Welcome back to Wednesday Words Reborn, Week 16! To honor P. T. Wyant’s legacy as an author and her incredible influence on my success as a writer, I am taking up the torch of continuing her flash fiction challenge. Every Wednesday I will be posting some kind of flash fiction prompt, hopefully just after midnight Eastern time.
The prompt might be a single line, a photo, a group of things to include, a question, some weird news of the week, a theme, genre category, an idea, or quite literally anything my twisted ADHD-addled mind can come up with. Hell, if I get callbacks and engagement, I might even choose a line or something interesting from a participant’s response as a prompt sometime. (With their permission, of course.)
After the prompt is live, the rest is up to you. This isn’t any kind of contest. At least, not in the near future it isn’t, and whether or not you choose to participate is entirely your choice. The goal here is simply to have fun and exercise that writing muscle with, say, no more than 500 words. You can choose to leave your flash fiction story as a comment below, or you can post it on your own social media of your choice. If you post elsewhere, I’d love if you dropped a comment below with a link for me to follow and read. You can also tag me across my various social media accounts (Twitter, BlueSky, and Facebook; all of which you can find under my Contact info) when you share your snippet. And if you post on your own blog, a ping back to the original post would be appreciated, though it’s not necessary. Share your #flashfiction tales with the hashtag #WWReborn across social media for others to browse and find.
Hey, if a prompt inspires more than 500 words, too, run with it!
This week’s weird news prompt:
Write a tale based off the news headline: “Beloved ‘Russian Spy Whale’ Hvaldmir is Found Dead Under Mysterious Circumstances.”
Now off with you, Darklings! Write with the frenzy of an overly caffeinated hamster on a wheel! Just don’t trip. Or maybe do trip. It might be more fun that way. As always, I’d love to see what you come up with!
**All stories written hereafter from this prompt are the property, both intellectually and physically, of the author.**
This one was difficult for me indeed! But I managed to pull something out of the hat for the exercise:
Whale of a Spy by Ashley Apples:
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I was dreaming of an endless sky filled with pink and blue cotton candy clouds. I swam through the sky nibbling on the delicious clouds as I floated. I bit into a particularly large, fluffy cloud the sky turned red and a screeching sound rang from all around me. I had over stayed my welcome in this medical sky filled with edible clouds. I started falling, spinning into a free fall that would surely be my end.
I rolled off of my cot and slammed onto the concrete floor with a hard thud. My shoulder joint jarred and I worried I’d dislocated something. I kicked my blankets off and untangled myself. After getting up to my feet I gently lifted my shoulder and rolled it. It clicked ever so slightly and I winced but it wasn’t dislocated. I was happy for small miracles.
The alarm was still going off, it had followed me outside of my dream. My brain finally caught up to the rest of my body and I realized what it was. Whaledimir was in trouble. I raced across the cold, concrete floor of our secret under water surveillance chamber. Recently budget cuts to the program meant I was done here by myself, when normally I had a partner who would be watching Whaledimir while I was sleeping.
I got to the comms unit, sloppily stuck my headset on and slammed the button to open the line between the telepathic whale and myself. “’Mir? Are you ok? What is doing on?”
Shot. Came Whaledimir’s voice through the comm headset that translated his telepathic thoughts into radio waves I could hear.
“What?” I almost screeched, “Who would shoot a whale?”
The beluga didn’t immediately respond but I got the impression he was moving quickly, attempting to get to our escape route if he was ever discovered. I pulled up map and sonar to help guide him along. He appeared as blue blip on the screen, unfortunately two smaller red blips also appeared by him.
“’Mir, you’ve got two bogeys on your tail. You’re approximately half a league from the escape hatch. But if those two are close to you when you pass the sensors the auto turrets will activate on you as well.” Anxiety pulsed through me, but I managed to advise him of the situation with a steady voice. I did not want Whaledimir to get shot by the turrets.
I know. Came his deep, slow voice. Despite the sluggish way his voice sounded he was moving fast. Typically an adult beluga couldn’t swim faster than about fifteen miles per hour for no more than fifteen minutes. But Whaledimir was special. He had been enhanced he could propel himself at a rate of twenty miles per hour for approximately an hour. He wasn’t as fast as an orca, but he was fast.
The distance between him and the red blips grew more and more by the second. I rocked on my feet feeling anxious and helpless. All I could do was wait for him to pass the sensors to the defense system.
“You need just a little more distance between them and you, ‘Mir.” I said in my comm unit, quickly calculating the distance on the map and the sensor range. “You’re in sensor range, but they’re about to pass into it. I need you pass those turrets, ‘Mir!”
It will be alright. His slow voice told me even though he seemed to be slowly down on the sonar and the underwater map. The distance between him and the unknown enemies growing. He seemed to slow to a stop for a moment, just inside of the range of the turrets. I watched breathless as the red blips swam closer, and closer…
Suddenly, Whaledimir was moving again. He seemed to almost teleport past the turrets, just as the alarms went off to tell me they had advocated. Sensors and alerts went off all over the inside of my surveillance room. Two circles appeared over the red blips on the sonar and the distance sound of air rippling through water went off. The red blips disappeared.
Whaledimir’s blue blip swam closer to the entrance and I let out a small breath of relief. His sluggish voice in my head said. I am coming in for triage. See you soon.
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I admit the weird News prompts are definitely the hardest, but the headlines are too amusing to pass up.
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