Different (Fiction Friday)

As I lay down to try for sleep my mind immediately began racing. Not very conducive to sleep, I know. But how could I not think about the last time I’d fallen asleep?

It had been two days ago that I went to bed as usual, after having a perfectly normal day. But for some reason, when I drifted off to sleep, something odd happened to my brain.

It traveled. My brain, or my soul, or whatever you want to call it, traveled. And not just to the convenience store down the street. It traveled to, as near as I can tell, an entirely different world. A different dimension, perhaps, but different is the key word here.

As I fell asleep, I felt the spinning and thrust of rapid movement, then several moments later, it stopped. I opened my eyes, expecting to see the familiar shadow on the wall that the streetlights outside my apartment make. Instead I found myself…somewhere else.

It was a bustling street with loud music coming from several establishments. It was closed off to vehicles, or…maybe there just weren’t any. People freely walked in the street between the two columns of shops and restaurants.

I stood up from the bench where I was sitting, and took a few steps toward the middle of the street to look around and take in my surroundings. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a typical business district in a quaint, New England town. I’d seen dozens of streets just like this. But the people….

The people were…I guess there’s no other way to put it but bluntly, they were all blue. Not fake Halloween face paint blue, but tinged with blue, just like the blue of your own veins that you see under your skin. And everything else was blue, too. The bricks that made the buildings, the pavement of the street, the bench I had just gotten up from. It was all blue.

I looked down at myself, lifted my right hand up and into my field of vision. I was still myself, still pinkish colored, my sweatshirt still green. I looked down at my shoes and pants, still brown and tan.

A wave of fear flowed through me as I looked up, returned my gaze to the other people in my surroundings. They’d noticed me, and how different I was, and several were coming toward me….

Untitled (Fiction Friday)

It was that quiet time of the morning where nothing much is stirring, save for a couple birds just waking up. I stood on the back porch, leaning against the railing. The autumn leaves filled the yard and forest with vivid bursts of colors, and a thick fog seemed to wrap everything in a crisp, damp embrace. I gazed across the lawn into the forest beyond, the smoke from my cigarette wafting up into my vision.

A subtle movement caught my eye. It was at the edge of the forest, just behind one of the first trees, half hidden, but defined against the darkness of the trees. A figure stood there, leaning against a tree, the fog swirling slightly as it settled around her. Dressed in white flowing fabric, she appeared to be looking directly at me.

The shock of seeing someone where there wasn’t supposed to be anyone sent electric waves through my body, and I began trembling. My feet felt rooted to the floorboards of the porch. I could neither flee back in the house nor move closer to confirm that what I was seeing was real.

She took a step forward away from the tree then, stirring the fog around her again. Her right arm lifted from her side, her hand, palm-side up, moved through the fog toward her face and then in a repeated beckoning motion. I could just make out a soft smile on her lips, the whole of her face taking on a soft, warm expression.

My jaw dropped as if to speak, though nothing came out. My feet uprooted themselves from the porch floor. I felt a strong urge to go to her, and at the same time, to flee. As I watched her waving me to her, pulling myself in two directions, the fog seemed to thicken in the woods, enveloping her entirely. A new wave of shock flowed through me as I noticed her fading into the fog, fading away until she herself became the fog.

A stroke of genius…

While enjoying my first cigarette of the morning today, looking out on my back yard with its frost-covered multi-colored ground cover of leaves, I had an idea. Fiction Fridays. I’ve always enjoyed flash fiction, both writing and reading it, and not only is it a great format to stir up the creative juices, it is also a perfect format for a blog!

Flash fiction is fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category. Some self-described markets for flash fiction impose caps as low as 300, while others consider stories as long as 1000 words to be flash fiction.

So, as a way to force myself back into the world of fiction, every Friday I will post a short (or not-so-short, if I so choose) piece of fiction. This may be in addition to my normal journaling philosophical blathering, or it may stand alone. I will probably use writing prompts at least to start out, and many of my beginning efforts will probably suck. But, as my favorite inspiring writer (Mur Lafferty) says, “It’s okay to suck.” As I continue this journey, I will suck less and less, and more importantly I’ll be writing more and more.

Now that I’ve figured out the link feature (not that it’s that difficult, but yay! I have links in my posts now!) I’m going to work on figuring out categories and tags. Categories won’t be difficult – but tags…holy crap I really don’t know how to tag my posts! How do you choose what words to tag with? How do you know when to stop? Why do *I* have to do the work to tag my posts???