Welcome back to the home of #ThursThreads for Week 682. Year Lucky 13! The last year of the cycle, the Moon Year. And tomorrow is HALLOWEEN! To those who keep coming back, I’m delighted to see you again!
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 682:
Scottish Word Slinger, Dauntless romance author, and #ThursThreads host, Siobhan Muir.
Discord | Bluesky | Patreon | Eden Books | YouTube |
And now your #ThursThreads Challenge, tying tales together.
The Prompt:
“You’re not lonely?”
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 in the Moon Year. Good luck!
The Wanderer
It was a new town. One in a long string of cities, villages, human habitats I’d found myself in. I had no particular reason to stop over. A transient urge, maybe. Not a new feeling. Certainly, I was tired of bus travel, tired of being upright, listening to the moans and snores of others.
And my own.
I found a room at a small hotel in the cities core. A simple room. Bed. Bathroom. A window looking out on an alley. And a café across the street.
It was still morning so I wandered over to have some breakfast.
Busy place. Office workers, mostly.
I found a booth at the back, facing the street. Picked up the menu. Gave it a boo.
The waitress, Glory her tag said, was in her mid-forties. Maybe younger. She swooped in with coffee and a vague smile, forced the way people who hadn’t slept well look. Something I was more than familiar with.
“Know what you want? ” Glory asked. I imagined it was a question she had been asking most of her life.
I flipped back with “a friend.”
That almost got a laugh.
“You and the whole world,” she said without skipping a beat.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just feeling…”
“Lonely? You’re not lonely, mister. You’re in the heart of a big city. Three hundred thousand at last count.”
“Good to know,” I said. “Ham and eggs. Spuds too.”
“Back in a jiff.”
It was a good meal.
Filled me up.
250 Words
@billmelaterplea
@sterlings-son-2.bsky.social
“You’re not lonely?”
Aisling considered Carla’s question. She knew the definition of the word: sad because one has no friends or company. But wouldn’t one need to have had friends to know what their absence meant? She didn’t want to think about this and was relieved when the Bees finished their dart game.
Brad and Bruce dropped into their chairs, laughing as they grabbed their fresh ales. Aisling smiled at them. “Did you win?”
The men exchanged a look then burst into guffaws. Worried, she leaned away from them. Bruce, recognizing her discomfort, reached over to gently touch her arm. “Didn’t mean to be rude. You don’t really know us. Brad could be a professional dart player.”
“Except I like eating regularly and paying bills on time,” Brad said. “I’m a CPA. Bruce is an insurance agent.”
They both looked at her expectantly. The light bulb went off. “Oh! I’m…” She fidgeted with her glass. “Well…I’m a librarian.”
Brad grinned. “Like that TV series?”
She leaned away again, this time out of confusion rather than self-defense.
He explained. “It’s about this secret library that contains all sorts of magical items too dangerous to be out in public. The library recruits special humans to take care of things.”
She sat up straighter. “Oh! That sounds interesting, actually.” She felt her cheeks heat as she admitted, “I don’t watch much TV.” Her smile was tentative. “To me, all libraries are magical. I’m the special collections curator at the downtown library.”
****
249 Penumbra Papers #6 WIP words
Silver James
https://silverjames.com
“I kept my hair short, but feminine because bad guys really are misogynistic enough to think women aren’t threats.” She smirked. “Those bad guys often ended up being dead-wrong.”
Barrett swallowed hard. She was a combination of frightening and fucking sexy. They weren’t really into violence, but just her strength and confidence was a huge turn-on for them.
If she needs short hair to feel this good about herself, I will buzz her head personally.
“How’s your relationship with your family now? And do you want some more coffee?” They rose, hoping the causal way they got up helped relieve some of her emotional tension.
“More coffee no, and family, mm.” She tilted her hand back and forth. “My mom and I talk about once a month, just checking in. One of my brothers went into the Air Force because he wanted to fly jets since he saw Top Gun at his friend’s house. His eyesight kept him from doing that, so now he flies drones.” Lisa smirked again. “Talk about the ultimate video game. And he’s great at it. My other brother stayed home and went into carpentry, probably because of that deck-building summer. He works with my dad and I’m pretty sure he would take Dad’s side.” She shrugged. “I don’t talk to him much. But I’m still talking to my mom, and the Sirens gave me a new found family. That’s enough for me.”
“So, you’re not lonely at all?”
Lisa shook her head. “Nope.”
