Back with flash fiction as backstory

May 5, 2018 by Colette B 6 Comments

#May-be-A-B (letter B post) and accepting Sarah C’s writing challenge using her Alphabetical Prompts (letter A prompt).

While caught up in tangling and untangling my story idea for Sarah’s prompts, I decided that both casting characters and creating a fully-developed world is going to take a heck of a long time for a novice fiction writer who barely gets round to writing any fiction hardly ever. That best describes me. So bite-size backstory flash-fiction offerings seem a bright idea to be bringing forth nothing as big as a book, but there are billions of those so why bother writing a book. But maybe I’ll build on this writing in the future, y’never know.

Anyway, back to the letter A and writing to Sarah C’s prompt (no spoiler, wanna know the prompt, gotta go visit, apols, but otherwise revealing it spoils my tale too…)

Part A (untitled)

Arianne had been keeping a dream diary since before she even knew what that meant. Her mother said she was doing it even before she knew how to write English. Every morning the very first thing she did before getting out of bed was to reach for her paper and pen from the bedside table and note down everything she remembered.

“So what’s this then? Shorthand?” Marcus snatched the paper away just as Arianne made a grab for it and his face twisted with confused expressions as he turned the paper every possible way trying to find a means to make sense of the markings.

“Marcus give it back now or you’re never staying over again!”

“Oh I don’t mind not staying over,” Marcus scoffed. “Shag and run’s more fun anyway – and less washing-up and…” He was silenced by a thwack in the face with a pillow. Arianne grabbed the page from his hand and screwed it into a ball.

“So what was it?” Marcus persisted as she walked away from him toward her bathroom cubicle. She threw the paper ball across the room to land in the waste basket in the corner near her desk.

“Litter. See!”

Arianne hoped he’d leave it alone and maybe she could retrieve it later. She’d have to be more careful. She couldn’t possibly tell Marcus about Alradlayik teachings. He’d never believe her, no-one had before. No way she was she going back on meds for the disbelief of others. While she was small Arianne’s talk of the Alradlayiks, even before she knew the word aliens, was humoured as the imaginative play of a child while practising Alradlayik alphabet and drawing pictures from their stories.

At the age of seven everything altered. Her parents sought no help, as although Arianne had some strange ways of saying things and seemed different to other children, she was otherwise healthy and intelligent and not appearing emotionally disturbed but other adults considered her ‘afflicted’. All kinds of awful names were attributed to her condition of being … asleep in her earth-life, while as if awake in another life – only dreaming her parents would say. Doctors disagreed.

Entering the Academy, attending as a boarder at such a young age was not in her best interests at all, but assertions from the authorities that she would be forcibly removed from her parent’s care if they resisted meant she herself agreed, to spare her parents the guilt of allowing such a thing.

All Marcus knew of all this was that she won an early scholarship for high attainment and while it wasn’t exactly true, it wasn’t entirely a lie either. Anyway, as long as she wasn’t leaving her writing where he might see, maybe he’d forget about seeing that letter he’d picked up earlier. She’d attended to her hygiene, donned her uniform and arranged her hair and all within the five minutes allotted time. She took a deep breath and re-entered her room…

[500 words. 2nd draft, original writing, copyright 05/05/2018]