#ThursThreads Week 614 - The Mourningstar

 Not going to blather on much today. This week's installment in my The Mourningstar drabble courtesy of the #ThursThreads prompts hosted by Siobhan Muir. 

You can check out the contest rules and other entries on her blog, as well as check out her books and other things she is working on. 

This week's prompt is "The clock was ticking." 

My entry:

He knew he couldn’t hide forever. As much as he tried to re-enter society—re-enter reality, he found it was nearly impossible. Doing so would make it real, acknowledging her death happened, that she was irrevocably gone.

Everyone kept telling him that everyone handles grief differently and to take all the time he needed to process her death. There would never be enough time for that.

He would stop time if he could.

Despite his wishes, the clock was ticking. Time continued to move forward, steadily and sure, tick tick tick.

He poured himself another whiskey, having stopped counting them a long time ago. The alcohol did little to assuage the pain, no matter how much he drank. If she was here, he’d be right well drunk, but she wasn’t, so he wasn’t.  

Movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention, a familiar wisp of golden blonde hair. The scent of the ocean soon followed.

“Come to torture me some more?” he asked her ghost. “Thought you had enough fun toying with me already.”

His wife stood there with the same sad expression that she had the last time he saw her ghost. She looked perfect, not a single hair out of place. No broken bones or fractures or blood, unlike the day he had to identify her body at the morgue, mangled and lifeless.

“Why are you here?”

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The #Mourningstar drabbles are based on the Lucifer TV show. While my story is original and divergent from canon, I am playing in another creator's sandbox. 

#ThursThreads Week 613 & Other Musings

 The #ThursThreads flash fiction contest was off last week so there wasn't a prompt, but I've been busy writing other things in the meantime. I've been pretty successful in writing nearly every day. Sometimes it's only for an hour or less, other times a few hours. Some of the time is more productive in word count, but all of it is productive in some manner. Either outright writing or going back and fixing a section. 

A writer friend gave me a great piece of advice a few weeks ago that has really struck with me, especially while I work through a thorny part of a story I'm in the middle of. She told me "If you find yourself really stuck, chances are whatever it is that's gone wrong is actually at least a few scenes earlier if not more."

As I sat at my laptop and realized that my characters didn't have the same information I had in my head - that they should, or at least one of them should have that information as a source of their motivation, I went back a few scenes and saw where a slight tweak to dialogue and adding a bit more to the scene solved the issue of the missing motivation. Some truly great advice that I am sure I will use many, many times in the future. 

My #ThursThreads story 'The Mourningstar' continues this week. I barely posted the prompt in time, but it got in before Siobhan closed it. Now we wait for judgment from the guest judge. You can check out the other great entries at her website here. 

The Prompt: “Only one minute remained.”

Time seemed to come to a standstill as his brother manifested from the shadows, his boots echoing across the cement floor. It had been years since he had last seen his brother and he looked exactly the same. Of course he would. He didn’t age unless he wanted to age.

“Brother, you have five minutes to divulge what you know before I make you regret your ill-advised scheme.”

“I’m sorry about C-“

“Don’t you dare. You don’t get the privilege to say her name,” he snarled.

His brother held his hands up in a placating gesture. “I’m sorry all the same. I always liked her.”

“If you liked her so much, why wouldn’t you just tell me what you know? Or was that just a ploy to get me to come meet you?”

“We both know you wouldn’t have come if you knew it was me that reached out to you.”

He stared at his brother, his arms loose at his sides, his weight on the balls of his feet. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but he would be prepared for whatever happened. The minutes ticked by until only one minute remained.

“Time’s almost up, Brother. Tell me what you know about my wife’s death or we are done here.”

The screech of metal startled both men, as a large freight door at the back of the warehouse slid open, a figure illuminated in the doorframe.

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Thanks for reading and leave a comment if you feel so inclined. :)

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The #Mourningstar drabbles are based on the Lucifer TV show. While my story is original and divergent from canon, I am playing in another creator's sandbox.