Welcome back to the home of #ThursThreads for Week 639. Year 12! What a fantastic testament to the writing community. Y’all rock!
Today is Thursday and that means it’s time to start flashing on #ThursThreads, the challenge that ties tales together. Want to keep up each week? Check out the #ThursThreads #flashfiction group on Facebook and the Group on MeWe.
Need the rules? Read on.
Here’s how it works:
- The prompt is a line from the previous week’s winning tale.
- The prompt can appear ANYWHERE in your story and is included in your word count.
- The prompt must be used as is. It can be split, but no intervening words can be inserted or tenses changed.
Rules to the Game:
- This is a Flash Fiction challenge, which means your story must be a minimum of 100 words, maximum of 250.
- The story must be new writing, not a snippet from something published elsewhere with the prompt added.
- Incorporate the prompt anywhere into your story (included in your word count).
- Post your story in the comments section of this post
- Include your word count in the post (or be excluded from judging)
- Include your social media handle or email in the post (so we easily notify you)
- The challenge is open 7 AM to 8 PM Mountain Time US.
- The winner will be announced on Friday, depending on how early the judge gets up.
How it benefits you:
- You get a nifty cool badge to display on your blog or site (because we’re all about promotion – you know you are!)
- You get instant recognition of your writing prowess on this blog!
- Your writing colleagues shall announce and proclaim your greatness on Facebook, Bluesky, MeWe, and Mastodon, etc.
Our Judge for Week 639:
Computer IT master, flashfiction writer, and human, Mark Ethridge.
And now your #ThursThreads Challenge, tying tales together.
The Prompt:
“No one has heat.”
All stories written herein are the property (both intellectual and physical) of the authors. Comments do not represent the views of the host and the host reserves the right to remove any content. Now, away with you, Flash Fiction Fanatics, and show us your #ThursThreads. Good luck!
***Looking Back***
Looking back, you see yourself, the slouched kid in the old parka, arms stuffed deep into borrowed sleeves. You smell like linoleum and cigarettes that have been smoked behind closed doors.
Your friends smell the same. And, looking back, you notice that none of them have two parents. No one has clean clothes. No one has heat.
And it’s snowy, cold. The trees are bent like old men. The sky is dull and heavy, like it might fall.
You don’t have boots, just your brother’s old shoes, and when you arrive at home, you pull them off and leave them on the front stoop, hoping they’ll be somewhat dry when it’s time to go to school tomorrow.
Inside, old blankets sag over the windows. “Hi, Ma,” you say. She’s in the same place you left her in the morning, a cigarette burning between her fingers.
You survey the coffee table: half a pack of saltines, aspirin.
On TV, Phil Donahue says, “But you’re not antisocial; you’re with a community.”
Your brother’s not home yet. That’s good. Your sister might be.
You go to the fridge and open the door, and close it, and you go back to the living room and eat a couple of the saltines.
Looking back, you want to tell yourself to sit down and say something.
But, looking back, you watch eight-year-old you go back out and put the wet shoes back on and go play in the dirty snow with your friends.
247 words
@clay_sweatpants
My secretary opens the office door, her breath fogging. She’s wrapped in her black puffer coat, mittens, and hat, boots thumping the stone floor.
“Mike is here with the furnace company.”
Shedding four quilts, I stand, extending my mitten covered hand. It’s a trick bringing alive humans onto the Hell Plane, because they can’t know where they are. The chaos that brings is not something I care to deal with again. Thankfully, I can create the illusion of this being a medical clinic and he will be none the wiser.
“Dr. Stan Marsden, nice to meet you. No one has heat and so we’re all glad you’re here.”
He smiles in the way that repairmen do and he follows me down the hall. Our furnace is technically on the tenth level of Hell, since there’s a lot of square footage to keep warm. As far as Mike knows, it’s in the utility closet near the patient exam rooms. His tool bag settles onto the thin green carpet and the door squeaks open, our massive boiler reduced to a standard size commercial furnace; presenting Mike with a 2,000 year old boiler might be a bit much for the poor guy.
“Nice to meet you as well. Let’s see if we can get this up and running again.”
I leave him to it, as he takes the front cover off and frowns. I hope it’s not too bad; these old boilers are hard to replace these days, even with modern upgrades.
@Aightball
250 words
My Goodness…a second necessary edit was required. I’m have a host of Senior Christmas Moments…
In The Wayfaring Woods
We had heard rumours that somewhere behind the Shelter Mountains a small cadre of our ancestors had taken root decades earlier.
