'The Swing Connects' by Katie Willow

It's hot, we're going swimming at the waterhole, a bit of stream dammed up, overhung by a rope swing tied to a tree. We walk the tree-lined lane to get there, swatting at bugs, shrug off our shorts and tees and squeal as the cool water slaps our warm bodies, two of a small gang of children. We surface, water trickles over our eyelashes and the big teeth of our open mouths to the points of our chins where it drips back to its source, mixed with our spit. Giggles escape our strained throats as we tread water, waiting to see who will splash first, a tanned forearm swiping up into the sunlight, fingers splayed ready to block the return fire. When we tire of the play fight we make for the edge and push-pull-flop ourselves out, breathing strongly. Here we are equals, you'll hold the rope for me when it's my turn to swing out, I'll climb onto the smooth branch and sail an arc over the ripples below and behind me, back to where you wait on the bank.

'Anointed' by Allison Renner

She stands on the beach, the sand packed so firmly that it doesn’t even seem like she’s staring out at an ocean. Then again, nothing ever turned out like she expected.

Though she left no footprints in this hard-packed sand, she can clearly see the paths she could have taken, looking back—studying instead of going to the party, taking the job in New York rather than walking down the aisle before following him around the Midwest, from town to town that all managed to look and feel like the hometown she’d wanted to escape: bland, flat, stifling.

A wave rouses in the sea and she watches it approach, wanting to step forward to meet it halfway, but she holds her ground, makes it come to her, and though it’s a lukewarm splash that eventually laps at her toes, it feels like a baptism.

'Lady Reza’s Shadow' by Leigh Loveday

She had come here, halfway across the world, to escape the thing that would kill her. Instead, it had stitched itself inseparably to her.

It could not speak, would only show itself as smoke the colour of verdigris, of lichen in the endless humid gardens they had left behind. But Lady Reza understood that by the time the djinn found her, it had forsworn its original purpose. Her heartbeat was proof enough. The contract was void.

Whether this independence was of its own making, or her family had tired of the long pursuit and cut ties with their degenerate pet, she would never know.

Now, in a snowbound and hardscrabble city, in a room beneath a bridge that breathed in the river’s rolling cold, the Lady and her assassin shared an exile. It trailed her soundlessly about her business; it crawled in to share her warmth at night; it no longer entertained thoughts of swallowing her soul. Here, she was all it had.

She supposed that was beautiful, in a way. It was nothing like friendship, even less like forgiveness. It was an understanding; a reality that the last year had left her raw enough to bear.

Lady Reza watched her companion now, casting awful shadows in the firelight, doing and thinking whatever it did. She had come to sense when its attention was on her. She smiled. Ice crackled around the doorframe.

In time, this understanding would serve her very well. She had never been more sure of anything.

'The Better Bridge' by Birgit K. Gaiser

Bronk had been right. She knew she had been. And yet, she felt terrible about their fight.

Prink had been her girlfriend for – oh, for at least half a century now. They’d stopped counting long ago. 

She pictured Prink’s hair, a beautiful metallic-grey mane that fell heavily over her strong, proud brow. Her eyes, cold steel, fierce enough to freeze humans with one look, but tender whenever she looked at Bronk. 

Well, usually. 

Bronk dipped her feet into the cool water of her river. It had been a long walk home from Prink’s bridge. Which, by the way, was not as imposing and solid as Bronk’s bridge, so Prink really should be visiting her more often, not the other way round. 

She watched some ducks building their nests on the shore, close enough to the water that one deluge could destroy them. And yet, they kept trying. They succeeded, too, more often than not. Whereas she and Prink had never dared to –

“I’m sorry,” a voice said behind her. Bronk turned to see Prink. 

“I love you, Bronk. And you’re right. Your bridge is bigger than mine. And sturdier.”

“Yours isn’t so bad,” Bronk sniffed.

“Hmph. It gets more humans,” Prink said. “But I don’t need that anymore.”

She held out a necklace, an oval of thick rope completely filled with hip bones. Bronk’s eyes went wide. Prink was proposing!

“Is that why…?”

“Why I’ve not been visiting. I was nearly finished. So… Will you?”

With shaking hands, Bronk took the necklace and dropped it over her head. “Yes.”

