Chasing Someone with Dynamite – A 100 Word Story

storytime.pngYup, it’s flash fiction time again!

As always, this is based around Laurence Simon’s weekly challenge for the 100 word-stories podcast. It’s a great exercise for writers – writing a good drabble is a lot harder than it appears, but is still a "small" task so you can get around that idea of it being too much work. And then you get a random (and often bizarre) writing prompt to shoehorn you out of writer’s block! Go read the rules for the Weekly Challenge and participate! Heck, Chris the Nuclear Kid does when he remembers to (and I can drag him away from video games)!

The player below should have the audio for this week; if it doesn’t, you can find the audio here to download. You can also read and hear the rest of the entries at the 100 Word Stories podcast site!

The music, by the way, is a clip from this sort-of-mashup clip on YouTube of Adele and Chasing Cars. Go give them some love and upvotes. This story owes a large debt to John Updike’s "Playing With Dynamite", which you can hear in MP3 format over at the New Yorker. The title owes a debt to both works.

Confessional"Father, what is the meaning of life?"

He sat back on his bench, running a hand through his thinning hair.

He knew.

He knew the touch of her hair and hands on his back. He knew the glow of her skin in morning sunlight, the spice smell of her sweat.

The way the universe hid inside her eyes when she said she loved him.

"It is," he lied through the screen, "to love the Lord God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our soul."

Father Adam closed the panel, sat back, and remembered Lilith as he wept.