NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge Story 2

Update on my first Flash Fiction challenge over at NYC Midnight.  My first story captured me a whopping 3 points!  Considering there's about thirty people in my group, and the fact that almost half of them received zero points, I'm pretty pleased with my score.  Even better, we were able to share our stories on the forum over at NYC Midnight, so I was able not only to get constructive feedback on my own work, but also had the pleasure of reading and commenting on submissions from many other talented authors.  

Just days after we got our scores back for story one, it was time to write our second story.  

Once again, we were given a surprise genre, location and object and had 48 hours to write, edit and submit a 1000 word or less story that fits that genre, is predominately set in that given location and mentions the object.  They'll total the points from the two stories and the top five in each group will go on to the next round.  I'm fairly certain my score will not be high enough to move me forward, but I still consider this experience a super-win.  

This time my Genre/Location/Object was: 

Drama/Dog Park/Pistol

Here's my submission for Story 2:

Dogs Don't Make Plans

A man on the brink of achieving his lifelong goal is deterred by an unexpected encounter at a dog park. The experience leads him to the discovery of purpose. 

John had owned the pistol for seven years.  He didn't purchase the used, forty-five caliber Ruger for personal security or target practice.  He wasn't a die-hard gun rights activist or a member of the NRA.  He just wanted to ensure he had access to a gun when he finally worked up the courage to shoot himself.

Seven years, and today was the first time he loaded it. Monica's leaving had been the catalyst, but she wasn't to blame. He'd been wanting this long before their marriage dissolved, long before their relationship had begun. He'd wanted this as long as he could remember.

The weight of the gun in his waistband, solid against the small of his back, comforted him as he walked. Its presence gave him strength. The sure-footed energy of youth that had abandoned him years before returned under the influence of the pistol's unyielding pressure. Today would be the day.

The street ended at the park. John walked in, defying the rapidly setting sun.

“Park closes at dusk,” the security guard barked at him. John recognized the lack of intention in her undertone, familiar as his own face, and ignored her veiled warning.

His footsteps didn't slow until he reached the small dog park. The enclosure was deserted in the chilly twilight. He let himself in through the double gates, making sure the first closed before he opened the second, observing the protocol, though he had no dog.

John headed for his usual spot, the solitary bench beneath the bank of trees near the fence. He spent many afternoons there, eyeing the dog owners who gathered in the center. He detested the way they pretended to like each other while the dogs they were too embarrassed to admit they regretted obtaining ran off the energy that would otherwise be spent destroying carpets and clawing furniture.

John deplored the transience of it. The transience and the waste. People waddling back and forth to jobs that accomplished nothing, breeding children they spoiled, wasting what little the Earth had left, sucking up everything natural and turning it into plastic. All for what? Five minutes of distraction gift wrapped as pleasure, ultimately creating nothing but torn paper and flattened ribbon. More waste.

He sensed the beginning of a spiral. Therapy had taught him to recognize the onset of his obsessive thought patterns. They took control of his mind, rendering him bedridden and useless for hours, sometimes days. They left only once they'd ravaged him fully, the hole inside him that much bigger, his goal that much further away. Aware of the pattern, he stopped it from progressing.

John sat on the bench. It was time to reach for the gun, but he couldn't force his traitorous hands to move. Fear! Stupid fake emotion that always blocked him from getting what he wanted, what he deserved!

No matter. He had planned for this. He popped in his ear buds, reached in his pocket and hit play.

“All you desire is waiting for you,” the soothing voice of David Waters, self-help guru and award-winning life coach reminded John, “just beyond the veil that fear is holding before your eyes. You have the power to take control of your life. That black mass of terror is just a paper screen. Reach out and rip it down. Tear it away! Do it. Do it now!”

The recorded words freed John's hands. He pulled out the gun and took off the safety. His heart sped up in his chest. A tingle went through him, a long-forgotten spark of life. This was it. It was finally going to happen.