“An offshoot of the Philbert Clan,” my Grandfather had said. “Freethinkers, they were,” he lamented. ”Unable, unwilling to conform, to stay with the colony. We begged them but they were adamant, positing, yes they used that term, positing as if it was gospel, that personal freedom was the highest calling. They simply would not listen.”
Grandfather Gains was a wearying old man, always reminiscing about the most obscure of things. “We had order then” he would say. “We chose others to represent us.”
Of course we children laughed at the foolishness of that. We knew what it meant to have others representing us. The loudest voices always won.
But we were intrigued. You know how children are. They are curious and there we were, lost in the cold, the absence of fuel, the oil and coal no longer available, our elders freezing to death as the climate shifted, the floods, the rising seas, the sun a distant and chilling apparition.
“No one has heat,” became the clarion call. “Did they not see this coming?” a few asked. The Authorities, the notorious Green Shirts, would haul them away never to be seen again.
A few of us finally decided to slip away, to seek out the dissidents from decades before, to venture into the Wayfaring Woods beyond the Shelter Mountains.
We had nothing to lose.
249 words
@billmelaterplea
“Heard more noise from my 1st Grade gym class,” Alice Gibbs said, peeking through the curtain before her grandson Alan’s debut match for Capital City Wrestling.
“Yeah. No one has heat,” Alan said, nerves twisting toward dry heaves.
“I don’t know, Al. Those last boys were dripping buckets of sweat. Little blood, too,” his grandfather Jack said.
“No, Gramps, heat’s any emotion a wrestler can stir up from the audience. Louder the better. These marks were dead while the O’Brien brothers tore it up.”
“They were brothers?” Jack asked. “Practically killed each other.”
“Just doing their jobs, dear,” Alice said quietly.
“Which I’m gonna have to do soon. This sucks…”
“Then liven ‘em up, honey,” Alice said. “Who’s your opponent?”
“Jaime Vasquez, Lucha Kid.”
“Who’s heeling and who’s going over?”
Soon, from the front row, Alice jeered Jaime’s beatdown of Alan. As if infected with her fever, the crowd fired up.
Flipping over the ropes, Jaime confronted an irate Alice. She nodded, and he head-butted her to the floor. Boos rained down.
Promoter Jim Nowicki helped Jack get Alice to her feet and to the locker room before the two wrestlers came through the curtain.
“Thank you, Jaime,” she said.
“Muchísimas gracias, yourself, wela.”
“Want a job, Alice?” Nowicki asked.
“Just do good by my grandson. Business is in his blood. Mine still, too, it seems,” said the daughter of Baron von Pfalz, the Continental Assassin, who taught her to bump, sell and draw heat since she was seven.
250 Words
@JAHesch
Moist
Harris weighed the rocks against one another, one in each palm. The one in his right hand was flat with vertical sides, chips taken out of its edges; the other was round and smooth with a fine white dust that it shed when he handled it. Neither of them was what they’d hoped for. What they’d prayed they’d might find.
“So, what do you think? Will they burn?”
Harris shook his head. “We might get a little warmth from them if we baked them for a while. But nothing that would last. And then there’s the matter of how we’d do that. We’d need a spark and dry kindling and a draft of cool air. Something to generate a flame. But how to do that? That’s the trick we’re all trying to work out.”
The raft drifted along the river, turning when the currents took a hold. There was nothing above the waterline that was dry. Even with a shack of broken wood tied together, there was no place on it that was dry, the stars shining through the gaps at night, bringing in the cold and the rain.
Everything was wet and decayed. Cities had sunk into the mud and disappeared, their people deserting them, millions looking for a shelter and somewhere to sleep.
Harris dropped the stones back over the edge. They sank immediately.
“If only we could get everything dry again,” he said, studying the clouds. “But no one has heat or anywhere that’s permanent.”
249 words (including title) – twothirdsrasta.blogspot.com
“This i-is the p-place!”
Suzy extended a shivering claw toward a snow-covered public house. Morrigan’s breath billowed in thick clouds. Winterwood had never been colder than this village, and never had such an underlying sense of threat.
The raven-haired swordswoman let herself in the front door with her mouseling companion close on her heels. It wasn’t any warmer inside. The proprietor raised his head enough to reveal his face within the pile of blankets near the door.
