Carol Moncado

After a kinda crummy morning, I had a good time chatting with Jan and doing our Flash Fiction Friday.  This one needs a couple of caveats, but I’ll post them at the end.  Jan will be posting hers on her blog shortly.

So we set the timer for ten minutes and away we went!  The first sentence was the prompt.

The diver entered the hull of the ship through the gaping hole that sank her.  He wanted to explore a bit before he had to head back up to the surface.  He glanced behind him and saw his wife and dive partner close behind.  They slowly worked their way through the ship and then out through a portal on the deck.  He motioned to her that he was going to go over the side to look at that part of the ship.  She nodded and followed him.

The shipwreck was at least 200 years old according to the dive master.  The aging of the wood, the overgrowth of the [stuff] attested to that.  He went around the bow of the ship and came to an abrupt halt.  Or as abrupt a halt as one can come to when in the water.

His wife touched his arm as she rounded the bow behind him.  Bubbles floated in front of his face as he pointed towards the site that had stopped him mid-swim stroke.

There on the floor of the ocean was a dead sailor.  It wouldn’t be shocking if it was the bones of a sailor that had belonged to the ship when it sank, but this sailor was different.

The body was only partially decomposed.  He could see dog tags.  The uniform was modern.

So what was a dead sailor doing pinned underneath an old shipwreck in his dress whites?

He shook his head, grabbed his wife’s hand and kicked rapidly, propelling them upwards.  Time to call NCIS.

Caveats:

I know nothing about diving.  The little I do know comes from a couple old Baywatch episodes and random stuff I may or may not have picked up here and there from somewhere – or at least I think I did.  So I may be way off on the diving stuff.  Ah well.  No research allowed for Flash Fiction :).

NCIS is my all time favorite television show.  Ship at the bottom of the ocean [combined with the inability to get the opening scene from season 1 episode The Immortals out of my head] and you get NCIS :).

Yay!  It’s Flash Fiction Friday! I’m kidless for a few hours [woohoo!] so Jan and I got together on Skype, bemoaned the lack of good writing prompts [open a magazine to a page and write about the first picture you see.  Um, no], then trawled around the ‘net some more and I finally made one up to honor the heroes of 9/11.

Tim would never forget where he was when he heard planes had crashed into the Twin Towers.

We took the sentence, set the timer for seven minutes [oops!  Supposed to be five!], and away we went. This would need a lot of work to get into some sort of publishable shape but that’s okay :).  You can find Jan’s on her blog.  What about you?  Can you come up with a story in five minutes?  Or, to quote Alan Jackson, ‘where were you when the world stopped turning that September day’?

Tim would never forget where he was when he heard planes had crashed into the Twin Towers.  He was driving down the highway, his head bobbing to the beat of the song blaring from his stereo.  He’d had his favorite CD in or he would have known much earlier, but his mood was more suited for Metallica than it was for talk radio and the FM stereo in his car didn’t work.

He’d been in a funk.  Jessica had left him.  She’d moved in with some other guy.  They’d been living together for two years when suddenly, out of the blue, she announced that she’d met someone else.  She’d been sleeping with him for months already and then she just left.  That was Sept 8.  Tuesday, the rest of the world fell apart just as his had.

He’d dreamed of spending the rest of his life with Jessica.  He was going to propose to her on their anniversary on September 15.  He wondered if he could get his money back on the ring.  What did guys say when they tried to return engagement rings?  ‘Sorry went with something bigger from somewhere else?’

He’d planned on burning all of his pictures and gifts – everything Jessica had left from their time together, but she’d called.  Early that fateful Tuesday morning.  He’d planned on heading into Manhattan early for work, but the ringing phone had woken him at 630. Not only had she left him, but she was pregnant.  With his baby.  How she knew for sure the baby was his since she’d been sleeping with both of them at the same time… well, he wasn’t exactly sure how she knew, but she was insistent.  So he’d called and left a voice mail for his boss at the Store of Knowledge in the concourse at the base of the towers and he’d gone for a drive.

It wasn’t until nearly ten when his phone rang.  Again.  His brother had called him about fifteen times.  He’d ignored every one.  But Joe wouldn’t call that much that often if it wasn’t something uber important so he finally answered.

And that was when he found out the entire world had changed.  Not just his world.  The whole world.

Okay – it’s coming tomorrow.  Today, Jan [my ‘other mom’] and I did a Five Minute Flash Fiction exercise.  We had a prompt.  We had five minutes and…

GO!

We spent five minutes writing about

Alice tried to remember who had given her the key.

then we exchanged our version of Alice and the key.  She posted it on one of her blogs and I posted mine in the comments.  We decided to make it a weekly thing.  Our plan is to get together in Skype and do it together [though we may not every week based on schedules, etc. or we may do it on Thursday for posting on Friday if we know we have busy days but that’s the plan], then post on our respective blogs.

Once we’ve posted ours, we both want to know what you come up with!  What can you write about Alice and her key?!

My personal rules include: using the prompt as the first sentence whenever possible and very little editing [spelling and punctuation only, if that] so what you’ll see is what I wrote.  Unedited.  Eesh!  Am I sure that’s what I want on a blog that I hope agents may look at someday?!  Ah well, them’s the rules!  My rules, but still ;).

So – anyone else have any ideas about Alice?  Stick your story in the comments – otherwise look for the first official Flash Fiction Friday tomorrow :).