Calling all bloggers! From here on out, once every month, I'll be posting a brand spankin' new piece of flash fiction...and I'll be asking you for the subject. Yup...you'll be sending me the prompts, and I'll be writing a piece of flash fiction (no longer than 500 words) from your suggestions!
The first piece, "Rocket In Real Life," was written using a prompt from Figment, a site scheduled to go live this fall, where I'll be cross-posting my flash fiction. (First line of the story had to be: What were you thinking?) I've included a video reading (turn 'er all the way up to hear me...or just watch Jake, my constant companion, who steals the show...) I've also pasted the entire story below.
...So go ahead, bloggers and YA fans, brainstorm some prompts! (The harder the better...I dare you to try to stump me!)
Email all your suggestions to writehollyschindler (at) yahoo (dot) com. The first piece of blogger-generated flash fiction will go live September 9 (one month from today). Can't wait to see what you have in store for me!
"Rocket In Real Life"
by Holly Schindler
“What were you thinking?” the girl cop asks, shaking her head beneath the throb of patrol car lights.
I let loose a sloppy laugh, because I screamed the same thing at Jason maybe ten minutes ago, as the party clanked around us. “What were you thinking?” while my fingers dug ditches into his bicep and she ducked behind his shoulder, her eyes too wide not to be guilty.
His friends laughed. In the law of guys, best friends got the pass. A girlfriend lived like a blind mole, in the dark, happy and unsuspecting until the metal trap shot into the earth and stabbed her.
“Rocket,” they all moaned, his friends and mine, the way you moan at a bad joke, because I’d had a full cup since the party’d started. As though drunk and overreacting were one and the same.
“Rocket,” they called, using that ridiculous name my parents had given—What were you thinking? I could have asked them sixteen years ago. Okay, so it was Raquelle on paper, but Rocket in real life, because I loved the sound of the engines at the nearby airport. Speed—I’d craved it always, sprinting straight into the arms of anything the rest of the world thought I wasn’t yet ready for…
Especially Jason.
I chased them, out of the house and then down the street when she got in his car, two blocks, around the corner, until the steering wheel slipped from my loose fingers and I hit them, laughing at the crunch of the metal like we were in bumper cars.
But they’d already been following us, the cops. Called to a loud party, and now, it’s the straight line I can’t walk and the nose I can’t find, even on my own face…And Jason’s mouth, which I’ve tasted too many times to forget—the same way I could never forget the taste of Dr. Pepper. And her, still in his passenger’s seat.
The guy cop sticks his hand inside Jason’s window. Cross-eyed with booze, I swear I see a fist bump. A pass.
And in the throbbing blue lights, I finally begin to curse my precious speed, because it’s only raced me here—handcuffed, watching Jason pull away. And wondering if anything will ever feel uncomplicated again.
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