“Find a place, if you wish, traveler. Unfortunately, all we can offer is cover from the wind and snow.”
“What a-about your famous ramen?” Suzy squeaked from behind Morrigan’s battle-skirt.
The blanketed elf’s face was hollow and hopeless.
“No one has heat. Even magical fire no longer ignites here.”
“This swordswoman can beat the oni that cursed your village, but she needs food!”
Morrigan felt the mana in the earth and air, all turned in on itself. She shook her head.
“An oni didn’t do this.”
All within earshot looked up at Morrigan’s pronouncement. This was spirit magic. But only a truly mad spirit would use their magic in this way. The kind of self-destructive madness associated with touching The Dark.
“But I shall break the curse anyway.”
Morrigan nodded to the proprietor and exited the public house. A Dark-touched spirit outside of The Green seemed impossible. Morrigan was uniquely aware that she was the only one to ever escape the Unseelie Court after touching The Dark.
244 words
@davidaludwig.bsky.social
Andrew didn’t remember making it back to the Paris Casino or through the fancy doors, but he woke up enough on the elevator up to the seventh floor where his room sat. Ryan seemed content to stand beside him quietly, but he made sure to guide Andrew into the hallway when the doors opened.
“Which room?” Ryan pointed at the signs with the numbers.
“To the left.” Andrew headed that way, digging in his jacket pocket for his card key. “Room 7125.”
They made it to the door without seeing anyone else from the wedding and Andrew’s nervousness rose. Should he ask Ryan to come in for a nightcap? Should he just kiss the man goodnight? He had an early flight the next morning and couldn’t miss it, but he didn’t want to let Ryan go yet.
“So, um, do you want to come in?” Andrew looked up at Ryan through his lashes, not sure which way he hoped the other man would answer.
“Are you sure? You’re not tired of me yet?”
Andrew shook his head. “Not even remotely. It would give you a place to rest before going out in the heat again.”
Ryan scoffed as Andrew opened the door. “It’s not hot out tonight.”
“Are you kidding? It’s almost seventy degrees and it’s only April!”
“Oh, honey, that’s what we consider cool. No one has heat like Las Vegas, not even Phoenix and Tucson. They’re far too wet.” Ryan gave him a saucy wink. “This is comfortable.”
250 ineligible #TripleStarRanch words
@Siobhanmuir.bsky.social
The pounding on the door echoed the throbbing in her head. Face emerging from under the covers, she sighed. A cloud formed from her breath. She squirmed, feet wrapped in thick woolen socks hit the floor and the goose-down comforter hugged her as she struggled to stand.
“All right, all right!” she yelled. “I’m coming. Jiminy, keep your freakin’ shirt on.”
She shuffled to the door but left the security chain on as she opened it and peeped out.
The man framed by the crack was not wearing a shirt, thereby unable to keep it on. He spoke before she could.
“No one has heat.”
“The boiler is broken. The manager sent a memo.”
He dipped his head—a long way—to stare into the one eye showing through the gap.
“No. One. Has. Heat,” he reiterated, emphasizing each word.
She pointed to the knit cap on her head while still clutching the comforter around her. “I’m aware of that. I told you. The boiler broke. As in it is not working. Since it doesn’t, it won’t produce heat.”
“People are cold.”
She gave him big eyes. “D’uh.”
“Fix it.”
She blinked. Then closed her mouth, realizing it had gaped open. “Do I look like someone who fixes boilers? Sheesh.” Her brain caught up to the fact he wore only only jeans.
“Tools,” he demanded. “I’ll do it myself.”
“B-basement,” she stammered. He stalked away. “Are you an ice giant?” she murmured.
He called over his shoulder, “No. Santa’s elf.”
****
250 totally random Merry Christmas words
Silver James @ silverjames.com
“I’ll be sad when you leave. No one else is very fun to talk to. No one has heat.”
Deni looked up from where she was looking over the new blades the blacksmith laid out on his table to sell, to the old woman who sat there, fingers moving automatically with the needles, knitting something.
Anytime she saw the woman, she was always knitting. And the clothing was nice, which is saying something when they see that the woman is mostly blind. “How do I have heat, so to speak?”
“You tell me how it is and aren’t afraid to be mean to an old woman. Everyone wants to be so respectful and treat me like I’m some village seer. As if.”
“Gram, they do that because fo your age.” The blacksmith straightened up, giving deni a shrug as he finished laying everything out.
