Cracked Flash: Year 2, Week 10!

WELCOME BACK TO CFFC! 

RULES

Judge This Week: Si

Word Count: 300 max

How: Submit your stories as a comment to this post, along with your name, word count, and title (and Twitter handle or blog if you've got 'em!). One entry per person.

Deadline: Midnight tonight, PDT! (~00:30 will still be accepted due to slightly late posting)

Results announced: Next Wednesday afternoon.

Remember: Your entry must begin with the prompt! The prompt can be mutilated, but not beyond recognition. (Pictures do not need to be incorporated into your stories, they're for inspiration (and sometimes our amusement)).

Prompt 

"Welcome, we've been expecting you."

Cracked Flash: Year 2, Week 9 Results!

Thanks for submitting such excellent stories all of August! I had a lot of fun reading them. Y'all are awesome.

Reminder: READ THE RULES. In particular: the rule which requires that the prompt be your first sentence(s). The pictures are optional, the prompt is not. Thanks!

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: Cracked Flash Fiction Competition is going on HIATUS for all of September! Why, you ask? Colleges are starting classes and both Si and Mars are moving (whee) so we anticipate we will have exactly 0 free time. :( But we'll be back in October!

And now, Y2W9 winners!

Honorable Mention

Bill Engleson (@billmelaterplea) with Armageddon with a Twist

Disclaimer: Si has much less poetry knowledge than Mars and isn't as good at analyzing them. This is a great poem! I really liked the clear structure and rhyme scheme, my favorite line was "a devils hound wagged old earth’s tail." loved the imagery there. I wasn't really sure about why there were two poems--I could see the connection, of course, but switching to the second poem broke the flow of the piece for me. I liked the imagery of the clown laughing until the end. Well done!

First Runner Up

Jeff Rowlands (@jeffnuggets) with A Question of Perspective

I love the way this story weaves the prompt in with the tale of two lovers who slowly grow apart, and the way that painting is tied to every aspect of the story. I love the multiple meanings of this line especially: "A picture he had treasured now consigned to the past." I would have liked to know more about why she changes--though, of course, it might just be that they slowly grow apart without any particular trigger. The ending is well done, excellent imagery of the empty drawers as a metaphor for their relationship as it ended. Great job!

Y2W9 Winner

Sian Brighal (@sian_ink) 

with Legacy

Beautiful story. I liked the poignant tone, the image of the crumbling moon, the excellent way you incorporated the prompt. My favorite like was this: "The unwise faith placed in progress had snapped, Damocles’ sword falling to smite those whose greed outweighed their caution and wisdom. " Great use of imagery and metaphor to set the scene. Actually if I tried to list all of my favorite lines I'd probably end up quoting the whole thing. This piece just flows, from the first sentance to the last. Even though there is no main character other than the hidden narrator, we still feel a connection. I really liked the way you incorporated the story--greedy, fatal mining of the moon's resources--with description here. Excellent job!

Legacy

The moon shone red. The end had come.

The unwise faith placed in progress had snapped, Damocles’ sword falling to smite those whose greed outweighed their caution and wisdom. Against the starry backdrop, the huddled masses whimpering on land could see streaking lights swarming away from the crimson moon. A few hours before, those lights had rested upon the silver disc, hidden in the moon’s reflected glare. Now, they scrambled like disillusioned moths away from a toxic lamp.

The news said it’d be only a matter of hours until the moon collapsed and fractured, her heart and bones mined out. The news reporter hadn’t elaborated: they all knew what would come next. Moonrocks the size of continents would hurtle towards them; the oceans would rage and boil away before the atmosphere and everything immolated.

Those ships and her crew were merely extending the extinction of…everything in their bid to survive. They’d hover like flies over the last carcass, and when it was picked clean, they’d waste and die to hang like desiccated insects in a long-forgotten orbit. And our legacy to the universe would be a broken-hearted moon, weeping debris

Cracked Flash: Year 2, Week 9!

It amuses me ok?!

 

Welcome back to another exciting episode of Cracked Flash Fiction! This week your host, Si, will throw at you another strange prompt and you will in turn throw back a strange story! Let the games begin!

