Category: Flash

Flash: Crossing Over

Erin Penn

Painting: A Laborer At Celeyran by Henri de Troulouse-Lautrec

Image courtesy of the Henri de Troulouse-Lautrec Foundation
Painting entitled: A Laborer At Celeyran
Shared under the Creative Commons attribution

Wearily, the old man sat down on the rock. Spring flowers surrounded him, blooms created by the spring rains. Before him the rains combined with melting snow from the distant mountains had swelled the creek to a full swirling torrent of mud, sticks and foam. His nomadic family barely made it across with their herds. Everyone except for him.

He had made the journey more times than he could count. The miles embedding agony into his legs .. knees … ankles … hips, screaming all his years at him, whimpering the distance from the winter lowlands to the summer mountain pastures.

Three creeks they had already crossed in their long journey to green grass. Sweetwater, Yellow River, Narrow Ford. Four more waterways lay ahead. This creek his family named Abandon.

When they had to leave his mother behind, unable to carry her across all those years ago, he had watched her go to a bare rock. Maybe even this one. There she sat. He had looked over his shoulder a dozen times until too many hills were between them. She never moved.

His father, left behind a handful of years later **screamed** at them and kept trying to splash across, until the waters swept him away. As the strongest male, he had been too busy trying to keep youngest, humans and herd, from drowning.

He vaguely remembered when his grandparents no longer could make the journey.

At least he hadn’t needed to leave Jacomina behind. She died from the cough many winters ago, her bones in the mound.

The dog worried him. Most of the dogs stayed with the family, but BlackFoot stayed behind. The dog wore a track between the waters where everyone crossed and where the old man was sitting. Eventually it sat beside him on the rock and put its head into his lap, whining. He petted its head.

No one looked back as they walked over the hills. Not that he could see. Nodding once the last of the animals crested the hill, the old man stood and began to look for shelter. He knew he wouldn’t last until the winter return, but the dog needed caring. A den of some sort. More rains were coming.

(words 370 – first published 4/17/2016)

Flash: Bunny Hop Line

Erin Penn

Man in Bunny Ears

Image originally on Breathless Press; found again on Pinterest
Cannot find original attribution

Howie always knew a police lineup was in his future. He just always figured it would be for a break and enter, or a bar brawl, or a drug deal, or a hooker who was a cop in disguise, or speeding. He actually hoped for the speeding. Speeding would mean they had set up a full road block and used a plane to catch him during one of the times he pushed over a hundred. His boys would buy him drinks for a year on that story alone.

He never thought it would be for helping out at a kid’s birthday party. God, the cops wouldn’t even let him take off the bunny ears during his mug shots. The fuckers were laughing their asses off.

It had gone wrong, oh … so … wrong.

(words 132 – originally appearing at Breathless Press 9/4/2013 for the 4/8/12 Sunday Fun)

Flash: Funner Part 2

Erin Penn

Opened Dictionary Stock Photo

FreeDigitalPhotos.net photo by Arvind Balaraman.

Joe was trying to get little April to accept puréed carrots, when his wife said out of the blue, “Yes, I believe funner is a word. Fun, funner, funnest.”

The peanut butter and ginger jelly sandwich was placed where their personal 4-year old tornado named Scott would land as soon as his milk glass was added. She returned to the kitchen to pour the final attraction, and then start assembling their more adult sandwiches. Joe wouldn’t mind a PB and J himself, but Cheryl tried to keep them on a somewhat non-strict diet. Thirties brought a little gut to both of them and she dislike buying clothes just for “upsizing” as she put it.

Scrapping up the carrots that were using osmosis to feed his favorite daughter through her cheeks and bib, Joe tried to place the conversation … it took a moment. Reorienting the food through the more proper channel of her small mouth, he was able to respond, “Nope, I am pretty sure funner is not a word. Did you look it up?”

Delivering the last of the Saturday lunch to the table, Cheryl mouth pursed in consternation as her husband got a point in the debate. “Well, no.” She pulled out her smartphone after sitting down. Booting up, she started navigating through menus looking. “Let’s see, some stuff about funner added to the dictionary in 2010 … Urban slang … oh here is something. Both noun and adjective, but not … drat.”

The arrival of their oldest made her put the smart phone aside, as she saved various glasses from spilling and laid down the requirement of eating at least three apple slices as well as half the sandwich before leaving the table. Joe concentrated on cleaning up the baby, the highchair, the plastic beneath the high chair and finally himself before joining his family at the kitchen table and snatching the phone for himself. Juggling April on one knee, and scrolling through the Google search he found a good article and passed it over to his wife after Scott started counting the Fritos on his plate.

