The air is thick, smells green and hopeful somehow, the day I visit the swamp witch.
“You can see portents in there? Visions of the future?” I ask in earnest.
She nods, places a hand on my swollen belly. I shift, protectively.
She peers into the jar, watching the gases swirl, seeing things that I cannot.
Bright colours coalesce and I hear the sound of children’s laughter. Then the gases flicker out, as though they were never there.
“Born dead, just like the others,” the witch imparts, shrugging.
That’s it, then. The ritual’s over, out of gas and out of hope, and my heart’s as empty as the jar.
Sophie Sparrow writes fantasy fiction and humour. Her work has appeared in PseudoPod, Arsenika, Mad Scientist Journal, (Dis)Ability: An Anthology, and previously in Stupefying Stories, in “Angels,” “The Ghost of Moscow,” and “Dangerouser and Dangerouser.”
She has worked as a content writer, transcriptionist, and software tester, speaks Russian and French, has previously been paid to wander around film sets, and is now quite tired of writing about herself in the third person. She likes cats and red wine, though not in the same glass. Keep up to date with what she's doing at www.writersophiesparrow.com
The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood
spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a
few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted,
usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries,
determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to
Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.
You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.
This time the challenge was to write a flash fiction story of no more than 150 words in length, inspired by and using the phrase, “out of gas.”
Special Thanks to Paul Celmer: for going above and beyond to help with this challenge!
1 comments:
Oh this is just devastating! Any person who has felt their body swell with this hope only to find it’s not meant to be can relate to this piece - the green hope, the dreams of laughing children, the emptiness of loss. What an emotional roller coaster this piece is. Beautiful and heartbreaking.
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