'A Sense of Belonging' by Suzanne Hicks

Mothman sat in a field of orange and yellow wildflowers that sprouted from the earth against a backdrop of bright green grass after the rains fell for a season at levels not seen in years. As he admired the landscape, inhaled the sweet air, his red eyes locked on an insect buzzing toward him, mesmerized by the sight of it coasting along with the gentle breeze, tiny wings fluttering. Mothman spread his dark wings, and stretched an arm out, extending his index finger just as the little bug reached him, landing on his fingernail, resting with its wings tucked beneath its shell. He noticed small black dots against its round red body, thinking the color matched the shade of his orbs, feeling the beating inside his chest grow rapid with thoughts of what if. What if this bug and his eyes reflected wavelengths of light the same way, like how it would in two different creatures, but ones meant to exist in the same world.

'The Show Must Go On (or Roast Lamb Was His Favourite)' by D X Lewis

Ed and I just couldn’t resist one last pint of Old Peculiar in the Rats’ Castle, so we slip to the table 20 minutes late for lunch.   

Our parents and grandmothers, who disapprove of alcohol on principle, but especially on Sundays, greet us with disapproving looks and faces even longer than usual. 

“It looks as if the vicar gave a very serious sermon,” I whisper tipsily to Ed, not quietly enough to avoid being overheard. 

I notice that Granny, my maternal grandmother, who’s skinny with thin hair, is dabbing her eyes with a cotton hankie. 

“Your lovely Grandpa has just passed,” says Mum mournfully, failing to suppress a sob.  

“Passed what, Mum?” I say, hiccupping, and still under the affluence of incahol.  

“Your grandfather died while you two louts were getting drunk,” says Dad.   

“Where is Grandpa?” says Ed, falling suddenly sober, despite five pints.   

“We laid him out on the lounge sofa,” says Mum.

“Shouldn’t we call a doctor or ambulance?” says Ed. 

“Grandpa wouldn’t want lunch to spoil,” says Mum.

“Roast lamb was his favourite.”

'The Final Countdown' by Scott MacLeod

It was the fanciest Kevorkian clinic anywhere on Swiss soil. 

The cost to pull the plug still staggered him.

The kids gathered, dutifully ringing the death bed.

 

Staring blankly or busy doing inheritance math?

The needle began its desired effect.

 

“Any last words, Pop? Regrets?”

“I don’t think so.”

 

“Are you sure?”

He considered.

 

“Wait!”

'A Chance Encounter' by Birgit K. Gaiser

Rada was a big believer in “men running into women”, meaning deliberately not getting out of men’s way on the street when they expected you to.

Anton was usually careful how he moved his large frame through a crowd, but he’d just received a long-anticipated call about the Troll Bridge job. He stopped paying attention to his surroundings, and found himself bumping into a woman half his size – a woman who now glared at him.

“I’m very sorry,” he said to the woman, “please, just one moment, so I can explain why I need to call back later…”

“Or you could watch where you’re going,” the woman said, while Konstantin asked if he really needed to think about the offer.

Anton looked from the woman to his phone, then back again, starting to regret having left the house this morning. He was an artist, not a communications expert, and one conversation at a time was enough for him.

Holding one hand up to Rada and flashing what he hoped was an apologetic smile, he spoke. “Konstantin, I’ll take the job, thanks so much – I really want to work on the bridge. But I’ll need to call back later, there’s a bit of a situation –“

“A situ– wait a minute, is that Konstantin from the Troll Bridge Trust? I’m working on that, too, I’ll be cutting and engraving the stones!”

Anton pictured the tiny, actually rather attractive, woman in a workshop.

“I didn’t know you and Rada were friends,” Konstantin said.

“We – that is – not exactly – I mean – Rada, I’m…”

“He’ll call you back in an hour, Konstantin.”  Rada grabbed Anton’s mobile, ending the call. “You can buy me a coffee. You know, to apologise properly. And talk about stones.”

