05/11/2022 - Smoke
Reading time: 2 min
Photo by Stephen Hocking on Unsplash
By the time I woke up, fire had swallowed the front door and my bedroom was hot enough to boil my goldfish in his bowl.
I coughed something black and sticky, bitter, like the burnt corners of a toast, and crawled on the floor, praying for a layer of oxygen below the carbon monoxide. I touched the handle and my skin melted like cheese on a frying pan. Screaming, I looked at my palm. The burn had the shape of letters.
“Turn around,” it said.
The thing I coughed, that disgusting dark sputum, had never touched the floor. It was lingering in mid-air, and twirling it moulded the smoke into sentences.
“You’re not going to die,” it said.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m you,” it said.
“What?”
“You—I, we—get disfigured in this fire. The experience will give you powers, but it will drive you mad. Jump.”
“What?” I asked again.
“Jump, from the window.”
And so, I did.
---
Marvin was texting his next customer when he noticed Maria’s window opening. She seemed high, and he thought she would never notice he’d given her three pills less than what she paid for, but maybe he was wrong.
He grabbed the bag and decided the best thing to do was gulp them down, pretending he never had the full lot, and as he did so he saw Maria looking down, terrified. Without saying a word, she jumped, landing only a few feet from him, the sound of her skull cracking scarring his mind forever.
Only a smile of relief remained on her dead face.
He glared at the empty bag where the three extra pills had been until a moment before and mumbled a single word.
“Fuck.”
About this story
Prompt:
ELEMENT ONE: Your story must begin in medias res.
If you’re not familiar with this term, here is an article to explain. Basically, start off your story in the middle of the action. Plop us right into peril - or friendship - or dinner, and then we can figure out what happens. Together. Just the two of us, because…
ELEMENT TWO: Your story must contain exactly two characters. No more, no less.
Sorry, all you universe creators. Time to pare down your cast. (A dead character still counts as a character!) There’s a little wiggle room in this element regarding animals and inanimate objects who may be characters. If it interacts with the plot in a meaningful way, then it’s a character. (If you’re really not sure, just go with your gut and we won’t be too picky about it.)
From the official page of FFM 2022.
Notes on the challenge
Each and every story published here has been written, reviewed, polished and published in less than 90 minutes. Which means you’re going to find spelling mistakes, ugly sentences and weird structures. I still hope you’ll enjoy them!
