Flash Fiction Friday! Volume 1

Yay!  It’s Flash Fiction Friday! I’m kidless for a few hours [woohoo!] so Jan and I got together on Skype, bemoaned the lack of good writing prompts [open a magazine to a page and write about the first picture you see.  Um, no], then trawled around the ‘net some more and I finally made one up to honor the heroes of 9/11.

Tim would never forget where he was when he heard planes had crashed into the Twin Towers.

We took the sentence, set the timer for seven minutes [oops!  Supposed to be five!], and away we went. This would need a lot of work to get into some sort of publishable shape but that’s okay :).  You can find Jan’s on her blog.  What about you?  Can you come up with a story in five minutes?  Or, to quote Alan Jackson, ‘where were you when the world stopped turning that September day’?

Tim would never forget where he was when he heard planes had crashed into the Twin Towers.  He was driving down the highway, his head bobbing to the beat of the song blaring from his stereo.  He’d had his favorite CD in or he would have known much earlier, but his mood was more suited for Metallica than it was for talk radio and the FM stereo in his car didn’t work.

He’d been in a funk.  Jessica had left him.  She’d moved in with some other guy.  They’d been living together for two years when suddenly, out of the blue, she announced that she’d met someone else.  She’d been sleeping with him for months already and then she just left.  That was Sept 8.  Tuesday, the rest of the world fell apart just as his had.

He’d dreamed of spending the rest of his life with Jessica.  He was going to propose to her on their anniversary on September 15.  He wondered if he could get his money back on the ring.  What did guys say when they tried to return engagement rings?  ‘Sorry went with something bigger from somewhere else?’

He’d planned on burning all of his pictures and gifts – everything Jessica had left from their time together, but she’d called.  Early that fateful Tuesday morning.  He’d planned on heading into Manhattan early for work, but the ringing phone had woken him at 630. Not only had she left him, but she was pregnant.  With his baby.  How she knew for sure the baby was his since she’d been sleeping with both of them at the same time… well, he wasn’t exactly sure how she knew, but she was insistent.  So he’d called and left a voice mail for his boss at the Store of Knowledge in the concourse at the base of the towers and he’d gone for a drive.

It wasn’t until nearly ten when his phone rang.  Again.  His brother had called him about fifteen times.  He’d ignored every one.  But Joe wouldn’t call that much that often if it wasn’t something uber important so he finally answered.

And that was when he found out the entire world had changed.  Not just his world.  The whole world.