'Exposed' by Allison Renner

We were happy once, not when we first met, both outcasts with no one to square dance with in gym, but we partnered up and became inseparable. Our friendship developed after the bell rang, when we could go to my house where no one was home and be ourselves. There, it felt safe to talk about how we felt, to share more than words until you felt stifled.

Suddenly, it was too much, too wrong, and then you shared my secrets with the world.

I walked home alone, sat in the house alone, wondered what you were doing. Made a plan so I wouldn't have to go to school tomorrow.

'Group Hug' by Melissa Flores Anderson

Lilly didn’t tell Charles about the move, but told the front desk girl in her office who told the front desk girl in his office.

She'd sat in his office after the harsh review from her boss that she was a bad writer, seeking consolation, encouragement and got none.

When she picked Jack up from Mick's that night, Mick was the one who saw the tear streaks on her face, held her. 

She settled into Mick's arms, warm, familiar, and Jack squeezed between them and yelled out "Group hug," his small arms reaching up.

Mick texted her after she left and had tucked Jack into bed, that she’d always been great at everything she did.

He said she'd always been a writer, in school, when she was the most published student in the lit mag.

When she dropped Jack off at the weekend, Mick had a copy of a lit magazine on the table.

"Where did this come from," she asked, flipping through the pages of her adolescence, to words she'd forgotten.

He'd bought the books when they were in high school, stored in a bedroom at his mom's.

Lilly thought Mick hadn’t noticed her in high school, when she was quiet, unsure of herself.

As she turned the pages, she turned back to their first date at the coffeeshop.

The one he had picked because it was close to his work, but no.

She saw now he picked it because he remembered she spent time there.

Days later, she returns to pick up Jack, Mick asks her in.

She closes her eyes, envisions the three together in the house.

She can't see them there, but maybe somewhere new, different.

She tells Mick about the job offer weeks later.

He doesn't hesitate, says, "We'll go with you."

'Love Bombing' by Madeleine Armstrong

On our first date you said you adored me, like we were in some period drama instead of Nando’s. On date two, you brought a dozen red roses, and no one had done that for me before. So I’ll admit I was impressed, even before you declared your true, everlasting love on date three. I thought you might be The One, despite it being too fast (my friend Kate said). I’d all but moved my stuff in when you started pulling away, slowly at first. You stopped listening to what I said, or maybe you simply didn’t care anymore. And I didn’t understand your sudden coldness, so I just clung on closer. That was a mistake, because it seemed to annoy you even more. It all came to a head at your friend Huey’s party. You were all over that girl Maya, the Shakira lookalike. I had absolutely no chance of competing with her. Your face when I asked you to leave. Like you’d accidentally stepped in dog shit. What the hell happened? you asked. You used to be confident. And I couldn’t remember. The old me. Before you. Alone.

'From a Bridge over the River Lea' by Margot Wilson

We scattered the ashes of the dog, who had outlived her young owner by one year, from the bridge over the river, where we used to take her for walks. The family gathered from their homes in other parts of London to this place, where, as a young dog, she used to race the train that goes to Hertford. The path runs alongside the railway for most of the way, bordered by nettles and dock leaves, under road bridges and, in one place a motorway. Coot and moorhen paddle up and down and round and round, with ever diminishing numbers of chicks in tow in the Spring. We watched as we stood on the bridge we had chosen, crossed by a grass-covered footpath, and hugged each other. Our tears for a young woman, and now her dog, are wearing away channels in the riverbed. We remember how, every single day, when she was a teenager, they would walk here together. A swan glides by, perhaps the one that built its nest under the street lamp. The soothing, calming river water continues to scrape away at the banks and beds. Her brother’s new girlfriend is here with us today and her sister’s boyfriend. They did not know the sister who will never be an aunty. They did not know the dog when she was young. We watched fish jumping, mallards, coots and moorhen diving. Each of us shook ashes into the current. We turned and made our way back. Gone the spell of rippling water. We waited for the train. We sped south together. Then we scattered.

