Last week's winner, @hummingbirdFF, has picked her prompt for this week's #fanficflashfic, and it's a great one.
Here it is:
Prime Circle's "Breathing."
It doesn't matter what inspires you, just write whatever you feel.
Remember to check the rules.
Have your 100 - 200 words submitted by 11:59pm Thursday, EST.
We want anything and everything: poetry, prose, fanfic, OF.
JUST GET WRITING!
Leave your entry as a comment - include your word count, and your twitter handle if you have one.
FYI - entries that exceed (or are under) the word limits will not be considered by the judge.
Here are the song's lyrics:
ReplyDeleteStep back
Stop the world
Stop the time
It's always running
Just trying to catch my breath
Just trying to take it in
Unfold and calculate
Concentrate and reach for something
Here's to the good times
The bad times
The times that could have been
To the wrong times
The right times
I know we'll breathe again
Until then...
Until then...
[Chorus]
Suppose that we got older
Suppose that we'd begin
Suppose that I stopped running
It could begin again
Suppose in life we made it
I'm never looking back
I'm never looking back
The hardest part of letting go
Not easy to believe
And sometimes you'll just never know
Gets harder to perceive
You're gone
You're long gone
[Chorus]
I know you can see it, now
Can't feel it, after all
Seems it's us versus time
Think we made up our minds
All that's left is just to see
[Chorus] x2
Here's to the good times
The bad times
The times that could have been...
Twitter: BedeliaJane
ReplyDeleteWords: 184
We cut our teeth on their hearts. Hiding in blanket forts and tree houses, we giggled and schemed. Our wolves would be anything we wanted—our very own pair of grownup puppets, dancing to our whims.
Now they stand before us, their faces unchanged by time. Jacob stares at the place where my fingers link together with Claire’s. My voice freezes with my breath, hands itching to let my power do the talking for me.
“We’re in love,” Claire says, meeting Quil’s gaze with her shoulders straight. “Have been for a long time.”
“Ness?” the ghost of my Jacob says.
I nod. “The imprint makes you be whatever we need, right? Well, we need you to be our friends. Just that, nothing more. No one asked us if we wanted…”
Trailing off, I swallow the unfair words. No one asked them, either.
Claire gives my fingers a squeeze. Time to cut the strings. Time to let go.
We don’t say we’re sorry. Hand-in-hand, we run away from the devotion everyone claimed we’d never be able to refuse.
Neither of us look back.
Word count: 174
ReplyDeleteTwitter handle: @AnnaLund2011
Hiding in my home, or blacking out my windows couldn’t keep me from seeing you before me. Your face was etched on my mind. I buried myself in my darkened home, but I could never get rid of your ghost.
What was the right time for me was obviously wrong for you; twenty years have passed. I have never stopped running, and you have never looked back.
You just never got it, and then you were gone. Just gone. And I did get older, running too, I grew up, grew way up. Never looking back.
I had made it. I was never looking back.
And then today, you walk back in. You show me all the good times that could have been—as if I’d been the idiot back then, as if I hadn’t already known.
Your face is in agony, tears falling. Realization has hit. It is just that it is too late.
So I tell you no. And walk away.
Showing myself I have indeed made it. I am strong without you.
Word count: 196
ReplyDeleteTwitter: @lellabeth
"I'm sorry Bella, but I... this isn't working anymore. Love shouldn't hurt like this, shouldn't feel like there's someone squeezing my stomach in a vice every time you touch me. It's been over for a long time," Edward says, his eyes averted as I buckle and break, my legs as weak as his reasoning.
There is a moment where I feel paralysed, where the pain radiating from my solar plexus steals my breath and my chest threatens to cave in. I try to speak but only manage a strangled wail of pain, my hand reaching for a body that doesn't belong to me now. I watch as Edward picks up his suitcase and opens the door of our house, my vision blurring until he seems like a mirage. And maybe he is - the perfect oasis that disappears when you get too close.
My heart falters as he twists in my direction and I wait for him to turn around, to heal the love-dripping wound that is my body, but he doesn't. He leaves without a second glance and I'm left with my memories of what could have been, alone on the cold tiled floor.
