FlashFiction Freewrite Friday - Not Too Late

Yes, just like last week, I know today is Monday not Friday, but I’ve been doing the Hive Blockchain version of NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) every day, and thought I’d share this FlashFiction Freewrite Friday – Not Too Late piece here on my WordPress blog so I could have something new to share for #MondayBlogs.

Here’s the link to my blockchain post – FlashFiction Freewrite Friday – Not Too Late on Hive

So without further ado…

The prompt I put on my Hive Blog Posting Month daily prompt calendar for today is, “Visit a market & share at least 5 photos for #MarketFriday.” I had grand plans of wrapping up this last Friday of #HiveBloPoMo with a followup to my Flashback Friday visit to McKinnon’s Market for the first Friday of the month but alas – it wasn’t meant to be. But never fear, @dswigle – I still plan to get it done as soon as possible!

Since I’ve been having fun ~~inflicting my writing on my followers~~ doing some new flash fiction pieces (like here and here) I thought I’d go ahead and do another one today instead.

And as I’ve been doing, I use one of my recent Deep Dream Generator photos for a visual prompt. This time I went with one of the Autumn tree pictures I did for my November 21st 2021 post – And Another Eight Extra Deeply Dreamy Sublime Sunday Shots.

And again this time, instead of using one of the awesome @freewritehouse daily prompts, I went with The Most Dangerous Writing App’s plot/prompt generator.

So my visual prompt is –

FlashFiction Freewrite Friday - Not Too Late — “Billowy leaves and fall clouds“

And the 5 Minute prompt from Squibler is – He had the urge to clear the ground, to look out and see nothing

And again, once again (lol!), I used The Most Dangerous Writing App. For those not familiar, it’s the one with the motto, “Don’t stop typing, or all progress will be lost.” Or in other words, if you stop typing, your words start to fade and after 5 seconds, they disappear completely and you can’t get ’em back. Talk about motivation to keep the words flowing!

Now, here’s my Flash Fiction story result.

Not Too Late

He poured more coffee into his, “Number One Dad” mug and stood silently for a few minutes looking out the window of the kitchen sink.

A motion caught his eye and he noticed more autumn leaves falling from the trees at the edge of the property. At times he had the urge to clear the ground, to look out and see nothing so he wouldn’t have to deal with the memories the autumn beauty invoked.

Memories of not so long ago, when the house wasn’t so empty and quiet, when the noise of a happy family used to drive him crazy and into the garage where he could have some space to think. If he’d only known then how much he’d miss the chaos, he hoped he would’ve chosen differently. But choices have consequences, and he was living with the results of his.

Now the brightly colored leaves brought him back to that fall in the not too distant past that still seemed a lifetime ago, when it all changed, and he wished with everything he had that he could somehow fix it.

Later that night, he had a strange dream. One filled with color and sound, much like the household noise of years ago. He was walking through a landscape that looked oddly like the backyard, but odd and dreamy looking, as if he (or the trees) had taken some hard core psychedelics.

“Trippy.” he said to himself as he slowly walked around, looking for the source of the noise.

After a time, he realized there was a voice under the cacophony. He tried to focus on it, and after a time, he could make out the phrase, “not too late.”

Maybe it was a sign, an esoteric message from the Universe. Maybe he could try again. What did he have to lose but his loneliness?

But first he’d have to wake up.

And a screencap of the MDWA result for good measure…

That definitely took a different turn than I expected when I first started writing. Unlike the past two weeks, I only thought about the story for about an hour or two (whilst I was doing some of my OCD curation duties for today…lol). I was considering having the character stumble into some alternate universe (and given the last line, still not out of the realm of possibility), but the result was more melancholy and less supernatural than I was going for.

Maybe I’ll revisit this again some time soon, and do more freewriting to see if I can figure out what were those Autumn choices he made and what exactly happened. Of course, I could just leave it up to the reader to decided… hmmm…

While I ponder, I’ll leave you with…

Hope everyone has a fabulous Friday and wonderful weekend!

EDITED TO ADD: Can’t believe I completely spaced mentioning this, but @epodcaster – you’re the main reason I picked that picture for my prompt, since you said such nice things about it under the original post. I think my brain is still addled from all the Thanksgiving turkey! 😂