I suffered a bout of writer’s block today, wrestling over what to work on both for this post and in general. I hate those kinds of days, but they do happen. They’re easiest to bear when you don’t really feel like writing, and oh-so-much harder when you want to write but can’t. Today was the second kind of day.
So I took what I thought would be the easy way out and opted for super-short flash fiction for today’s story. Just 100 words. How hard could that be?
Brutal, it turns out. I turned the prompt over in my mind, trying to find the right light to see it by, but inspiration eluded me. What you’ll find below, if you’re brave enough to continue, is practically Pet Sematary fan fiction. It’s not bad. In fact, there are a couple of really nice turns of phrase, but it lacks a certain spark. There’s no life in it, ironically, and for that reason I’m chalking this up to a dud.
Eh, I’ll live to write another day.
Oh, yes. The prompt. As usual with these 100-word jobbers, this one comes to us from The Prediction:
100 words maximum, excluding the title, of flash fiction or poetry using all of the three words above (‘bandage’, ‘frustrate’, and ‘olive’) in the genres of horror, fantasy or science fiction.
stray
Damn stray. It was late, and he couldn’t afford a 24-hour vet, so he bandaged it as well as he could.
It still died.
After a moment of frustrated contemplation, he decide to bury it in the backyard beside the fruitless olive tree his mother planted years ago.
That night he heard it. Paws on the back door. An insistent whimper. An occasional growl.
The next morning his door was scratched to hell, mud and blood spotting the shredded wood. And across the yard, he saw it. The olive tree, up-turned beside what should have been a fresh grave.