Once Upon a Time Writing Contest Entry: “The Thing about Red-Hot Iron Boots”

I’ve decided to enter the Flash Fiction contest hosted by the folks at Yearning for Wonderland. It’s the Once Upon a time Writing Contest, the theme is “unexpected fairy tails” and the word limit is 350 . I like this idea as well as anything involving fairy tails and turning fairy tails on their heads. So here’s my effort and see if you can guess which fairy tail inspired this one.

The Thing about Red-Hot Iron Boots

The thing about red-hot iron boots is not that they are heavy, nor is it the heat. It’s the fact that they are rusted iron boots glowing red. What sort of style sense went into making such a thing?  Iron boots are passé. They reek retrograde and stink overindulgence.

Just like her and the way she’s handling our tiff. She’s married off; she’s got her charming prince, although personally I’ve seen better looking and heard brighter speak, she’s got her own new kingdom to add to the one she took from me. She’s got the waterfall wedding dress, the towering cake and the piss those midgets conjured and called wine. She’s got all these things, and still bears a grudge.

My guts rise when I think about the glut at that wedding. But that is how it has always been with her. Proclivity to excess, that one. She couldn’t live with just one midget; she had to hoard seven of them, and to watch them tumble over themselves for her, like nesting dolls, like she was gold, or something. She doesn’t have a heart of gold, I’ll tell you that –all show and shine.

Over dramatizing everything, like with the apple.

I’ll admit I let the brat get to me, but I didn’t put that much belladonna on the blasted apple, just enough to knock her out a bit, to miss her passing prince. It was the least I could do for all the trouble she’d caused over the years. But she escalated it with the fainting, the pretending to be dead, and the glass coffin thing, because everyone would want to see a dead person’s face as it turns to straw. So tasteless.

Now she’s congratulating herself for picking the red-hot iron boots when she’s really not got an original bone in her body.

Dancing in these boots won’t kill me. They are heavy and they crush my ankles. They are hot and sear the flesh from my bones. No, instead it will be death by “gaudy” for me. Red-hot iron boots indeed!

(344 words)

©Debra Providence 2012

To read some really great stories from other entrants in this contest please click this  link and for more info on the rules follow the crescent moon.

Five Sentence Fiction: Armor or…A Hunting We Will Go?

I have to say that I have been thoroughly enjoying the Five Sentence Fiction weekly writing forays and somewhat surprised at the ideas that come to my mind whenever Lillie McFerrin gives the prompts. This week is no exception. The prompt is “Armor” and at first images of crystal cocoons,  armadillo girls popped into my head. Then Smaug lumbered in. He scorched the first occupants, and sat down in his usual Smaug way.  Me, like all the best burglars, watched his glorious  under belly for that one patch where the scales didn’t meet and then the idea(s) for this week’s FFS effort came to me.  At first they were all jumbled up and then they separated. Ah…the writing process. Love it!

Five Sentence Fiction: Armor or  …A Hunting We Will Go?

1# Steven Rapier

Steven Rapier sat in his usual corner in the café across from his second apartment watching, with protracted scrutiny, a young, slim dancer-type, in a denim shrug and floral maxi dress, the one with the caramel face under a mass of black curls, currently engrossed in the latest Terry McMillan effort.

Her soft cheeks complimented her heart-shaped face and there was a growing hardness in his groin as he imagined the gurgling noises her perfect throat would make while his well practiced fingers dug into it -she doesn’t look like a screamer, not like the last one.

The young lady, sensing this scrutiny, looked up; made fleeting eye-contact and blushed as her eyes returned to her reading.

That’s it, Rapier thought, that’s the “in” he was seeking; that soft spot, like the flesh on her beautiful neck, the only skin uncovered by her modest but exquisitely feminine outfit.

Deploying his brightest smile, Steven Rapier got up from his usual table and walked with cool purpose towards his next “passion project.”

#2 Deidra Blest

In a quiet, softly lit coffee house, not too removed from her usual haunts, Deidra Blest sipped her honey- lemon tea,  not really reading the book in front of her.

She sat in the dim section of the coffee house, confident that no one in this big city believed in folktales, let alone the ones that came from the Islands, and she was supremely confident that the ever-busy city people wouldn’t notice her long enough to see what she really was.

Except the chap sitting across the room from her, currently oozing thirst under his tan fedora and through his slacks.

Deidra indulged her special powers: knock them down with pheromones,  and really turn-up their heads so that what they thought they were seeing was a young demure female.

“City men sweet, oui,” she thought and then smiled as she shot the strapping Fedora Man a glance, “I will feed well tonight.”

© Debra Providence 2012

Five Sentence Fiction: Tears

This week’s Five Sentence Fiction challenge is “Tears“.

What it’s all about: Five Sentence Fiction is about packing a powerful punch in a tiny fist. Each week I will post a one word inspiration, then anyone wishing to participate will write a five sentence story based on the prompt word. The word does not have to appear in your five sentences, just use it for direction.

I wrote two this time after struggling to find point of entry and I decided to publish them both. One feels a little incomplete.

Tears #1…or The Dust Miner’s Daughter

Two figures stood on the look-out platform of the Company mining post near the Eagle Nebula.

The smaller, a girl, leaned into the glass and pressed her face against its coldness while the burly figure, an old dust miner, shifted his weight and cleared his throat several occasions, clearly unaccustomed to the company of teenage girls, especially the weepy sort.

