What?? A Flash Fiction Friday post? At long last!
November and the first half of December were intense, and now things are pivoting toward chill again so I finally had time and the right headspace to do some flash fiction again. I used a prompt from a Discord bot called Writer-Bot (which I recommend, by the way) which went as follows: “You awake alone and get ready for work. You go to unlock the door and notice a strange pair of shoes by the doormat.”. I didn’t do quite that, but something sort of similar. It also doesn’t really have an ending, it’s just sort of a snapshot. Here we go:
Pink Converse
I grabbed my keys from the little table by the door and reached for the handle, ready to head out and start my day, a glint of pink caught my eye. I looked down and there they were – a pair of pink converse, standing neatly on the door mat. I blinked. “That’s funny,” I thought. “I had shoes just like that when I was eleven”. It took a little longer for it to click. The scuff marks on the outer side of the left shoe where I’d tripped and fallen the first time I wore them, the little cluster of hearts I’d drawn in sharpie on the right heel – those were my shoes. The shoes I hadn’t seen in over fifteen years, that had been so worn the fabric had almost ripped in places by the time I had outgrown them and reluctantly parted from them.
As my brain slowly ground to a halt trying to figure out how they’d survived not just being thrown away but the years that had passed since and somehow found their way back to me in a completely different part of town, I became vaguely aware of a sound coming from the living room. I turned and popped my head in through the doorway, and there I was, sitting on the sofa. For a second I just stared at myself, one me wondering if I was still sleeping and this was just a hyper-realistic dream and the other me staring back with an intense curiosity. Dirty blond hair cut into a chin-length bob, years before the side-shave or the piercings. Years before a lot of things, when I only had a vague sense that the imminent adolescence was going to suck and that childhood as I knew it was over.
I stood up from the sofa with slow, purposeful movements, tugging on the sleeve of my red sweatshirt. “Don’t freak out,” I said, with a tone of voice as if I was addressing a particularly skittish squirrel but not very well. “I know this is kind of weird, but I promise… I can explain everything.”
Hope you enjoyed it! I’m glad to be back to the flash fiction again, so look forward to more next week!