Welcome back to the home of #ThursThreads for Week 650. 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 650:
Slightly past-it Canuck and word chucker, Bill Engleson.
And now your #ThursThreads Challenge, tying tales together
The Prompt:
“All of us travelers in time and space.”
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!
All of us travelers in time and space know there is one rule you don’t break, don’t shift the timeline and change your present. The ability is passed on to only one descendant who has the moral fortitude to follow the rules and not break, or stay in the timeline or shift to another reality, permanently. My family is however a secret rule breaker as my grandfather has proven bringing my grandmother to this timeline when her counterpart her passed away young. Grandma Louisa had truly loved his counterpart, finding grandfather alike she decided to come back with him to our world, going on to have four children( one of who had me their granddaughter, the heir traveler.) Here, I am, on my first solo trip and with the same dilemma, my one true love who was dead in my universe is alive here. Should I break the rule and approach him? Should I start a romance that may go nowhere? If I do succeed in making this man fall in love with me, do I break the rule and bring him back to my timeline? I knew the rules were in place for a reason, but I made the decision and Colin came back with me as my husband. At first, I thought everything was okay. but I was wrong; war has broken out and the unfit president who never won before is in charge. I broke the rules now we all pay for I can’t give Colin up.
250 words @sweetsheil.bsky.social not on X (Twitter) anymore.
Ryshtar held still and I was able to drag my tongue across his hand very slowly.
He tasted of salted ocean fish, and warm spice bark, and I watched his shoulders relax as the anesthetic properties kicked in. I was surprised I didn’t mind the taste of his ichor—it always made me gag when I licked my own wounds—and I lifted my head away to examine the wound.
It had stopped leaking and the edges were clean yellow where they started to heal.
“There, that should do it. How do you feel?”
He raised his gaze from his palm. “That was amazing. I hardly feel any pain now. Can all your people do that?”
I shrugged and reached for a water skin to clean my palate. “I think so, though my family was known for having the talent.” I sighed. “I’m the last one of my people so I suppose it’s just me now. My fem-parent was the real healer, continent renowned. But they’re gone.”
Rysh reached out with his good hand and placed it one of mine. “We’re, all of us, travelers in time and space at the whim of the Life Mother. We go where we’re needed because She deems it so. That’s why I’m here. She told me I needed to come here, to find you, and that would fulfill my purpose.”
I dripped my chin and gestured with one hand. “Now that you’ve found me, what’s your purpose?”
“I have no chenting clue.”
249 ineligible #SciFi #WIP words
@siobhanmuir.bsky.social
“A Fae prince walks into a coffee shop…”
Ariel didn’t look up. “I’m not a prince.”
The dragon enforcer sat anyway, ignoring the obvious attempt to dismiss his presence. “True. You’re just the King’s Seducer.” He deliberately made the words into a title.”
“Go away, Drakon.” Two could play that game.
Nikos sipped the coffee that magically appeared at his elbow before speaking. “So what brings you to this fair city?”
“This isn’t your territory, Nikos.”
“Nor is it Fae. I’ve business. Why are you here?”
“None of your concern.”
“It is when a certain FBI agent we both know and wish to seduce is worried about you.”
Ariel finally looked up and stared at the man sitting across from him. One would never know Nikos wasn’t human unless you looked closely at his eyes. He inhaled and added the stench of smoky magic to the list of characteristics. “So now you do Sade’s bidding?”
“I do when walking down the sidewalk, looked through the window and see you. Two birds, one cup of coffee and all that. Don’t do something stupid, Ariel.”
“Who would care?”
“All of us travelers in time and space.”
The words hung between them, shimmering with magic. Time and space. Ariel almost smiled as the idea formed. He could travel between. He could return to the beginning and start over.
He almost thanked Nikos—a bad move with dragons because it put one in their debt. “Here there be dragons,” he said instead, then disappeared.
****
Silver James (https://silverjames.com)
Oops. 250 Penumbra Paper WIP words
“Novel”
A young man picked up a book, a title we’ve all heard. He sat in the park and read the book cover to cover. Suddenly the world made sense. The systems, the patterns, the hidden machinery. He felt a great urgency, a need to explain, to correct, to lift the veil. He told people what he knew. He watched their faces. They didn’t understand. Wouldn’t even try.
Years passed. He read the book again. The book had changed. Or maybe he had. Maybe the world had softened him, made him careful. He listened more, sought meaning in the words of both young and old. He surrounded himself with people who thought deeply, who spoke in slow, deliberate sentences. He wanted to be one of them.
More years passed. He found the book on a shelf, pages curled, dusty. He opened it. Every word unraveled him. There was no grand understanding, no certainty. The book was new again, the way the world was new when he was a child, strange and shifting.
He told his grandson what he had learned. “Knowing is temporary,” he explained. “Unknowing is constant. We are all of us travelers in time and space, grasping at light. Understand?”
The young man nodded and left the room thinking how the old man knew nothing of the modern world.
220 words
@krvanhorn (Bluesky & X)
Being the one who crosses over the souls of the departed is dull work. Every night is filled with departed souls who are waiting to be reunited with family. We make some small talk and they reunite with family.
Of course, there is the occasional unwilling soul; not everyone is ready to go after all. And that brings me to Dr. Abbigail Strong, chair of the English Department for a local university. When she sees me, she screams. I suppose the scythe does look a bit wicked.
“Who the hell are you?!” she yells, yanking a blanket over her naked figure. Her brown hair is a mess of knots.
“Carla, here to cross you over to the afterlife.”
“Afterlife? I’m only 50! I have to teach in the morning!”
