Every month, the Furious Fiction Flash contest challenges writers worldwide to write a 500-word flash story in roughly 55 hours.

March 2024 prompt’s criteria:

• Your story must include a character who revisits something. (Like a place, an object, or a person).

• Your story must include the same color in your first and last sentences.

• Your story must include the words CAMP, FAST, and SPARK. (Longer words are okay if original spelling is retained.)

I like a lot of things about this contest. For starters, it’s free and recurring. Second, it’s fast — five hundred words over a weekend. Third, the contest attracts 600+ entries from people worldwide, so it’s fun to see what people come up with. And fourth, I longlisted in January 2024, which makes me only want to try that much harder.

My story centers around Eleanor, an elderly woman on her deathbed, trying to confess a lifelong secret to her son, David.

Further, with her in the room is an ambiguous, ephemeral character named Cordelia, a nameless Doctor, and — as I flash back to revisit Eleanor’s past — her father and elder sister, Danielle.

The first reaction from my betas was, “Mickler, what in the *!&^#^ are you doing?” Six characters in a five-hundred-word story? Indiscriminant jaunts through time? Switching settings without any section breaks? This is madness!

And they were probably right.

After some tightening and re-reads, they warmed up to it.

Finding the prompts compatible this week on Reedsy, I wrote a 1,000-word version of the story and posted it there. Either way, I hope it does well and pleases the AWC and Reedsy judges! We’ll see!