Her tear stained face glowed in the blue tail-light of the comet that was slowly disappearing behind the giant columns and, though some part of her knew it wasn’t really possible, she thought that if she stared long enough at that one spot where he disappeared, she might catch a glimpse of his special red suit, or even his harness, weaving back and forth through the dust and gas.

“Er, you couldn’t really do nothin’ about that, none of us could,” the miner interrupted her concentration, “I mean, your old man, he’d get that glassy-eyed look whenever one o’ them comets was about, even before you was born he was like that.”

She nodded, grudgingly, because deep inside she knew she never stood a chance competing for her father’s love with a thing as old and as breathtakingly terrible as a comet –she just couldn’t compete at all.

Tears #2: Ms. Lenora Chase

Lenora Chase tossed her canary yellow shoulder bag on to the purple velveteen loveseat in her apartment and made a beeline for her 3^rd Gen W.I.L.L. O 5 box and the bottle of Hennessey on her large dining room table.

Reaching inside the box for the nuero-interface halo, she ignored the instructions for adjusting the emo-drainage dial, turning it all the way up to 10.

It had been that type of day, what with the scene with Kevin her married boss, and the new younger, curvier, and very eager intern, the one the other girls called red lips and mega tits and the cool way Kevin dismissed the whole thing.

Ignoring the warnings on the manual against drinking and oversetting the halo, Lenora downed the contents of her glass, pressed the fully charged halo on to her temple and stretched out on her cherry pink couch.

Tomorrow, if she woke up, when they looked at her they would see her mascara intact and they would know that she is Lenora Chase and she cries for no one.

Five Sentence Fiction: Scorching

In my previous post I mentioned that I would be trying the Lillie McFerrin’s Five Sentence Fiction on a regular basis. This week’s prompt is “Scorching” with the following instructions:

What it’s all about: Five Sentence Fiction is about packing a powerful punch in a tiny fist. Each week I will post a one word inspiration, then anyone wishing to participate will write a five sentence story based on the prompt word. The word does not have to appear in your five sentences, just use it for direction.

Scorching

Asha-Bean crouched in the swampy dasheen patch, mesmerized by the inferno that was once her grandmother’s house.

The green heart-shaped leaves stung her flesh while the heat from frenzied flames pressed against her face, and billows of black smoke stung her nose and throat.

She wiped her sweating brow, smearing kerosene and soot across her face, confident that at least one of her grandmother’s nosy neighbors would see all these things that she had done, and call for help.

Asha-Bean told them she didn’t want to stay with grand-mother; smelly, cranky, beating first for every little thing and asking questions after grandmother, now sleeping in her plush queen sized bed, with all the fancy cushions, at the center of the blaze.

She told them she didn’t want to come.

© Debra Providence April 2, 2012

P.S. Really loving the FSF

Of Good Deeds and Flash Fiction

Sometimes it is really a challenge to manage all the aspects of your life. This is especially so if you desire to write regularly. Just like anything else, writing is skill that requires practice. I haven’t had a lot of creative writing time recently so I’ve resolved to do whatever little bit I can whenever I can.  Take this afternoon, for example, I wrote the bulk of this little story while standing in a long line at a bank. It started as an attempt at Five Sentence Fiction (FFS) (thank Ruth Long for inspiration here). However, I found that it didn’t want to say at five sentences. It is still Flash Fiction. I am intrigued by this type of story telling because it challenges you to think of efficiency in plot construction and being precise with detail. It is a way to get some practice even if you don’t have a lot of time.  For more information on Five Sentence Fiction  check Ruth Long, and Lillie McFerrin . (By the way, really great stories posted at both sites).

Now here’s my attempt/practice effort. It’s called “Good Deeds“, it’s 243 words long, and it started off as FFS, based on “wicked”, which is McFerrin’s prompt for this week. (For some reason Elphaba comes to mind.)

Oh, and it’s in me favorite genre . 🙂

Enjoy!

“D”

Good Deeds

Jules’ stomach churned. Sitting at the foot of his wife’s bed, he stared at the monitor that flickered while her life stats dwindled. Stretched out on the bed in the center of the pale green room with the broken blinds, she had been in a coma while the child inside her dreamt and sucked his thumb.
The graying, pasty-faced Collector was waiting at his side. His black suit was faded, the threading was showing and Jules could see dirt around his collar. He reeked of stale tobacco.
He stared at the karma counter in his hand; its beeping keeping pace with Jules’ wife’s failing heart.
“She’s almost all out Mr. Jules, sir.” The Collector’s coarse voice unsettled him. “She has used it all up. She weren’t the person she is now, you know.”

It was then that he made his offer, and with such detachment that it led Jules to conclude that this wasn’t the first time.

“She weren’t the person she is now.”
The words reverberated in his head.
“What’ll be Mr. Jules?”
The Collector’s reasoning was fair enough. What’s the use of good karma points in the next life when he could save two lives now? He only hoped that in the next one she wouldn’t be as wicked as she was in the previous. Stomach turning, Jules rolled up his sleeve and stretched out his left arm, revealing the faded blue-code imprint. Then he blinked while the counter bit into his flesh.

©Debra Providence 31st March 2012

There you have it. I’ll step away from it for a bit. I have a few more projects for FF SF (say that three times fast), one of which is code named KEFIE (it could almost be a girl’s name) and another coded VDHO (definitely a girl’s name) and I promise to try for FFS once more. 🙂

Peace

“D”