Friday
Friday Flash Prompt: Time Keeps on Ticking, Ticking....
This prompt demands of you a flash in 600 words or less. In The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Fiction, Lex Williford discusses writing 15-minute fictions, day after day, for forty days, a flood of flash. For your Friday Flash, you can take as long or as little as you’d like, as long as you meet these requirements.
- Someone has 15 minutes to get something done.
- It must include these five words: swamp, flippy-floppy, swivel, tentative, slippery.
- Tick—in all its varied meanings—should be an image that appears throughout.
- It should end with this phrase: the feathers of a bird.
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net’s suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
posted on 22 Oct 2010, 2:14 PM
If I didn’t get my butt home in the next fifteen minutes, my dad was going to wup my slippery ass for sure. The clock was ticking but the train had barely passed over the swamp and was still making its way over the trestle. I was walking through the grass towards the intersection. The grass was high and whipped against my legs. I hoped that there were no ticks in the grass.
I stood at the edge of the tracks my heart was making flippy floppy in my chest. The challenge was to jump across the tracks and drop the egg onto the front of the train the moment it passed. I swiveled my head back and forth, to the train as it ticked across the trestle, to my friend down the tracks watching me and down to my sneakers. I took a tentative step forward and braced. The train was almost here. I leapt across the tracks. I saw my sneakers lifted along with them were the feathers of a bird.