Welcome to a piece of Wednesday Word’s flash fiction on Darkling Dreams!
A good friend of mine, P.T. Wyant, is doing a blog post every Wednesday called Wednesday Words with a new prompt for a bit of flash fiction writing, just to get in the habit of writing something, anything. (Even if said flash fiction is complete garbage at the time. Garbage is better than nothing though, right?) If you’re looking for some inspiration yourself or just something to aimlessly write, then go check out her blog for this week’s prompt!
With that being said, I am going to share what I came up with for this week’s flash fiction prompt based off a three word combination prompt. So here is my very rough around the edges minute of inspiration based off her prompt. I’d love to hear what you guys think of it!
(Please excuse any errors you may see, I said it was rough around the edges.)
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Hourglass Moon
“Fate, why are we out here?”
She shrugged, glancing sideways at her best friend. The action made her wobble as she tightrope walked along the train track’s rail. She flailed her outstretched arms, leaning with one foot out as an acrobat before regaining a parallel connection to the rail. “You don’t want to be out on a walk?”
“Depends on where we’re going and what the walk is for.”
Fate rolled her eyes slightly. “Lighten up, Destiny. I just wanted to take a walk.”
“That normally means you’re lost in your thoughts again, girl.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
Now it was Destiny’s turn to shrug. “Depends what trouble you walk yourself into from that line of thought tumbling away up in your pretty little head.”
Fate chuckled lightly, smirking. The two of them walked along in silence, Fate balancing upon the railroad and Destiny walking in the stones beside her. The crisp autumn day had them in hoodies to fend off the growing chill of October days. Destiny eventually shrugged off her satchel backpack and rummaged through it until she pulled out a half loaf of Italian bread. Fate had looked over at the crinkling noise of paper to see what she was doing and now shook her head.
“I swear, out of all the things someone could be addicted to as their favorite food, you have to have the strangest one.”
“What?” she protested, unwrapping the bread and tearing off a piece to pop in her mouth. “I like bread, is that a problem?”
“It’s odd.”
“You’re odd.”
Fate busted out laughing.
“Oh c’mon, you know you are. You stare off into space how often with this cloudy, dazed look to your eyes and we can’t get you to come back down to reality. You know things that are olden age or even too advanced and things you have never heard of before, yet you spit out facts, wisdom, and advice as if you yourself experienced all of it. Sometimes I think you’re a totally different person, even a different gender at times. It’s like you become someone else. When that happens and you snap out of it, you rarely ever remember what you did or said.”
Fate smiled ruefully. “I told you, I can’t explain it. I hardly understand it myself. It just feels like I’m…there but not there. Like my spirit has drifted away to something else and I’m viewing worlds, people’s lives, and eras beyond our own.”
“It’s weird.”
“It’s…exhilarating,” Fate corrected. “It makes me feel connected.”
Destiny rolled her eyes. “I don’t see how, but okay.” She paused. “Connected to what?”
“I’m not always quite sure,” she admitted, taking the piece of bread Destiny offered. “Sometimes I feel connected to emotions, other times to a different perspective or time period, other times to something completely alien. To the earth and the universe.” She shrugged. “I don’t always know and can’t always put words to the feeling.”
“I’ll say. It’s hard to get you speaking and thinking straight again after one of those…episodes.”
“You make it sound as if it is a health or mental issue,” Fate frowned.
“No! You know I don’t mean it like that, Fate! I just don’t know how else to describe those moments when you zone out and talk nonsense subjects you’ve never cared for or known about before that moment.”
Fate turned quiet again, staring down at the railroad ties as she walked along the rail yet. The breeze blustered past them, ruffling their hair. “It feels… It feels like I have body hopped,” she admitted.
“Body hopped?” Destiny raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah…” She slowly nodded, almost like she was mulling over her own word choice for naming it. “Body hopping… Like I have switched bodies and minds with someone else. Where I see what they see, think what they think, know what they know, experience and remember all they have. That’s…just how it seems.”
“Well… If you say so,” Destiny answered quietly, feeling perplexed. She came to a sudden stop two paces after her friend did, looking back to her. “Fate?”
Her best friend didn’t answer right away though, her eyes locked on something wedged in the rocks in the middle of the tracks. She hopped off the rail and crouched down, pulling away the stones until she uncovered what had glinted in the light and caught her attention. A sudden odd sensation descended on her as she stared at the golden necklace. Carefully she picked it up and held the charm in her hand, standing up.
“Fate? What is that? What’d you find?” Her friend came to her side to look.
“I’m…not sure…”
The pendant was a small white hourglass with sand inside it, hanging off the top tip of a black crescent moon. Her thumb ran across the hourglass, finding that the charm spun in a circle off the moon charm. As it did so, she felt a thrill wind through her body. An uplifting lightness that made her feel as if she was floating on air. She felt like she was being pulled away and falling in a dream.
Just like the dream falling, as soon as she took her thumb off the hourglass and the spinning stopped, the sensation came to a jerking halt. She practically flinched from the sudden loss of the feeling she had been experiencing. A moment of dizziness passed over her in which she shook her head to clear it.
“Fate?” There was a note of alarm in Destiny’s voice now as her friend tried to grab her attention.
The longer she stared at the pendant all the pieces of jumbled confusion about her episodes began to fall into place in her mind. The fog of mystery was beginning to lift and giving way to clear skies. She began to smile in giddy excitement, feeling a sense of rightness thrumming through her veins. The necklace was a sign, she was sure of it.
She looked up to Destiny. “Let’s go home. I think I just found my answers.”
Now you can find this flash fiction work and others on my profile on Wattpad! Click here for my profile and go dive into a sea of Shards of Imagination!
Also, as I work to play catch up from my latest computer crash, I will be posting the Shards of a prompt I missed from May and June directly to Wattpad each week. That means two Shards every week! Those old prompts will not be posted to my blog so if you wish to see the old one of the week, you’ll have to hop on over to my profile on Wattpad.
The next oldest one from June 8th went live earlier today. You can find Freedom’s Hope on Wattpad!
Darkling Dreams 