'Long Bright Dark' by Chloe Paige

I never minded drowning until the water drowned me. This ocean is a roiling creature, breathing when I am not. The flooding pressure in my chest reminds me I am made of toothpick ribs and balloon lungs so delicate and rippable that only air should belong inside them. I had thrown myself into the water so the water could drown me. What a terrible thing to ask of it. There is endless dark below me for the sinking; I once thought there was nothing darker than wanting to die, but the black dye of dying blinds my mind with a new night. Now, ocean salt crystallises my spirit back onto my bones. Brine open my eyes and I see the bright. A warbling of red sluices through my oblivion, above my head, and I find myself wanting to feel it.

My surfacing severs time into before and after, above and below, breath and death. I cough the saltwater from my lungs and ocean air eddies inside them, my body buoyed by a roiled red. It is from the morning sun sitting on the skysill. It reaches fiery fingers across the waves to touch me, so warm on my razed cheeks. Across the way, the roaring red ocean gives way to land. I wonder if the water could ferry me there, another terrible favour to ask. For now, I float on my back in this long bright dark, where I am reborn, born breech, feet to the fire.

'You and me and the abstract' by Karen Walker

You find me staring at an abstract painting. You grunt, "Hurry up." 

We passed an art show on the way home. "Can we stop for a few minutes?" I had asked. "Please." 

In the work, I see yellow clouds dripping blue tears.  

"What? I never get you."  

The art does. I want it. It wants me.

You glance at the price. Glare at me. 

The clouds turn orange. Coppery. I know the painting knows you count every penny. 

"You're not buying this, this mess." 

"Yes, I am." 

Red rises in your face and seeps onto the canvas. 

"We're leaving," you snap. "Now." 

No.  

You curse purple. "This is f*ing ridiculous."

People hear you. 

So does the painting. Purple blotches appear. It's not afraid of you.  

Your bluster blows over because it isn't, I think.  

A grey wash—fog?—in one corner of the picture lifts, revealing horizontal lines and a circle underneath.   

To me, a bridge arching over a river. 

The water in the art is a friendly, eco-friendly green reflection despite how you're behaving.     

I also reflect. Decide okay, will try. I reach for your hand and, clenching it tight enough to make it hurt, yank you onto the bridge. "Let's go for a stroll and talk." 

'Swimming with Mom' by PL Harris

In Hawaiʻi, when someone dies, we say:

I love you. I forgive you. Please forgive me.

I say this to my mother when I visit her grave.

But for some reason, I mostly think about this at the beach.

Mom didn’t learn to swim until after she retired, when she was 55 years old.

I don’t know why.

Might have been because she and her family lived away from the shore, on a sugar cane plantation.

Might have been because it wasn’t something girls did back then.

Might have been it just didn’t feel important to her parents.

But she wanted to swim so much.

Her first step was to make sure we three kids, my brother, sister, and I could swim.

She took all of us to lessons when we were little kids.

I only swam once with my mom in the ocean, me in my floral bikini, her in a blue one piece. 

There was nothing but joy in her eyes, in her heart.

How I wish she could have experienced more of that.

Will you forgive me Mom, for not being there when you had a stroke, for not getting you to the hospital, for not giving you one more day in the waves?

'Simmer 'til Reduced' by Donna Day

The days of British people popping the kettle on were long gone, so watching her father boil water was a privilege dampened only by his continued refusal to look at her.

‘Tea or coffee?’ he asked, unlocking the caddy.

‘Tea, please.’

‘You always did have to do the opposite to the rest of us.’

He spooned the dark leaves into the strainer and poured the hot water over them. Finally, he looked at her, his eyes half hidden in the steam.

‘Who did you vote for?’ he asked.

‘You know who I voted for.’

He nodded. ‘Do you want sugar?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Will she see me?’

‘She will.’ He stirred the tea and she noticed his hand was shaking. ‘Please don’t talk about the war.’

‘Which one?’

‘You know which one.’

She nodded. Picked up her tea.

‘Don’t drink it all at once,’ he said. ‘There’s no more where that came from, and she baked.’

‘She baked?’

‘She did. Cherry bakewells. Used all our almonds for the year.’

‘She hates cherry bakewells.’

‘She does, but she knows they’re your favourite. You always did have to do the opposite to the rest of us.’

'How To Be More Axolotl' by Kate Axeford

On our first date, Dave marvelled that Axolotls can regrow tails and eyes—even parts of their hearts. Dave says water forgives everything. He tapped Esmeralda’s tank as he said it.

‘See,’ he whispered, ‘she healed.’

Esmeralda hovered, her regrown leg gently kicking a fern.

‘Watch,’ Dave said, tapping the glass again, softer, like he was apologising to Esmerelda. ‘She remembers, but she moves on.’