'Too Much Information' by Jean Feingold

When David Elihu Jorgenson was introduced to new people, he always made a point of telling them his entire life story. Since he was 83 years old, the story was long and took a considerable amount of time to tell. He had become accustomed to his listeners, also elderly, getting bored before he finished and wandering off. 

David had experimented with telling condensed versions, but could never decide what to leave out. Every part was important to him, from his early years to his retirement. He decided he should stop at the point when people fell asleep. The story got shorter and shorter and the snores got louder. 

Finally even David snoozed during his own life’s tale. He started introducing himself just as David. People seemed to like him better. 

'Wet Season Lament' by Sumitra Singam and Kathryn Reese

I start in the monsoon when the river was swollen with silt and the debris of broken tea trees, crushed lantana and the dropped unripe fruit the orchard shed before the seed could be viable.

I am carried with the flood, fingernails crescents of mud, swept into sidestreams that do not bear any name, and my skin sloughs off, my own name silt in the riverbed.

My babies, too, driftwood children, submerged, emerging, finding lodging in the rock then working their way loose, twisting like a compass needle, yearning not for north but for sea.

Can I call them babies if I did not birth them, but merely allowed them to fall from my pelvis, ignored sloughings, the detritus of meaningless life?

What if I let them subsist on whatever they could grasp and they grew up half-salt, half-scavenged sugar and just a little fish?

Perhaps a line will hook them, give them meaning through a swift blow, gutting, scaling, guts thrown to their brothers.

Perhaps they will find themselves homed in mangrove muck or in some amphibious god’s estuary haven.

My dreams mean nothing - children propel themselves on their own tides, breathe their own air.

Listen: the thunder is summoning the drenching, that storm’s coming for the mountains again.

The river in spate, I swim helpless, rainsick, to the source.

'The Loneliness of the Single Twin' by Joyce Bingham

It was in the morning, in class, when a minor thought drifted into my head, blossoming like a cherry tree bud.

Petals shared and answers given; I knew it was you, and I returned lilies, white and majestic, I adored them.

Practice was amusing and we played jokes on everyone, always a twosome, not conjoined in body, but in mind.

In school, we studied similar subjects, shared friends, finished each other’s sentences but we’d parted to different cities.

Then I couldn’t find you within me, there were no flowers, only a wall of barbed thistles.

You’d barricaded your mind, to hide from me; chided I wept, bereft of your soft petals.

At home you’d changed, every shared flower had sharp thorns with pollen that stained scarlet.

A wall of ivy separated us and I was alone for the first time.

When you married, I was your bridesmaid, and carried lilies in my hands.

They were stripped of pollen, as you had stripped yourself of me. 

'Dawn' by Chloe Paige

Outside, the sun threatens to break the horizon while I sift through our bills in our half-lit kitchen, your voicemail echoing off the walls: Hey, baby, I’ll be home soon.

The first bill is for the bigger car; you started working night shifts so we could afford all this growing space.

The next is for the crib, which I thought was too expensive, but you wanted the best for Sienna.

Then the doctor’s expenses, because you were always exhausted; and then another bill for my phone, always paid.

I play your voicemail over and over, Sienna kicking at your voice.

The sun finds the horizon, shining on our final invoice.

Tow truck – from the morning you didn’t come home.

I drop the bills, fluttering mourning doves.

Dawn breaks, and so do I.

NFFD 2027 Prompt #5: Erosion

 

 Prompt #5: Erosion

Welcome to The Write-In!  This year, we're celebrating the 2026 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology Mudlarking, its theme of Bridges, and the work of NFFD's new artist-in-residence Joanna Campbell. 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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Write a flash in which each sentence is at least one word shorter than the sentence before it.  

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If you’re submitting this to us, make sure to note that this is a response to Prompt #5: Erosion.

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 Red Zeppelin via Unsplash.