Word count: 200 (per GDocs/Drive)
ReplyDeleteTwitter: @sandyquill
======================
She missed him every day.
She understood, but she hadn’t said yes. She’d been so afraid...
This morning, she flipped her hair out of her eyes and faced the mirror. “Today, I’m going to be brave and walk out. Alone. And I’m going to smile. I am.”
The regret in his eyes passed before her reflection as she piled up the scraps of courage. “Come on, you can do this. You can.”
His memory smiled and they nodded to one another.
Blowing out a breath, causing wisps of hair to scatter over her forehead, she swallowed her regrets down with a shot of determination. “You can,” she whispered, facing the door.
Out of her apartment, down three flights of stairs to the walk. She found a smile in the morning sunshine and put it on her face, ready to give it away.
He had asked her to try for him once and she hadn’t. Today, she would try for both of them.
“Good morning!” the oncoming man said as the sun glinted off the dark waves of his hair.
A wall rose within her, the smile slid from her face. It wasn’t him.
His ghost, watching over her, sighed. Again.
Word Count: 200
ReplyDeleteTwitter: @quietdrabble
Time isn’t subjective. Hours, minutes, seconds in a day do not stop because of a choice made. Time keeps its own pace.
I wanted it too much, needed to fill every inch of her. I knew within a niche of my mind this would be my undoing and shatter my soul, but I continued. Staring directly into her eyes, I entered her for the first time.
It was never even in reciprocity; someone always wanted more.
Many delicious times I explored her body and memorized the paths of her curves and how we fit together. Whispered words, broken breaths, heated flesh, everything was euphoric and thrilling within that small space of time.
Time was not forgiving.
We kissed beneath my sheets. Her sweetness mingled with my smoke and rye flavoring, and I knew I hadn’t gained what I truly desired from this. I knew she wasn’t capable of honestly giving what I craved. Yet I took selfishly, hoping to leave her with an offering, another part of me. She had no clue how much she already owned.
The buried memory invades my brain and festers in the recesses, though her presence never faded. Even if we shared only one night.
Days and days and days. How many still to go? Too many. A life takes too many days to live. I can’t face them all.
ReplyDelete“It will get easier.”
“Just deal with one day at a time.”
“Be grateful for the time you had with her.”
“Better to have loved and lost…”
People say a lot of things when someone dies. I’ve decided most of them are lies.
Every day without her is harder than the one before. The memories of her –of us –don’t soften and glow, they burn and hurt. They don’t make me stronger. They’re crippling me. I can’t move forward, and I can’t escape.
I dream of erasing her. I dream of that first day, when she ran into me on her way to class. Our shoulders slammed together, her folder emptied on the ground, my notes exploded, mingling with hers until it took us half an hour to sort it out, full of nervous laughter and fingers brushing and names, numbers awkwardly exchanged…. Instead, her shoulder missed mine. Our lives never collided. She passed by and one day died and I never knew it.
Then I wake up, still in love with a ghost.
Words: 188
ReplyDeleteTwitter: @bigblueboat
One fight, one cousin, one shattering of dreams.
My best friend has taken over the life I had planned, we had planned.
When I look back, I see things I could have changed, things he could have done differently. Yet, he was the one insisting it was over when I was willing to fight for us.
Watching him now, I can see why he gave up on me, on us. I don’t remember his eyes shining as brightly when looking at me. The small brushes of his fingers against her hand never happened between us.
After glancing at them one more time, I pull my backpack onto my shoulder. Returning to my car I whisper goodbye to everyone I know, the life that could have been.
Driving out of the parking lot, I try not to look in the review mirror. The images still flash before me: the rings that will never be exchanged, the tears shed over our first son taking his first breath, the fights over the last bite of lo-mein.
Taking the right turn onto the highway, I wipe the tears away and look forward.
Word count: 200
ReplyDeleteTwitter: @TiramiSue84
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It was a long time coming and yet, it hit me out of nowhere. It crept and crawled within me undetected, through the pores of my skin and into my veins. Up, up right into my heart. A stab. Further even – into my mind. Was it a punch or a bullet?
This realization.
It's taken me years to see, feel and grasp what's been hinted to me by others right from the start.
You are not good for me.
