Flash Nano 2021

 

Well, I've done various writing challenges in my time - NaNoWriMo twice, a year of writing a poem a day, stone poems and other mini challenges, but I have never tackled a flash challenge.

This one comes from Nancy Stohlman, a name that flashed (pun intended) up on Twitter this week. The challenge is to write a flash story (flash is up to 1000 words) a day throughout November. I love flash stories and I write anything from between 75 words to 1000 words usually, though somewhere around 500 words seems to be what I write most.

So, I have taken on this challenge. Every day I receive a prompt via email and I try to stick to those. Don't you just love prompts? I love visual and written ones to nudge me into writing something I would not otherwise have written. So the challenge is twofold - writing everyday and sticking to the prompts.

I get my prompts in the afternoon (the delay being that this is a US website), so I may be a day late writing my flash stories. No matter, it gives me something to look forward to.

I thought I'd share a flash story with you. Every Friday throughout the challenge I shall publish a draft flash story. This one just happens to be one I wrote this morning, so it is hot off the laptop and without any real editing. Comments welcome.

Pit

It was all knew, the sound of the hooter from the mine. It marked my days. It was the clock I lived by. My father worked the early shift, coming home as black as the coal he worked with. When I was a young child, I thought he was two men, the sooty faced one, clothes stinking of coal dust, and the fresh faced one with pink skin. Every time he bathed, he became born again, like those Baptists up on Slate Hill. Yet however much my mother cleaned and washed, coal dust seemed to settle everywhere, and especially on me.

I knew that when I left school, that’s where I would be going. There was no other work in our town. Unless you made it to the grammar school, the mine was where you went. But I had a fear of the dark and a fear of being underground. My father said, ‘You’ll get used to it, son.’ And as the day neared to my journey beneath the earth, the nightmares started. During those last days at school, my chest would tighten when I thought of what was to come. I went around town after school searching for any job I could do. Anything, but go underground. Yet, my fate was sealed the day I was conceived a boy.

I walked with heavy feet with my father that first morning. My heart thumped harder the nearer we got to the pit. There were some formalities to go through and my father answered all the questions because I couldn’t speak. My breathing became laboured and shallow. I heaved air into my lungs, but there wasn’t enough. We walked with the rest of the gang to the cage. The stench of coal crept inside of me. The cage rose from below. The door opened and the previous gang stepped out. Dirty faced and exhausted men came into the light.

‘Come on lad,’ my father said. But I couldn’t move. My father placed a hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t breathe. Taking gulps didn’t help. Tears coursed down my cheeks. I was going to die here before I even made it down. ‘Pull yourself together,’ my father shouted. I dropped my lunch box, pulled off the helmet that seemed to drum me into the earth, and ran. 

I ran and ran until I came to the hills, where I could breathe again. I stood looking down on the town of my birth. The soot covered houses, a town with no colour, a town where washing smelt of air and coal. Thoughts dug through the fug of my brain. I had shamed my father, my family. I was not the son to be proud of. So I kept walking. Out of the parish, out of the county until I came to a green land with trees and sweet air. I felt cleansed. My heart was heavy, but I knew I could never go back. I would take my chances elsewhere. I shivered as day edged into evening. Below me stood a farm, a collection of barns set around a cottage. Smoke curled out of the chimney. The irony of it made me smile, but I kept walking towards it.