Flash Fiction Friday: Add your own in the comments!

If you are reading this, return the favor: let us read you! Or don’t. We don’t want to be pushy. But if you are so inclined, we want to start up Flash Fiction Fridays and it’ll be so much more fun with more people playing along.

Flash fiction goes by many different names and has about as many definitions. For our purposes, though, it’s gonna be anything under 500 words. So, air any ideas, characters, or situations that you just can’t shake. Make shit up or tell us the truth, it’s all the same in fiction. After all, if fiction is “the lie that tells a truth”(via John Dufresne), it stands to reason that it is also the truth told as a lie.

Here’s mine:

The place is empty on a Friday, which works well for him. He retrieves the blanket from his bottom drawer and unfurls his yoga mat in the copy room (where it is warmest). It never gets completely dark – the exit signs glow even in the daylight and at night they light up whole sections of the office like an unholy waiting room, where you sit can for years before one of Satan’s bureaucratic minions calls you to the window. It is a lot like that in the daylight too. And even he is a lot like his daytime self. He is supine, not seated, but his mind cranks around things that are not real to him and he wonders what everyone does with their lives if they don’t do this.

To Doomsday or to Not Doomsday

I have been told the end of the world is coming…  And to that, I know what my grandmother would say, “They said the end of the world was coming my entire life and it never did.”  My grandmother has since passed away at eighty-seven years young.  And her words are what I have held on to for most of my adult life when “the shit’s about to hit the fan”.  A phrase that all doomsdayers seem to quote as the raison d’etre.

As a teen, the threat of nuclear war loomed.  My dreams were riddled with sirens and obliteration.  Then there was the Y2K bug which, I must admit, I stashed a fair amount of non-perishables and water, just in case.  I found myself later eating through cases of cans of Dinty Moore stew and Little Debbie sweets.  More recently, there’s been the Middle East “conflict”, 911, major floods, tornadoes, earthquakes.  The tsunami in Japan.  All “signs” of our imminent demise, right?  I’m not convinced.  Well, if you are also not convinced, then you must not be online, reading the paper or listening to the fear on the streets.  December 21st, 2012 is the end of the world as we know it.  The Mayans knew it.  And now we will have to live through it.

Now most of us know that the Mayan calendar merely starts all over again and is cyclical so the end of days is really just the transition to the beginning of the calendar again or as some like to call it, “the Galatic New Year”. Some like to believe that this “new age” signified by December 21st will bring harmony, community, and love to our much deficient present version of the world.  A return to the feminine.  A new era of hope.  But being a Librian, the lady with scales measuring each side with equal intent, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that December 20th I will be devising an escape route and meeting destination with my family.  Just in case.