It wasn't pink-tinted glasses I'd been wearing where you were concerned, but rather blinders and earplugs.
I was blind and deaf to your fake and phony, your resentment and hypocrisy thinly veiled by the cover of your pretend caring.
You felt no love for me.
You kept me around so that my misery could make you feel better about yourself. For you to soar, you needed to see me fall.
And this realization hurts. So much so that I'm breaking a bit as I walk out on you now, but I have to. If I don't, you'll further use me up until there's nothing left.
It's too much to ask, too much to take.
I have to let you go.
Word count: 198
ReplyDeleteTwitter: @SerendipitousMC
Edward was in the middle of breakfast when Emmett came into the kitchen with a grumbled “Good morning.” He tossed the folded newspaper on the table and pointed to a photo. “Didn’t you used to hang out with her?”
Edward glanced at it, barely interested at first. Above his plate of eggs, his hand froze, grasping the fork until his fingertips turned white.
He turned back to his food. “No. I hardly knew her.”
The moment Emmett left, Edward lunged for the paper and read the article even though he knew it would make him ill. Surprised, he felt anger flare first, even before despair. This was so wrong. The picture was so wrong. It should have been him, smiling with her above a headline that joined their names. It shouldn’t have been this other man.
His secret was the twin to his lack of courage.
She never knew how she lived in his heart, as constant as its beating.
She never knew that she was the shadow of his every thought.
She never knew that he cradled the memory of every slight smile she gave him like each was an infant.
She never knew.
She never knew.
Wordcount 200
ReplyDeleteSherbert20111 on ADF
Get in, get up and running, get out. This is the third for me this month and I’m empty.
I check the client team’s faces when I put up the Gantt chart exposing the ambitious schedule.
I’m looking for buy-in. I’m seeing ‘we can’, ‘we can’t’, ‘we’re shitting ourselves.’ ‘We’re going to kill you’ is front and center, flipping her hair and dressed in fury. Her face is all big eyes, writing ‘bastard’ over every word I say.
She crosses her legs as I start to wrap up. The heel of her foot slips in and out of her black patent pumps, sliding against her hold-ups.
Sounds like breathing.
“I have a question?”
“Of course.”
“What do you have for anyone working remotely?”
“We have a thin client, I can give you a demo?”
“See me later,” gets a laugh. She lets the peons go to dissect the ideas at the watercooler, until it’s just us.
Neither of us mentions the bar last night, or the state of her hotel room this morning.
I power up the hand-held. I should be the bigger man, but I’m not. It’s her, as she holds out her hand.
“Hi, pleased to meet you.”
Twitter: annetteinoz
ReplyDeleteWords: 199
She left the ring as her promise. Placed it in my palm and folded my fingers over it, kissing them.
Never doubt I’ll be back she’d said. Then she’d kissed me, the desperation and sadness so evident in the press of her lips against mine.
I stood there and watched her walk away, even though everything in me was telling me to stop her, to hold on to her, and never let her go.
Now, one day bleeds into another, a facsimile of a life. I stumble through my days and at night I try not to think about how it would be if she was here.
How long am I supposed to wait for her to come back? Is seven years too long or not long enough?
The photo taped to the mirror in our bedroom is sun-faded and finger-smeared. It’s not enough any more. I run my fingers over her laughing face one last time.
Sitting on the edge of our bed I empty the contents of the orange plastic bottle into my hand, washing it down with the vodka that is always there.
I lay down and wait for her to come to me.
@mrssiobhanmasen (200 words)
ReplyDeleteFifteen years together, she found me when I was broken and things didn’t improve much from there. No matter how hard I tried, it just seemed to never work out for me.
I was angry and mad at the world. My parents died when I was eight, left me alone. I had a right. At least I thought I did.
Bella changed that for me, she gave me hope.
I found a good job; I supported us well enough so she didn’t have to work. Until the day I got angry at my boss and hit him. It was his fault, I told myself. Bella will understand. She did. She always did, I wasn’t surprised. Unconditional love she showed me, unconditional to the point that I began to take advantage of it. Turns out she had a breaking point too.
The day I snorted coke for the first time because I was ready to escape my shitty life I had at the moment, she warned me. The day I OD’d at my cousin Emmett’s house, she broke.
