I saw a writing prompt in the 10-Minute Novelists Group that really intrigued me. The prompt was you find a book which turns everything you write into it real. What do you write?
This resulted in a flash fiction piece which I write in 10 minutes before going to fetch my daughter and going for lunch. The slightly edited version was later published on Wattpad. The text is also below the link in case you had no interest in going to Wattpad (I hear varied things about it).
Some of the friends whom I showed this piece remarked that the premise was very much like the anime/manga Death Note. I see the similarities but I must confess to not drawing that link when I first saw the prompt.
I hope you enjoy reading…
Be Careful What You Wish For…
He wished he had paid more attention in English classes in school. Had he internalised the importance of precision in language, he would have written something else in the book.
Instead he now found himself stuck in a void where could not see a thing. Not one single thing. Even his own limbs and extremities had been hidden from sight. Touch was still available to him. He could feel his fingertips when he rubbed them against each other or on where he believed his various body parts to be.
Taste and smell had also not gone away. He learnt this the hard way when he tripped over an unseen obstacle and landed face first into a pile of cow dung. The stink that assaulted his olfactory nerves as it flooded his nostrils left no doubt that the shit was bovine in nature. The taste was a lesson that was both unneeded and unforgettable.
Worse of all was still being able to hear. He could hear everyone and everything. And all he heard were screams and futile cries for help. Occasionally, he would hear the fading voices of someone who had fallen off the cliff which he knew was only a few feet behind him. This would be followed by a brief ‘thunk’ before the roaring of the waves took away its latest quarry.
On that day, he had come to the cliff so that he could throw himself over the edge and end his life upon the jagged, solid rocks beneath. Instead, he had found the book.
That damned book. He wished he had never set his eyes on it. Most of all, he wished he had put more thought into what he would write in it before his depression-fuelled mind led him to commit his darkest fantasy upon its pages and thereby unleashing the curse upon the entire world.
“Everything disappears”.
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