She read through it, taking a bite of her chicken sandwich. Cheryl sipped some black cherry Kool-Aid then returned the phone and said “I believe the circumstances were very informal and therefore the usage stands.”

Joe laughed at loud, thinking back to exactly what he was doing during the “circumstances” of its usage. Glancing at the phone, he confirmed the article he had found boiled down to “Funner should not be used in formal writing, though it’s usage has been accepted for informal writing. For formal English writing, more fun should be used.”

“Agreed. In addition, I will concede we were not writing at the time.”

“Funner … Fun .. Ner … f.u.n.n.e.r.” Cheryl stated and spelled.

Laughter took them both, with April’s baby chortle joining in. Scott looked up from his counting; not understanding the joke, but enjoying the laughter, his high pitch child squeals joining in.

(words 498 – first published 1/2/2013; republished in new blog format 4/3/2016)

Blog: Inspirations for Flashes – Visual and Text

Erin Penn

INSPIRATION: FLASHES – VISUAL AND TEXT

EXAMPLE: MY BLOG

Hey all, this is the fifth Thursday of the month. I decided for the fifth Thursdays instead of pointing you to someone else’s blog, to write my own. For this one, I thought I would let you in on how I write a little.

You may have noticed I sort the Sunday Flashes into “Visual Flashes” and “Text Flashes”. So, what is the difference? After all, nearly every post I do seems to have a picture associated with it.

First off, flashes are very, very short stories aimed around 1,000 words. Most of mine fall between 500 and 1,200 words. For fifth Sundays, like in January, I will be posting a flash of around 2,000 words. Flashes are meant to be written flat out and tend to be more “scenes” than full short stories requiring character development, plots, and growth. Since I am posting the flashes instead of hiding them away, I do a little editing – correctly the worst of my grammar and spelling errors – before letting the world see my babies.

The difference between Visual and Text flashes is what inspired them. With visual flashes, I am working from a visual prompt. I saw a picture and tried to create a story around the picture. Visual prompts started my blog.

Back toward the end of 2013, I discovered Breathless Press’s blog where they posted a picture every Sunday and asked readers/writers to post a line inspired by the picture. I wrote a few flashes – about three-week’s worth. Then I decided to start my own blog and posting the stories there as well. That way if anything happened to Breathless Press, I would still have my stories. Man, am I glad I did that. Because in 2015 the small press died, as so many have done. Publishing is a tough business.

I no longer have any of the original pictures, unless I was able to hunt them down and find the correct permissions. I am a stickler about creative attribution – but that is another blog (likely for the fifth Thursday of June).

Text flashes were written without any visual inspiration. I don’t have to tie them to a chair being red or a man wearing suspenders because that was in the picture. These stories may have been inspired by a conversation with a friend, an observation at work, or just spring from my head like Athena from Zeus’ (after a very nasty headache). Before posting, I try to find a good picture to go with the story.

A cool note that using visuals as inspiration and using writing to choose a picture have publishing industry equivalents. During the pulp era, sometimes publishing houses would buy a cover from an artist and give it to an in-house writer to build a story around. Modernly, author write the stories picked up by publishing houses, and an in-house artist builds a cover around.

I find that my visual inspirations tend to create new worlds and storylines, while my text flashes revisit and expand the worlds I have previously created.

As a reader, do you have a preference on the stories? Do you find the visual or the text flashes to be more interesting?

As a writer, have you used visual or text prompts for inspiration? Do you find one or the other easier to work with? Have you ever tried to find a picture for a story you wrote or work with an artist?

Comment below.

Flash: Coffee Urn

Erin Penn

Coffee Pot by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Image courtesy of the Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Foundation
Painting entitled: Coffee Pot

Coffee. Warm, wonderful, life-giving coffee.                                         

The silver urn bathed in the late morning sun, alone on the banquet table, steam curling from the lip. The steam barely visible to my unfocused eyes but glorious all the same.

Hot caffeine. The motion of my life’s blood. The function of my synapses.

Throbbing, my head ravaged me for last night. My tongue ached for the Columbia Black to spill over the cotton-parched muscle, burning away … burning away everything. If only there was a mug.

If only I could move my arms.

I twisted my shoulders to see how tight the bindings were.

My dry tongue pressed against whatever was stuck in my mouth preventing me from screaming, adhering to the terrycloth fiber. Blood and sweat-sock duked it out for control of my taste buds. I think the blood is mine; at least one tooth is loose. So much for the extensive orthodontic work my parents paid for during my teenage years.

Bile rose from the flavors but I manage to dry swallow it back down.

Did they, whoever they were, leave the urn as torture? For torture it was to have coffee so close and so far.

(words 196 – first published 3/27/2016)