248 ineligible #SirensInc words
socel.net/@SiobhanMuir (Mastodon)
Mourn picked her way over the tomes and scrolls scattered across the library floor. After selecting a journal from the floor and a few scrolls still on a shelf, the girl made her way back to the reading desk with the good chair.
“Aren’t you going to clean this up?”
“It’s not my problem.”
Mourn didn’t bother looking up from her studies. She could hear the rest of the family a room or two over.
“You should get out, sometime.”
A different voice? Mourn raised her head to see how many were in the room with her. No. She returned to her reading.
“I still need to study.”
“All by yourself? You’re not lonely?”
She clenched her jaw and held back hot tears.
“I won’t be when I can bring you all back for real.”
135 words
@davidaludwig.bsky.social
Alyssa had always liked the dark. When she could see, she knew that she was alone. Her mom had left her when she was just a baby and her dad was either out working or at home, jacked into the computer, looking at the live he did not have.
In the dark, it was different. You’re not lonely in the dark. When her dad would finally go to bed, she’d make her room as dark as she could. When the last electronic device with a hateful LED was unplugged and the windows covered with snug-fitting boards, Alyssa would get on her bed and let her eyes adjust to the nothingness. And when she finally knew there was nothing there to see, that’s when they would come.
They shed no light, but she knew their outlines intimately. They spoke no words, but she knew what they wanted. Their motions were hypnotic, their soundless calls irresistible. In the dark, she was no longer alone, and she was their creature.
How many times they visited her, she did not know, but as their connection grew, she no longer needed total darkness to feel them. Merely closing her eyes at school, or at work, or in the chaos of a busy street brought them to her.
And her to them.
They healed her, there in the dark, healed her heart and her soul, broken from loneliness and broken hearts and abandonment.
Alyssa lived her life alone. Except in the darkness. There, she was whole.
250 words
@drmag00.bsky.social
Orphaned, barely six years old and scared of the gruff grandmother, didn’t say a lot to her, just please and thank you. Her house was big dark and musty smelling. My small dark creepy bedroom made me cry.
My grandmother tried in her own way to make me welcome in fact she asked me the first week, “You’re not lonely, because you’ll be off to school next week. Forget this imaginary companions. They are the work of dull minds you are of my blood you will not speak of her again”
Millie came when I was scared at night c she laid down beside comforting me until I fell asleep. This continued until I entered high school. Millicent said she couldn’t see me for a while, but one day I’d see her and just know that we were meant for each other. My grandmother died when I finished high school and left me millions.
In my first year in my job running the family business, I interviewed for new employee.
She was lovely, tall, and beautiful from the back, but when she turned around. I gasped in shock this was Millie, my imaginary companion?
“I’m real,” she said. “I astral projected when I was young and the gods allowed me to visit my future true love.
We were married forty years ago and have two daughters who like their mother are often astral projecting. I wonder if I’ll meet my soon to be son-in laws soon?
246 words @sweetsheil.bsky.social
– The Last Light Factory –
At the edge of nowhere, Brown and Enigma find a crooked building. If it had a sign, it might read The Last Light Factory, but the letters have wandered off.
Inside, tiny suns blink in hanging bulbs.
Enigma presses a shadowy hand to one. “They’re alive.”
Brown peers closer. He notices that within each bulb, darkness curls as well, glowing inside out.
“Why are you here?” Brown asks.
“To remember what brightness means,” a sun answers.
“And how to dream,” says a darkness.
Enigma looks around the factory, “You’re not lonely?”
“Maybe we are. Maybe that’s what made us bright enough for you to find us.”
“Maybe we’re trapped here,” says the darkness. “Maybe if you…” And every filament stirs. The air burns with argument, a thousand faint voices of light and shade.
Brown cracks one bulb. Then another. One by one, the captive gleams slip free, darting about like startled fireflies that have forgotten which direction is up.
The factory explodes with shimmering ecstasy and anguish.
Enigma pulls a glinting sun from the air and asks what’s next.
“You already know,” it answers. “The things that have always made us happy will continue to make us happy.”
Enigma echoes the sun, testing to see if the words can work more than once. “… continue to make us happy.”
Outside, dawn decides not to arrive.
Inside, some of the freed lights drift higher, some lower. Some nowhere at all.
Brown smiles, or doesn’t. Hard to tell in this kind of glow.
250 words
@krvanhorn (X & Bluesky)
#ThursThreads Week 682 is now CLOSED. Thanks to everyone who wrote this week and I hope to catch you next week.