Day: December 5, 2022

#WDYS — A Hole In the Sky

Fandango23 Comments

Nine-year-old Altrua grunted as she pushed aside the manhole cover enough to peek out of the sewer. She couldn’t believe or even understand what she saw. Without even taking the time to close the manhole, she scampered down the ladder into the tunnel and ran toward the chamber where her extended family lived. When she got there and found her mother, she grabbed her mother’s hand and said, “I must show you something, Mother. There’s a hole in the sky.” Then she started pulling her mother into the tunnel and heading back to the ladder she had climbed before. “Go,” she said, pointing at the ladder. “Look outside.”

Elana climbed up the ladder and tentatively stuck her head out of the manhole where her daughter had partially pushed the cover aside. Elana let out an audible gasp. Tears started streaming down her cheeks as she gazed upon something she hadn’t seen in almost a decade — a small patch of blue sky and what appeared to be golden sunlight piecing the thick cloud cover.

Elana moved the manhole cover back into place and made her way down the ladder to where her daughter was waiting for her. “What is it, Momma, what did you see?” Altrua asked.

Elana hugged her daughter and said, “Quickly, we must go back and tell your father and the others. I think, at last, Altrua, I’ve seen the beginning of the end of the nuclear winter.”

Written for Sadje’s What Do You See prompt. Photo credit: Mohamed Almari @ Pexels.

Failure to Communicate

Fandango10 Comments

“Give it a rest,” Dave, the contractor, told Nick. “The quote is what the quote is.”

“Give it a rest? That’s what you have to say after almost doubling your initial quote?” Nick said. “I’m flabbergasted by this. What are all these additional charges you inserted into this revised quote you gave me?”

“Now let’s discuss this with poise and grace, Nick,” Dave said, trying to calm down his client. “I think I know what the problem is. Your wife reached out to me and said that she wanted to upgrade to designer appliances and hardware, which is what those additional line items are. I guess she didn’t clear that with you before she contacted me.”

“No, she did not,” Nick said. “And you can cancel that designer crap she told you to get and go back with the baseline appliances and hardware we had agreed to.”

“No can do, Nick,” Dave said. “I ordered the stuff as soon as your wife asked me to. It’s been delivered and it’s only returnable if defective.”

“That’s your problem, Dave,” Nick said. “I never approved the changes to the original work order.”

“It’s actually your problem, Nick,” Dave said. “And it’s a lot bigger than about this job and the appliances. What you and your wife have is a serious failure to communicate.”

Written for these daily prompts from yesterday: Ragtag Daily Prompt (rest), The Daily Spur (quote), Fandango’s One Word Challenge (flabbergasted), My Vivid Blog (inserted), Your Daily Word Prompt (poise), and Word of the Day (designer).

Blogging Insights — Reaching Out

Fandango16 Comments

It’s Monday and Dr. Tanya is back with her weekly Blogging Insights prompt. She provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote.

This week’s quote is from Jorge Luis Borges, who was an Argentine short-story writer, and essayist. Here’s his quote:

“What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person.”

Before I started blogging on WordPress, I blogged on Blogger for a few years and then on Typepad for a few more years. Neither Blogger nor Typepad had a LIKE button and I rarely got any comments from any readers (if I had any readers) on either blog hosting site. It reminded me of that old saying about a tree falling in the woods and wondering if it made a sound if no one was around to hear it. Was it the same with my blog? Did it make a difference to me if nobody was around to read my posts?

As much as I would tell myself that I was blogging only for myself, I was secretly disappointed that no one was reading my brilliant, engaging, compelling, fascinating, witty, entertaining, and interesting posts. I rationalized that these non-readers were the ones who were missing out on something special and that was their loss, not mine.

Then I decided to see what WordPress was all about and started posting on the WordPress hosting site. I figured that, if the same thing happened on WordPress as had happened on Blogger and Typepad, the cosmos was sending me a three-strikes and you’re out message and that it was time to hang up my blogging spurs. (Sorry about these mixed metaphors.)

But guess what happened? I started getting notifications that people had “liked” my post. And some people even took the time to post a comment, and to start to follow my blog. And those likes and comments grew exponentially. In the 5 1/2 years I’ve been on WordPress, I’ve gotten approximately 785,000 views, 254,000 likes, and 116,000 comments (excluding my own).

So back to today’s quote. As a blogger, I would agree. Being able to reach out to people and to have them read and respond to my writing makes blogging so much more fulfilling and rewarding than writing in a vacuum. And so much better than writing like that proverbial falling tree in the woods, where no one is around to hear you make a sound.

Share Your World — 12/5/2022

Fandango14 Comments
Share Your World

Di, at Pensitivity101, is our host for Share Your World each week. Here are her questions for this week.

1. Do you have a favorite outfit you like to wear?

No. I pretty much dress the same way every day: jeans and (in the cooler months) a sweatshirt.

2. What is the worst thing you were forced to wear as a child (school uniforms aside) ?

I honestly don’t remember being forced to wear anything in particular when I was a kid.

3. Do you have a sweet tooth, and if so, are you a chewer, cruncher, or sucker?

I’m not sure I would say that I have a sweet tooth per se, but depending upon what sweet treat I was eating, I could be chewing, crunching, and/or sucking. Let’s take a Tootsie Pop, for example.

I would suck on the hard candy on outside of the Tootsie Pop for a few minutes before I’d get tired of waiting to get to the chocolate-flavored chewy Tootsie Roll candy hidden on the inside of the lollipop, so I would crunch the remainder of the hard candy outer shell with my teeth until I reached the Tootsie Roll candy inside, which I would chew.

4. Do you think you could eat your weight in chocolate?

Maybe over an entire lifetime I will have consumed my weight in chocolate, but not at one sitting, which is what I assume the question implies.

Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge #196

Fandango14 Comments

Welcome to Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge. Each week I will be posting a photo I grab off the internet and challenging bloggers to write a flash fiction piece or a poem inspired by the photo. There are no style or word limits.

The image below is from Anita Austvika at unsplash.com.

For the visually challenged writer, the photo shows a woman’s hands holding a mason jar labeled “bath salts” and she seems to be either screwing or unscrewing the top of the jar. On the surface of the table is a weaved basket with some dried flowers in it, a roll of twine, and a few other items.

If this week’s image inspires you and you wish to participate, please write your post, use the tag #FFFC, and link back to this post. I hope it will generate some great posts.

Please create a pingback to this post or manually add your link in the comments.