“In this thirty seconds of silence, imagine achieving your goal,” David Waters' voice droned on. “Open all your senses, feel the texture of the objects you touch, listen to the sounds they make, visualize every detail.”

John closed his eyes, felt the weight of the gun in his hands, ran his thumb over the grooves of the grip panel.

A whimper interrupted the silence.

Squeezing his eyes shut tighter against the sound, John lifted the gun.

The noise continued, louder and incessant.

“Dammit!” John dropped the gun and jumped to his feet, jerking the buds out of his ears as he stood. The whimper stopped, replaced by a futile thrashing sound.

John walked toward the noise and gasped.

Wedged between a slender birch and the chain link fence was a wriggling mass of fur, shivers and mud. The little mutt, whose haphazard, lop-eared dimensions could define it as nothing else, was trapped. Its fluffy tail and one stubby back leg were entangled in a thorny vine.

John looked around the park. Still empty. No anxiously searching owner, no tear-streaked kid looking for his pet. Just the two of them, a man desperate to die and a puppy desperate to live.

“Aw, what the hell,” John stooped down and untangled the vine. Delighted to be free, the little dog bounded away from the fence in tiny, joyous circles.

John was no match for such celebratory antics. He walked to the entrance gate, half-smiling.

“Come on,” he called, “you'll be better off out there.”

The dog ran halfway toward John and stopped short.

“Come on.”

The stubborn thing wouldn't budge.

With a sigh, John walked back. As he reached for the dog, the setting sun slashed free of the treeline and lit up its eyes. These were not the beady, solid brown orbs of most dogs. These had depth; they swirled with dozens of colors, imperfectly mixed into clusters of dark and light like the nebula of distant stars.

“I saw the universe in them,” he would tell the story years afterward to his grandchildren. “It's not the world that's pointless, just our silly plans. The thing about dogs is, they don't make plans.”

But John did. He tied his headphones into a makeshift leash and slipped it over the dog's head. “Come on, then, Galaxy. Let's go home.”

Galaxy trotted after him without hesitation, lop-ear bouncing, fluffy tail wagging.

  

NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge 2015

Though for the past two years I have been focusing on my novel, this summer I entered my first Flash Fiction challenge over at NYC Midnight.  I had two main motivations.

1) To see if I had anything else in me besides this one story I've been working on for so long.

2) It looked like loads of fun!

Well it certainly was a lot of fun and I did manage to come up with a story.  

The first round consists of two stories, one of which has been submitted, and another which we'll write in September.  I say we because it looks like about 1500 people from all over the world have entered.  We're divided into groups of about 30 and each group gets its own prompt with a genre, location and object.  That's right - you don't get to pick your own genre!  Then we have 48 hours to write, edit and submit a 1000 word or less story that fits that genre, is predominately set in that given location and mentions the object.

My Genre/Location/Object was: 

Mystery/Homeless Shelter/Shovel

Here's what I came up with for the first story of Round 1:

Urban Treasure

All I wanted was a bed, but this was one of those places where they try to get involved. I regretted not accepting Jayden's offer. He'd only ask for my body; these people wanted my soul.

“Station twenty-three, second floor.”

The white girl at the desk handed me a blanket with a sweet smile I immediately mistrusted. It had an air of forgiveness, as if she were smiling at her pet cat to reassure it she still loved it after she'd caught it messing on the carpet. She forgot I'm not an animal, that I know what pity looks like.

I stared at her stony-eyed, enjoying the sadness that rolled through her flat, blue eyes. She was disappointed I didn't like her. I fought back a grin, which would have ruined the effect. It was the happiest I had felt all day.

“There's one more thing.” I always waited until after check-in for this part. “I have my little girl with me. She's four. She can sleep with me.”

The volunteer sighed, then nodded, the closest I ever get to approval. “Keep her with you. No running around unattended.”

“Ashante!” I called.