RULES

Judge This Week: Si

Word Count: 300 max

How: Submit your stories as a comment to this post, along with your name, word count, and title (and Twitter handle or blog if you've got 'em!). One entry per person.

Deadline: Midnight tonight, PDT! (~00:30 will still be accepted due to slightly late posting)

Results announced: Next Wednesday afternoon.

Remember: Your entry must begin with the prompt! The prompt can be mutilated, but not beyond recognition. (Pictures do not need to be incorporated into your stories, they're for inspiration (and sometimes our amusement)).

Prompt 

"The moon shone red. The end had come."

Y2W8 Results!

There's no context for this picture

WOOHOO thanks to everyone for participating this week!

Here's Y2W8 results! Let's get right to it!

Honorable Mention

Benjamin Langley (@b_j_langley) with Marketing a Malevolent Messiah

Amusing take on the prompt! A 21st Century founding of a new religion with a throwback evil who wants to make it big in today's world! I liked the little touches of modern life--the iPhone, the God 2.0 suggestion--mixed with occasional "retro"-style dialogue: "I am many millennia old. I have created galaxies, feasted on worlds. I transcend the concept of name." I wanted to see more character development and motivation for Gerry's (perhaps unwilling?) decision to ally with the beast. I feel sorry for Gerry! Well done!


First Runner Up

Griffith's Family (@KLGriffiths) with The One Feared is the One Revered

There was great voice in this story, established early and held throughout. I really like how you never explicitly state who your protagonist and antagonist are ... but it is quite obvious! Great job with the wheedling voice, the slippery insinuations, the brief references to a variety of various world events. I would have liked to see more tension develop in the piece, right now it has the same tone and pacing throughout to my ear. Great story!

Y2W8 Winner

Ronel Janse van Vuuren (@miladyronel) with

Supremacy

I admit it, the last line killed me. This is a great short, to-the-point piece that doesn't waste words and sets a compelling, multi-layered scene extremely concisely. I like the description of the powerful young woman, loved and feared for her powers--well done establishing that in a few sentences--and the sudden tone switch at the exact right time! So often these young, powerful protagonists are depicted as alone in the world--I love that this one has a sensible, unimpressed mother right in the thick of it. Excellent story!

Supremacy

‘I don’t want to be worshipped…’ the young woman at the head of the table whispered, staring at her reflection in the gleaming wood surface. ‘I want to terrify!’

Wind rushed through the room and blasted all the gifts away.

Everyone sat up straight; no-one dared look at her. Though they adored her for getting rid of the enemy navy with her power over air, she still scared them.

‘Too bad. Eat your eggs,’ her mother said as she placed a plate in front of her. 

Cracked Flash: Year 2, Week 8!

So, this week's prompt is going to be a surprise for Si, too, because I (Mars) think she forgot (I mean, it's 10 after 12 and there's no prompt up; wouldn't be the first time we've forgotten what day it is)! This means I get to pick some wild prompt for y'all and she's gotta deal, amirite? *fires up prompt generator* 

RULES

Judge This Week: Si

Word Count: 300 max

How: Submit your stories as a comment to this post, along with your name, word count, and title (and Twitter handle or blog if you've got 'em!). One entry per person.

Deadline: Midnight tonight, PDT! (~00:30 will still be accepted due to slightly late posting)

Results announced: Next Wednesday afternoon.

Remember: Your entry must begin with the prompt! The prompt can be mutilated, but not beyond recognition. (Pictures do not need to be incorporated into your stories, they're for inspiration (and sometimes our amusement)).

Prompt 

"I don't want to be worshiped--I want to terrify!"


Inspirational Pictures

Cracked Flash: Year 2, Week 7 Results!

Woohoo it's time for winners! Great job everyone, really enjoyed the stories.

Without further ado, here's Y2W7 results!

