Last week we posted our first Story Seeds prompt and had five amazing entries! Each one was so different and brilliant in it’s own way. Thank you to everyone who entered!
And our winner for last weeks prompt is: Lisa Hase-Jackson
Here’s her entry:
Converse High Tops where Dale’s favorite kind of tennis shoe because they didn’t make his feet sweat. He started wearing them as a middle-schooler and went through a pair every six months, a point his mother emphasized every time they bought another pair from Champs. He would sleep in them if he could, his mother complained, which wasn’t true at all. He always removed his shoes at the front door when coming home from school so they would last longer. Dale knew his mother worried about money.
Friday after school, Dale and his friends walked a couple of blocks over from campus to check out a house that had burned down the previous Tuesday. Billows of smoke had hovered over the neighborhood as ash and soot settled on the school’s rooftop. The scent of melted vinyl and charred lumber still permeated the air. No one knew what had started the fire. No one knew the family who had lived there.
Standing stark against the lowering sun, the house’s burned-out framed stood ominously. Something about the totality of destruction invited the teens to seek out remnants of the evacuated family’s life. Dale was stepping gingerly over broken glass amid the ruins when he lost his balance and put his foot down hard to steady himself. Sudden pain made him draw his foot quickly back as his sock filled with blood. There among the rubble he saw the business end of a wickedly-long nail sticking up from a blackened two-by-four.
Soaking his foot in the bathtub with Epsom salts that evening, Dale thought of ways to keep his mother from noticing the hole in the bottom of his right shoe and its blood-stained insole. He wondered how to make this pair of shoes last another five months.
This Week’s Prompt
Post your flash-fiction piece of no more than 300 words, no later than Friday at 0600 EST, in the comments. Your story can be of any genre, though we ask you to keep the content PG-13.
You may post one entry to each of our weekly contests.
Please include a title and a word count in your post. The comment form will ask for your email (which we never share with anyone!), but you can leave your Twitter of Facebook handle in your post if you prefer. Just make sure we know how to get in touch with you!
Winners and a new prompt are posted every Friday.
Prize: $10 Amazon Gift Card
Questions to Help Spark Ideas:
- How did you find this nest?
- What kind of animal/bird will hatch from these?
- Did this nest appear somewhere unexpected?
- Who is taking care of these eggs?
