a generator of so many decibels that speech was pointless. The upcoming exam had given momentum to Newton’s decision to lock himself in the bedroom and stay there. His father was now hammering on the door.

“Newton! Come out. Do some revision with me. You don’t understand the gravity of the situation. Do you want to fail? You have no impetus to work! Do you realise what a potential difference a few past papers could make? Why do you have such a resistance towards work?

 
Newton, safely behind the door, finally explained.

“Dad! I don’t like science and I don’t need it! I’m here listening to music, using my new amplifier, and enjoying simple harmonic motion as I mark the beats. I have plenty of potential energy if you just let me study what I like. I can’t bear this half life of science. I want to be a conductor! 

'Marianne Examines the Physics of Prolonged Adolescence' by Luanne Castle

Marianne couldn’t get her adult son to leave his room. She stood before the oven with a tray of unbaked cookies, wondering if she might just eat them herself this time. Jake had converted an old couch into a gaming cockpit by taking it down to the skeleton and adding in bolsters and a backrest pillow. His life was governed by inertia. He had what he needed. A monthly check he deposited on his cell. McDonalds and snacks delivered. Marianne knew he was refueling when his bedroom door would bounce back against the wall and he would lope to the front door, his flipflops flapping like frightened fish at his heels. Then he’d grab the bag, slam the door in the face of the delivery driver and immediately shut his own door behind him. When Marianne poked her head inside, he didn’t notice. Engrossed in the prancing lights on the screen, Jake was trapped in the gravity of his jerry-rigged gaming chair. The friction between mother and son was only in Marianne’s head because Jake had forgotten he ever had a mother, thinking of her as the one who kept the world from intruding. If only Marianne could figure out the impetus to get Jake to move out. Cookies suddenly seemed ridiculous. She fingered the long match, imagining another use. 

'Entropy in Apartment #201' by Eileen Frankel Tomarchio

It’s his last dread before all dread leaves him. To find the earth unfolded underfoot, a bath towel dropped in his wife’s wake. Shower-damp or just-washed, slipped off, left on the floor, short of the laundry basket, the bed. The way it sprawls in soft crevasses and small peaks, so treacherous. He has to bend on hip bones thin as handlebars to pick it up. Once aloft, he can give it a light magician’s snap, a fold once in half, end to end, edges flush, corners aligned. The straightness lets him breathe a little. He holds it outspread in his quavering hands, the new rectangle clean and welcoming as a just-bought doormat. But the dread remains. So he folds it again to the size of an atlas, like the one he used to read in bed when he was a boy, his favorite pages the ones with dramatic, saturated renderings of unrenderable things like cosmic rays and hadrons and black holes. But still the dread. So he attempts the hardest folds, the quartering and eighth-ing that can’t keep their shape. As much as he smooths and presses, the layers flop open in limp resistance, and he despairs. There was a time he could fold the paper sleeve of a straw so tiny and neat and labyrinthine, it was like another world. Is there a place in this world for him anymore where order remains, and if not, where he can create it? Best to know when to give up trying, to let a thing go. This, at least, he remembers. Sometimes. Like now. He snatches up the towel—that wild, unfurled bane—opens the hamper, casts it into the chaos, and slams the lid. Breathes. Then he looks for another dropped towel that might lead him to his wife.

'The shower after' by Elisa Dominique Rivera

My viciously exfoliated skin was fluorescent pink, which reminded me of that undercooked chicken burger I ate to impress you on our first date. In clumps, my hair gathered at the shower drain, its density threatening to clog the whirring whirlpool of red water flowing from me. My eyes won’t close from the swelling, the momentum of impact I could still feel ringing in my head. My body under that running shower was a dark bruised matter, a husk of silent nothing, because you said my “No” sounded like a yes.

 

NFFD 2024 Prompt #23: Fluid Dynamics

 

Prompt #23: Fluid Dynamics
WATER prompt E

Welcome to The Write-In!  This year, we're celebrating the 2024 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology theme of The Classical Elements - Air, Earth, Water and Fire. Throughout National Flash Fiction Day, we'll be posting one time-related prompt on the hour every hour from 00:00 until midnight (BST), for a total of 25 prompts in all.  You have until midnight on Sunday (BST) to submit your responses for possible publication here at the Write-In.  We'll start posting responses on Sunday, 16 June 2024....

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We're nearing the end; only one more prompt to go after this.

 

Choose at least three words or phrases from this list of scientific vocabulary and use them in a flash.  You do not need to use them in a scientific context or strive for any sort of scientific accuracy.

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If you’re submitting this to us, make sure to note that this is a response to Prompt 23: Fluid Dynamics.

You can submit responses until 23:59 BST on Sunday, 16 June 2024 for a chance to be published here at The Write-In.

You can claim the badge for this prompt by visiting the badgifier here (hosted by the NFFD website).

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