My girl scampered out from behind the entrance column where I had stashed her as I came in. She defiantly chose the long route across the lobby, deliberate revenge for my making her, a great girl of seven, pretend to be a baby. She came to my side sucking on the end of one of her braids, still clutching that red plastic shovel. She'd found it on the beach a few nights ago while I was working and hadn't put the damn thing down since.

It irritated me, her repetitive insistence that she needed it. Needed it! As if that shovel fed her, as if that shovel had walked through Brooklyn in August to find her a place to sleep, as if that shovel had carried her half the way. Ashante didn't need a stupid piece of cheap plastic. She needed her momma. Was gratitude too much to ask?

“I learned my alphabets backwards today,” Ashante announced to the shelter volunteer. “From the Avenue signs—”

I jerked her hand. “That's enough, Ashante.” Like I needed the whole damn city knowing my steps.

“One flight up.” The volunteer smiled again, holding the stairwell door. The smile was different now, but I could still see through it. She begrudged me my baby. My right fist balled up underneath the blanket.

Then I remembered the money. I didn't have time for fighting. I needed to think.

I ain't dumb. I knew I wasn't getting it back. You lose cash in my world, you lose it forever. You deserve to. But, I needed to know how it happened. I had been careful and finally had enough to get us an apartment before the weather changed. We couldn't spend another winter with Jayden. He was too unpredictable and Ashante was getting old enough to comprehend. He'd have her cutting rock by March.

I took Ashante to use the bathroom and shower, then pulled our toothbrushes out of my backpack. Hers had a little blue parrot on the end. “Arr,” she said, heedless of the pasty white bubbles dribbling down her chin, “I'm a pirate.”

I hustled Ashante back to the main room. She was still clutching the shovel.

We found our station. It was an old cot, like I knew it was going to be. Why couldn't that saintly volunteer have just called it what it was? I wouldn't have hated her so much.

I laid down and closed my eyes. Ashante sat at the bottom of the bed, digging a paper and a few broken crayons from her little bag.

I ignored her, thinking about the money. I had it three nights ago, down at Coney. The next morning, gone. Who could have taken it? One of my dates? Why would they? How would they even think to look?

Pride fought to prove theft, but it didn't have a case. My shame knew I must have lost it beneath a motel bed or dropped it out my pocket on the street like some idiot tourist.

But that felt impossible. It was an inside pocket I made myself. I always kept the tiny bag of folded bills there, trading them for higher denominations to keep the bulge from showing through my shirt.

The pocket hadn't been torn; the Velcro opening hadn't been tampered with. Not even Jayden knew about it. Jayden. If someone stole it, he was the obvious choice. Except Jayden would have confronted me. We would have fought and he would have yelled and hit me for holding out. He wouldn't just invite us to stay like nothing had happened. I must have lost it.

I drifted off to sleep, filled with anger and self-loathing.

I woke up alone.

“Ashante! Baby, where you at? Ashante!” I shouted, ignoring the angry protests of sleepy strangers.

I searched the room, the floor, the building. Nothing. Frantic, I returned to our cot, clawed at the blanket, shook it like I expected Ashante to come tumbling out of its folds.

The bed was empty, except for a crumpled drawing of a pirate ship, a severely ill-proportioned starfish and something that vaguely resembled a pier.

I dropped the picture and ran out of the shelter. I tore down Bedford Avenue, fueled with a mixture of fear and pride. My heart hammered as I followed the Avenue signs. R, S, T. Yes, my baby knew her letters. I crossed against the light the last few blocks and didn't slow down until I hit the ocean.

I found her under the boardwalk, in the corner where we'd spent the night before last, the red shovel working busily.

“Ashante!”

She beamed up at me. “There you are, Momma. Did you get my treasure map?”

My eyes trailed from her to the hole. Deep inside, one corner of a tiny plastic bag peaked up out of the sand.

***

Well, there you have it.  I posted it here just as it was submitted to the contest.  

Peace & love to all and best of luck to all my fellow Flash Fiction competitors!