“According to my list, you’re dead, so let’s go.”
Maybe I’m a little grouchy tonight.
I swing my scythe and disconnect her soul. She screams, convulsing, and I blink; that’s new.
“Are you all right?” I ask, as she begins to relax.
“We are all of us travelers in time and space,” she mutters, sitting on the side of the bed. I don’t catch the reference, but have never been good with classic literature. “But good lord did that hurt.”
Her wife jolts up in bed, and seems to register the change. While she starts CPR, we start for the door. The soul is disconnected, but I’ll be damned if the professor doesn’t revive, waking up with a gasp. Well. Shit.
@Aightball
250 words
All those time travel stories, I laugh at them. Fantasy that they are. Time, at the quantum level may flow in two directions, backward and forward. Because at the quantum level, it doesn’t matter.
But time in our space time? That’s linear. And it flows one way. Forward. All of us travelers in time and space know this. Time can’t go backwards. Dead people coming to live and living their lives in reverse. Animals un-decaying where they died in the wild, then standing up, and walking off.
Time is dependent on where you are. What you are.
A quark is the same either way. Coming or going. It’s a quark.
A duck is a duck. And only one way.
Sure, some fruit loops have tried to figure out time travel. How to go back in time, if only to watch it. Can’t be done. If you go fast enough, close to the speed of light, you can slow time down. Faster than light, you can slow time down even more.
But no matter how fast you go, time always flows one way. Forward. Go 1000 times the speed of light, and spend a year at that speed, and 1000 years flow by in normal time. Time travel. The only kind there really is.
Want to see the end of the universe? Can’t be done. You have to travel a trillion times the speed of light. Or faster.
Time travel stories. I laugh at them.
244 Words (Per Google Write)
@mysoulstears.bsky.social
“We do it again. And then another time because time is our plaything. We’ve raised ourselves above mortality. We’ve eternity to make our own.”
The image faded to black, and the lights came on again, revealing the banked grey seats of the auditorium. Of course, only two of them were occupied. It was another slow day in an endless run of Sundays, dust layered over the no-tear upholstery in a way that suggested millennia, rather than a lack of cleaning drones.
“So, what do you think,” Watkins asked. “Do you think they were naïve? Or maybe a little unfocused? It’s easy to foresee their mistakes in retrospect – we’ve the advantage of having history to guide us away from the pitfalls.”
“I don’t know. I think it was a combination of arrogance and a lack of imagination. They never saw it coming – they thought they had mastery over the universe.” Hewson got to his feet and began to shuffle back along the row, heading toward the aisle. A grey cloud followed him, broken plaster and particles of pumice raised by his movements, the cavernous room silent now that the video had finished. He raised a flipper and rubbed his snout, knowing a sneeze was coming.
“Come on,” said Watkins. “We’ve seen enough.”
The screen flared again; the video having looped back to the beginning. The human reappeared, his skin smooth and without scales.
“We are all of us travellers in time and space,” he declared. “I have made a discovery.”
250 words – twothirdzrasta.blogspot.com
Tobias stood at the back of the room with his partner Jason While. The man in the centre was holding court, everyone straining to hear and be part of the conversation.
“And then she said, I hate snakes!”
The whole room erupted in laughter. Other agents patted Belvedere on the back as a few fluttered their eyelashes at him. Beside him, While sighed deeply.
“Not enamoured by the poster boy, While?” Tobias kept his voice low. While was slumped against the wall, hands in his pockets as he gave Tobias a withering look.
Belvedere made his way out of the throng and headed straight for them. “Hello chaps! I hear the Director is sending us on a joint mission.”
“I’m sorry?” While pushed himself off the wall.
“The Troy job. You know just to make sure everything goes smoothly.” He grinned like a Cheshire cat.
“Our briefing didn’t mention you coming.” Tobias tried to move slightly to impede While’s reach in case he decided to swing for the department’s golden boy.
“You know how the Director is,” he waved a hand. “Thought you two could do with a spot of backup. All of us travellers in time and space need to watch each other’s back, what?” He adjusted his velvet jacket and sauntered out of the room.
“It’s his back that needs watching,” While glowered after him. “I don’t trust him.”
Tobias sighed as he stared after the other man. “For once While, I actually agree with you.”
247 words @lexikonical.bsky.social
Mifuyu Shizuka always felt like something was watching her. Sometimes she was right. Sometimes not. Most often, she never found out one way or the other. This time, the steady echo of footsteps not her own at least suggested she wasn’t alone.
She hated how often she came to in abandoned hospitals. Not that she wanted to be around people after one of her episodes. The abandoned hospitals just felt unnecessarily creepy. The other footsteps stopped. Mifuyu glanced over her left shoulder.
“Miss Shizuka.”
The calm voice came from a hallway on Mifuyu’s blind side. She nearly jumped out of her skin.
“You! You’re one of them!”
Mifuyu locked her good eye wildly on the tall, shadowy figure.
“I prefer to think of myself as one of you.”
The unperturbed figure touched a finger to the brim of their hat that shadowed what of their face wasn’t covered by their upturned collar. Something was wrong. Mifuyu’s usual rage crumbled to cold terror.
“What do you want!? Why are we here!?”
“I followed you to introduce myself. All of us travelers in time and space should endeavor to be cordial with one another.”
Mifuyu cautiously backed the way she had come.
“The hell does that mean?!”
The figure followed her dispassionately.
“It means that I want to be sure you don’t get in my way in the weeks to come.”
229 Fantasy Fighter words
@davidaludwig.bsky.social
#ThursThreads is now CLOSED. Thanks to everyone who wrote this week and I hope to catch you next week.