Honorable Mention

Sian Brighal (@sian_ink) with Slough Off the Dead

What really struck me about this piece was the excellent descriptive phrases used. Especially the phrase "the memory explodes in her chest like a fungus expelling spores"--so vivid and unusual, well done! I liked the way the woman dies and is reborn essentially by getting rid of the guy. Interesting interpretation of the prompt! I would have liked more dialogue to break up the paragraphs earlier on. I really liked how you use the comparison of the warmth & gentleness of the old woman's hands to the controlling grip she'd known before as a way to remind us about her past. Great job!

First Runner Up

Marj Crockett (@whithernow) with Stasis

What a tragic story! I like the way you used the prompt to slide into the events that had occurred leading to the main character's situation. Beautiful phrasing here: "She on one side, me on the other, tied together for eternity." The tone and voice of this story is really well done, it reads very cleanly and we're immediately immersed into the setting. I would have liked a little more description to fully visualize where the main character is and what their surroundings are like at this time. The idea of being in stasis, by one's own choice, and having to forever listen to the dying words of one's dead wife ... absolutely terrifying and very creepy. Perhaps even more tragic by the fact that the main character can't bring themselves to end it all. Well done!

Y2W7 Winner

Nod Ghosh (@nodghosh) with

The Console Room

What a unique story! Great job creating tension throughout the piece. Though the reader doesn't know much about what's going on or how these characters got here, we still care for the characters and want to know what happens. There's some excellent turns of phrase here, namely "Lota pushes a strand of hair from her eye, corporeal actions that have little meaning in Limbo.". What's really great about this piece is the way it introduces so many characters for a flash piece but doesn't feel overwhelming. Great job sketching them out so quickly! This could easily be expanded into something larger--I want to know how these characters got to be in Limbo, why they must haunt people on Earth. Excellent job!

The Console Room

"Next time we meet, one of us will be dead."
Bevan has an air of authority. I look around the circle, moving my eyes, though my head is an immobile rock. I catch Rhonda's gaze. Her face belies the terror I feel. Hezbaan picks at his scalp, and examines what he finds in his fingernails. Lota pushes a strand of hair from her eye, corporeal actions that have little meaning in Limbo.

One. Only one. How can that be?

No one says anything. Mahmood is the first to break away from the circle. We follow him into the console room in silence. Each of us connects with their subject. There is a whirr of activity as we begin our hauntings.

Today, my subject is Hanan. She is broken by the effort of keeping four children from death. She has stripped leaves from a tree in the compound. She boils them in a pot. The firewood has come from a bombed out ruin. Hanan adds salt. I detect her reticence at using those precious pink-white grains. I do the shiver-down-the-spine thing, and try to channel her dead husband from my bank of new souls.

It's tiring work. By the end of my shift, I've seen three others in Aleppo, one in Dhaka, and a New York psychiatrist who was about to slit his own wrists. Rhonda is disconnecting from her console, and I realise reckoning time has arrived.

Bevan's grave expression tells me it's bad news. Very bad for Hezbaan, Lota and two others. They're being sent back. The rest of us sit in silence.

"I've heard from upstairs," he says, shuffles cards in his hands like a gambler.

When he calls Rhonda's name, her relief is palpable.

The rest of us hope death will come soon.

Cracked Flash: Year 2, Week 7!

Si hath returned! I hope you're all happy with that announcement, cause I'll be judging CFFC for ALL OF AUGUST. I have total power!

*coughs*

ANYWAY I have been inspired by finally seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens (yes it took me this long shut up!) AND also by that awesome Rogue One trailer, so all your Optionally Inspirational Pictures shall be space themed! (Remember, IDC if you use these pictures or not in your story, it's your choice! I just like space.) Now get your pens, keyboards, and smoke signals ready, because here comes CFFC Y2W7!

RULES

Judge This Week: Si

Word Count: 300 max

How: Submit your stories as a comment to this post, along with your name, word count, and title (and Twitter handle or blog if you've got 'em!). One entry per person.

Deadline: Midnight tonight, PDT!

Results announced: Next Wednesday afternoon.

Remember: Your entry must begin with the prompt! The prompt can be mutilated, but not beyond recognition. (Pictures do not need to be incorporated into your stories, they're for inspiration (and sometimes our amusement)).

Prompt 

"Next time we meet, one of us will be dead."