One-Hour Life - Flash Fiction - Feb 2025
- Kait
- Feb 7
- 3 min read
Flash Fiction First Friday is an effort to publish something small on the First Friday of every month. The goal is simply to write more and to share more, and not get completely bogged down in huge projects. These pieces can spawn from writing exercises, prompts, or just freewriting. The point is that they're low-commitment and just for fun.
I'd love to see your flash fictions pieces if you participate, too! Either use the tag #flashfictionfirstfriday or comment below with a link to your blog.
One-Hour Life
Prompt from Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway. Chapter 1: Whatever Works.
Pick one of the phrases and, beginning with it, use it to freedraft a page:
After supper he would always...
In my favorite photo...
But why did she have to...?
I took one look and...
That little space made me feel...
Then the door opened and...
After supper, he would always take a walk, but no one ever knew to where. He’d disappear for an hour, every single night, regardless of weather. He always went alone.
When we offered to accompany him, he’d just shake his head and slip out the door before we could push the subject.
We’d always joke that he was out for exercise, but we knew that wasn’t the reason. He didn’t care about his health any more than he cared about the history of Soviet-era farming techniques. Which is to say, not at all. So we made up stories about secrets and drama, worthy of the silver screen.
Occasionally he would come back with some memento or another from his solitary journey. A polished stone, a four-leafed clover, a newspaper clipping. These cryptic relics fed our stories.
We generated friends, lovers, and rivalries based on those contextless artifacts. The river rock was a worry stone, gifted to him by a strange woman with flowers woven into her hair. The clover was a good luck symbol he’d won in an arm-wrestling competition down at the docks (our town didn’t even have docks). And the newspaper article commemorated a huge company merger, so we surmised that he was a high-browed CEO during his hour-long secret life.
The stories became more extravagant and far-flung as time went on. We’d sort of made a competition out of making the most outlandish explanation for what he was doing tonight. Eventually, he was not only a rich CEO with a strong arm and hippy ex-lover, but he was also a famous pilot, a world-class chess champion, and a successful sculptor to boot.
One day, our little sister snuck out after him after she was supposed to go to bed. The wild stories we’d been making up about him after dinner had gone to her head. She wasn’t old enough to know we were joking. We should have known better.
We searched everywhere for her. All through the house, the back yard where she liked to play, and all her favorite hiding spots. When all her hiding spots were ruled out, we realized what must have happened. We were getting desperate, ready to call the police, when she came waltzing right back in the front door.
We were all over her with questions about what she’d done, where she’d been, and was she okay?
She crossed her little arms and glared at each of us in turn. “He’s not any of that stuff!” she shouted and stamped her foot. “He just walks down to the park! He just sat on a stupid bench and fed ducks!”
We all stared at her. She’d followed him all the way to the park? It was over a mile away, and she’d been alone. It was getting dark, and was well past the middle of autumn.
“He and Maria used to go there together,” our oldest sister said, breaking the silence.
The door opened and he strode back inside, hanging his hat up on the hook. Just like he always did. We were standing in the living room in a huddle, all of us unable to meet his eyes.
“Aren’t you all supposed to be in bed?”
We hurried to finish the nightly chores and tuck the little one back in.
The next night, after dinner, we tried to invent a new career for him to attend to while he was gone, but no one’s heart was in it. The mystery had been exposed and the truth hung over our fanciful fictions.
Copyright KR Holton, 2025
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