She left, our unborn child with her.
Now I only think of the times that could have been and mourn what I lost.
Twitter @Aleeab4u
ReplyDelete200 words
Another dingy bar. Company found in minds as lost and lamenting as his own. Despair bled into the walls, and floors, and the whisky in the dingy shot glass before him.
He swallows down liquid self flagellation, wincing, though it's regret that burns not fermented grains aged in charred oak casks. The hint of smoke in his throat is the essence of irony, the palest illusion of her. His gut reminds him it wants red, not amber.
Memories are his only sustenance now.
Smiles, shy laughter, and sweet-pain kisses. Breathless sighs carrying the promise of passion barely breeched, and, oh, how he longed to breech. Claim sweet innocence, bring it life, spark it with fuel and let it burn him alive.
She would have ignited for him so sweetly if he'd only known to trust the tenderness within to love her that way. Instead, he sits here, a million miles away from his one true weakness, leaving her fire to fickle human fates.
But time waits for no one, least of all him. He stares at the clock, knowing he's losing the will to stay gone.
Until then, he raises his empty glass, one more for the empty road.
Love it ;-)
Delete@shellisthimbles
ReplyDelete202 ineligible words.
----
She lifts her glass, bubbles streaming to the surface. Fizz. Pop.
Her red-painted smile falters.
What did he say? I missed it. Something about leaving the past behind and looking forward, putting behind them the things that could have been and embracing the things that will come.
Her eyes find mine across the room; a compass point to magnetic north.
No trace of her smile lingers on her lips.
He keeps talking. People shift in their chairs, the champagne growing heavy in their raised hands.
An old guy up the back starts to complain, his crotchety voice carrying. The blond-headed toddler in the front adds his whine.
Her father takes charge, cutting across his new son-in-law’s waffling. “To the bride and groom.”
Glasses clink.
The champagne burns all the way down.
She pastes her smile back on. Embraces her sister. Kisses her new brother.
I follow her as she slips outside, loosening the silk knotted at my throat.
Lipstick staining her cigarette, she leans against brick, her hair fighting its way free from the pins.
Her words float on blue-grey smoke. “Do you ever wish you could wind back the clock?”
“Every day.”
She takes another drag. “I’ve missed you.”
“Every day.”
@VanCanuckGrl
ReplyDelete199 words
The cold wind whips against my tear-stained cheeks feeling like slaps of stark reality. I close my eyes, praying that when I open them the nightmare will be over.
His scarf is around my neck; his scent fading but the only tangible thing I have left of him. My eyes lack focus. I can’t look forward – there’s no future. I can’t look back because the memories haunt me. They hurt, like a thousand paper-cuts, through to bone and bathed in iodine.
As his coffin is lowered into the ground the realization hits me square in the chest. He’s gone. My love, my life; my everything. There’s nothing left for me; nothing left of me.
Mere breathing hurts. Inch by painful inch he’s becoming more and more unattainable. Time is frozen and yet it continues, without him. I don’t know how I’ll make it through the next ten minutes let alone the next ten seconds. How do I go on? I can’t fathom.
Pulling the scarf around my neck, I imagine it as his arms around me, hugging me one last time. The tears slip down my cheeks and if I had words, they would be “Until we meet again.”
Twitter: @mslizabeth
ReplyDeleteWordcount: 195
“What if we missed our chance?”
The question echoed over and over in her head as if she was standing in an endless cavern that wouldn’t let her forget the question she didn’t want to linger on.
She hardly even noticed the tears anymore as she sat watching him; the glow from her computer the only illumination in the room. She waded through hours of footage for any glimpse of him she could get.
This is what she had been reduced to. She craved Darcy as if he were air. Even when she knew it was hopeless she couldn’t let herself give up.
“Lizzie Bennet, I’m in love with you.” Those seven words, cut through the quiet mingled with her sobs. She was falling apart more each day having to acknowledge that everything she had lost was her own fault. If only she had fought so hard, been so closed to Jane’s insistence there was more to Darcy. She’d even let Wickham affect her vision of him, which only proved how foolish she was. She didn’t deserve William Darcy, but that didn’t stop that fact that she knew she was irrevocably in love with him.