“Bullshit, they are afraid that I will get my feelings hurt or something and then throw something. Or they feel sorry for me, nevermind that I did stupid things and have done stupid things for some time. I’m not wise. I’ve just learned how not to make the same mistake twice. This one here though, respectful but still tells me how it is. Everyone else pussyfoots around with their words. No heat.”
Deni’s lips twitched. “So you’ll yell if I suddenly treated you with kid gloves and said everything you said are pure gold?”
“I’m not afraid to stab you with my needles.”
247 WIP words
@solimond
The old-fashioned mercury thermostat drops a few more degrees. Nina taps the glass bulb in hopes that it’s just stuck and the temperature really isn’t thirty-five degrees in her flat. She doesn’t remember ever being this cold. Her fingers are starting to go numb and she vigorously rubs them together to warm them up.
The power went out a few hours ago and no one has heat. Everyone is scrounging to find stuff to burn, using the puny lights from their personal devices to navigate in the dark. In this squalid part of the city, burnable materials or anything organic, aside from the residents, are hard to find. Only the rich that live above them in the upper city have things like wood that could be burned to keep them warm. Not that they’d ever need it. The rich never go without anything that they desire.
Nina has only seen something made of wood once, when she was a little girl. A teenaged kid from the upper city tried slumming it for a day and was wandering around her block. He stuck out like a sore thumb. What she noticed were the wood buttons on his jacket. Wood never would have been wasted on something as frivolous as buttons in the slums.
She wished she had those wooden buttons now. Perhaps if she had, she could start a small fire and not freeze to death. Nina grabs another synthetic blanket and tries to not think about the bone-chilling cold.
249 words
@MLGammella
“No one has Heat, sir,” the rune crafter informed Maya.
Maya frowned. He glanced at the other rune casters, a few of whom shook their heads. What was going on? “Go to the barracks and fetch some new ones.”
The rune caster nodded and turned to leave.
“Wait. I’m coming with you.” Looking at the other rune casters, “The rest of you work the other rune cards in,” he ordered.
While his men worked, laying out the trap, Maya straddled his horse and left the borderlands with his subordinate. Etching runes was a hard and time consuming task. A single wrong stroke could render the entire process a colossal waste of time. So they relied on preprinted rune cards to mould the rune’s shape to the terrain, making sure that no errors occurred.
Maya soon reached the barracks. He heard laughter; One, booming, and several, tittering. Suppressing both the anger and the desire to cast a Lightening Dome, he stormed inside. There was a large pool in the training ground. An elderly man with multiple scars on his chest was lounging in the water flanked by some women.
“You!” Maya raged.
“Hey, welcome back, son,” the man jovially greeted Maya.
“What did you do with the rune cards?”
The man gave Maya a cheeky, lopsided grin. “Those? I used them to make this heated pool. Neat, right? Come on in. Vani here has a daughter of marriageable age.” The woman he pointed at nodded her head enthusiastically.
247 words.
@infiblue.bsky.social
Sandra L Penrod 250 words
sandrapenrod52@gmail.com
When my boat wrecked on the cold rocky shore of island I felt so utterly scared that I collapsed to the ground. Within minutes my knees and palms were chilled through my trousers and mittens. I knew if I cried my tears would freeze. I swiped an arm across my face and stumbled to my feet. Looking across the frozen broken landscape, I despaired, I am alone. In the Arctic.
In this stark land of snow and ice, crevasses and jagged peaks, better men, renowned explorers and sea Captains met their deaths. Starved and frozen.
Heart pounding, I tried to think. I had a good idea of where I’d wreaked despite the massive wave that had washed me down coast. Slipping off my leather mitten I felt inside the breast pocket of my coat and nearly cried; the folded paper still safely there. With trembling fingers I held the map towards a weak sun to study it. Then I started walking.
Cold and dazed I persevered, the brave men of antique times haunting me, pressing me onward. Survivors, some. For Fame and Glory.
Beyond time I walked and tripped and thirsted, and ice-blind fell at last into a mirage.
Dark haired people, a rustic sledge. The smell of wet fur. Huffing dog breathes. A frigid whisper, “Out here, no one has heat.”
But that wasn’t quite right. Because I felt it when a sumptuous fur was placed upon me. Where I lay dreaming of crossing the Arctic.
#ThursThreads is now CLOSED. Thanks to everyone who wrote this week and I hope to see you next week.