Esmeralda stared ahead, patient, like a saint in a stained-glass window.

‘You can do this,’ she mouthed to me.

This morning, Dave announces water is all about renewal. He says this whilst skimming a green film from Esmeralda’s tank with the spoon he uses later for Weetabix. I decide against mentioning cross-contamination.

‘Forgiveness,’ Dave continues, looking at Esmeralda, ‘is a process.’

‘Like filtration?’ I ask.

‘Exactly,’ he says.

I decide to take a leaf out of Esmerelda’s book and practice forgiving Dave for being a dick. It’s easiest to turn the last three months into a game, so I award him ten points for consistency, deduct fifteen for cruelty but give him five for always being first at the bar. He scores somewhere around “it’s definitely over” which feels merciful but fair.

I take my notebook down to the canal. From the towpath, I list everything I’ve done wrong too and fold the page into a triangle boat. I decide against launching. There’s enough shit in this water already.

Back at Dave’s, Esmeralda is still waiting in her tank. The water is clear. The temperature gauge reads a responsible fifteen degrees. Dave doesn’t tap the glass.

I end it with Dave, kindly, and give Esmerelda a cheery thumbs-up on the way out.

Tomorrow, I’ll think more about which parts of me regrow.

'Bluesman' by Erin Bondo

Bluesman howls at the paper moon, slinks down stinking back alleys with his beat up electric and air force duffel he tells folks was his fighter pilot Grandaddy’s, real hero shit, man, so what if he got it at the Army Surplus, if Grandaddy never saw action, he was still an angry son-of-a who drank himself to death.

Bluesman splashes his busking cash on diner breakfasts, over-easy eggs and bottomless coffees, ‘cause he ain’t dying hungry, and Bluesman’s got no home since his parents died and his bitch of a sister ran off, and yeah, maybe he’s a bit messed up, you know, in the head, but some days are clear glassy ocean, man, until the memories start sifting like sugar powder sand, and those are the nights he wakes up screaming.

Bluesman likes riding the rails, buses, subway lines, anything that keeps him moving, ‘cause when you stop, when you get cold, that’s when shit gets dangerous, man, so just keep rockin-rollin-ridin’ till you can find a beautiful woman to take you home, but Bluesman don’t mind, so what if he sleeps some nights under the bridge, he’s a Bluesman, this life chose him.

Bluesman ain’t scared of nothing, except maybe starving, or never seeing home again, the lake an unbroken mirror, pine trees piercing pitch night sky, and the stars, I swear man, more stars than anywhere on earth, where he’d sit out on the deck with his kid sister just looking up, and the howling wasn’t so loud back then, he could pretend everything was fine, just fine Sis, man, do those marigolds ever smell like Ma, and maybe someday they’ll do it again, if she’d just say he was right, that none of it’s his fault, maybe then he could forgive her. Maybe he already has.

'The Eternal Question' by Lisa H. Owens

The water seemed miles below, yet she could still hear the haunting echo of Reginald’s screams as he slowly drowned. It was his own fault really. She had warned him about how he had to land at an imaginary bull’s-eye located in the center of the buoys, otherwise the undertow would be too strong for him. No matter how hard they worked, his scrawny arms and legs would never be able to launch himself out of the underwater vortex, completely invisible on the water’s placid surface.

 He jumped. Completely missed the mark and, well, you have already figured out the next part.

She watched his body rise to the surface—face down—and a light ripple emanating from beneath the bridge carried him into the setting sun. It really was the best kind of sunset, pink hues sporadically dotted by billowy clouds. Reginald’s madras plaid swim trunks, garishly clashing with the beauty of the evening sky, fanned out around his toothpick legs.

“I forgive you, Reggie,” Betsy shouted to Reginald as he floated toward the open sea. She knew how to push his buttons and leaving him hanging on that question would worry him for eternity. She could imagine his nasal voice and how irritated Jesus and the Saints would be at Reggie’s befuddled, “Forgive me for what, Bets?” 

'The Night of the Comet' by Marinela Davies

Why we weren’t speaking that night − and it was late, very late, 3:30 a.m. by my watch − was something that happened nearly twelve hours earlier. A small thing, really, but by this time the silence had grown out of all proportion and poisoned every gesture we made as if we didn’t have enough problems as it was.

 

Janice was stubborn. And I was feeling defensive and maybe more than a little paranoid. We were both drunk − not loosened up, but like two exhausted zombies − by what we’d consumed at Nick Harper’s in the wake of the incident and then at dinner after and the bar after that.

