Welcome back to Wednesday Words Reborn, PRIDE Edition, Week 31! 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. In another hat tip to P.T. Wyant, we will be celebrating Pride all month long with LGBTQ+ geared prompts! If you don’t support pride, my prompts won’t be for you this month.
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 theme prompt:
Write a tale that centers around pride. NO hate or discrimination will be tolerated.
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.**
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She froze, staring at the paper sign taped in the window, a bad printout of rainbow clipart and a half dozen mismatched fonts: Port Seymour Pride.
Surely there were more than a few people in town whose gaydar had pinged upon meeting her—to say nothing of the tourists. But after two years on the Island, Ellie had yet to talk to anyone about being queer, let alone her past. As far as she could tell, nobody knew.
Ellie’s first Pride had been in Toronto, that last sweaty summer in 2001 before things fell apart, before America went mad, before Ellie had even met Lena, before Ellie’s brother was sent off to “learn Pashtun”, as he jokingly put it. Mr. Miller reminded Ellie of Jamie sometimes, though she suspected neither would appreciate the comparison.
But all that was a long time ago.
Port Seymour wasn’t the backwater it sometimes felt like, Ellie knew that. Still, it was a far cry from Toronto. Even from Ottawa. Finding herself back in the closet—in more ways than one—seemed the safest option. The easiest, certainly.
But was all of that as necessary as it felt? As her eyes skimmed over the rainbows watermarked with “Getty Images”, the Comic Sans declaration the festival was “open to all”, Ellie realized the 21st Century had arrived in Port Seymour at last. Conspicuously, there was no mention of who was organizing the event. Ellie sighed. Some things didn’t change. Of course, these days, it was less likely that it was some kind of activist collective, and more likely the tourism board.
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Very nice snippet. Thanks for sharing!
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