I could smell the nighttime stink of the lake beneath the bridge. I looked up and watched the sky expand overhead, its celestial alchemy lazily stretching. A boat hissed under, waking up all the geese, their talkative ardours screeching in protest or accord, I couldn’t tell which. The crickets started sawing in the dark till the night felt as if it was going to burst open and leave us shattered on the roof of the car.

“You idiot,” she snarled.

“You’re the idiot,” I said.

 

“I hate you."

 

“I hate you back,” I said. “No mercy.”

'Boxed Up' by Melissa Flores Anderson

My therapist tells me to put things in a box, put it on a shelf. Lock it away. Metaphorically, of course. She doesn’t know I perfected that move years before I met her. I’m here because I’m trying not to lose my head around my kid. That whole adage about how they’re always watching, we are their first role model. That box in the corner of the kitchen has the broken vase, the one with the flowers I brought home when I was late for my kid’s birthday dinner. No one said anything, but I knew the judgment by the silence in the room when I entered. I raised my voice. I threw my phone down on the counter. I didn’t mean for it to hit the vase and slide it to the edge of the island, the flowers cascading to the floor, a rush of glass and water across the hardwood floor. They went upstairs instead of cutting the cake while I swept the shatters into a dustpan, used an old towel to mop up the liquid. I would have thrown out that box, but my wife leaves it as a reminder that I am on my second chance, and there won’t be another.

'Lost, Never Found' by Jean Feingold

He considered forgiving her. Somehow he couldn’t do it. What she had done harmed only a material thing. But the thing mattered to him. Mattered a lot. That’s what she couldn’t understand.

What was this thing? It was a fishing kayak. He loved fishing and kayaking. He’d taken a second job and saved the extra income for two years to buy it. It wasn’t a $500 inflatable kayak. No, it was a single seat high-end carbon fiber kayak. It cut through the water so cleanly it was almost as if the water were air. 

He’d enjoyed only three trips in his new kayak before they had a big fight. She wanted them to go to a concert of her favorite band. The drive there would take five hours. The band meant nothing to him. His plans were for a day on the water fishing in his kayak. 

“This is the only time Summer Sound has been anywhere near here. Who knows if they’ll be back? You can go kayaking any time.”

“You like that band. I don’t. Go with one of your girlfriends.”

“None of them like long drives. If you were a decent boyfriend, you’d go to make me happy.”

“If you were a decent girlfriend, you wouldn’t try to guilt me into going.”

She decided to solve the problem, not just for that day, but permanently. She sunk the kayak. It floated downstream and disappeared. 

When he couldn’t find it, he filed a police report. He congratulated himself for buying an insurance policy covering theft, enabling him to replace it with an identical boat. 

He told the cops she’d taken it. Lacking evidence, no arrest was made. He never spoke to her again. 

'You Didn’t Know Any Other Way' by Sumitra Singam

You, an alchemist, undid my bones into atoms, trained them through the fractals of you your rivulets and creeks so I could fill you with my humours so you could claim my essence as your own so you could weight yourself with my gravity so you could feel solid earth under your arched feet so you could feel something alive so you could move and breathe and hope and wish and so you did wish and hope and move and hunt and gather and stuff stolen stones into your interstitium so you sunk into the earth where you met grubs and scurrying chittering things and it rained and became muck and mud and you looked to me to unstick you and the only way I could was to springmelt through you and reconstitute myself atoms molecules mitochondria cells bones ligaments fascia muscle skin so I could see who I was outside you something new something alive something separate and this mud is your mud and I live in the sun, the sea, the sky, the everywhere with my bones and flesh and skin.

NFFD 2026 Prompt #0: Water Under the Bridge

 Prompt #0: Water Under the Bridge

Welcome to The Write-In!  This year, we're celebrating the 2026 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology theme of Bridges. Throughout National Flash Fiction Day, we'll be posting one prompt every hours from 00:00 until midnight (BST), for a total of 25 prompts in all.  You have until 23:59 BST on Sunday to submit your responses for possible publication here at the Write-In over the course of the next week.

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To kick off our series of hourly prompts, write a flash about forgiveness or reconciliation.  Use water in your story in some way, but do not use the phrase 'water under the bridge'.  

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If you’re submitting this to us, make sure to note that this is a response to Prompt 0: Water Under the Bridge.

You can submit responses until 23:59 BST on Sunday, 14 June 2026 for a chance to be published here at The Write-In.

You can claim the badge for this prompt by visiting our badges page.

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Photograph by  Gu Bra via pexels.