Flash Fiction Writing Challenge
Inspired by one of my Pinterest boards, this is a flash fiction writing challenge based on the following theme:
‘Doorway to…’
“The door you are afraid to enter might lead you to the most beautiful and magical places.”
Use one of the images below as inspiration, write a 300-word flash fiction story about what lies beyond the door. Who will you find and where will the doorway lead you? Any genre (except erotica) is acceptable. As I write for a teen audience, please be aware that under 18’s frequent my blog.
Door Number 1.
Door Number 2.
Post your story in the comments below and be sure to read, like and comment on any stories posted by other entrants.
If there is enough interest in this writing exercise, I will add more doors in a couple of weeks.
Have fun.
Header: Image courtesy of Praisaeng at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Shelley Wilson Author 
That is stunning, Samantha. Thank you for sharing 🙂
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Thanks for the creativity burst, it was fun!
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Door to Esyld
I’m exhausted from walking. I loved Looe when my grandmother was here; I loved my grandmother. Now it makes me sad. I ask to turn back. My mother says yes but then we find ourselves standing before a gated wall.
‘I didn’t even see this wall’ says my mother. Neither did I; we were both just walking, looking down at our feet, thinking about my grandmother. The gate is open and it’s beautiful, so green. ‘Shall we go through? Just quickly?’ my mother asks. I nod. I want to go in.
There is a bench being warmed by the sun and the wood smells like happiness. My mother sits while I walk further, follow a path that leads beyond bushes.
A girl is here. She sits on grass and her hands hold dirt. She is looking at me, piercing me with eyes too bright. I walk towards her and she rises onto booted feet, and that’s when I notice her dress. She is dressed as if from another time. Looe has many festivals, I think. She reaches out her hands and I smile as the substance twinkles in the light. It is not dirt. I know the sight, the smell, this is tin that she holds. I hold her hands a moment.
My grandmother is watching us from the bushes. Her face is radiance.
I shake slightly as I drop my hands. I am alone now. I turn to the bushes, to where my grandmother stood. I remember. I had forgotten. Esyld has spoken to me one last time.
The miner’s daughter, Ictis bound, her parents unreturned
Her veins protrude a bloody tin
Desire for those she loved outlived her human frame
Her soul creates anew,
Firm love replacing pain
Unseen, unheard, to all but those
Whose sorrow likens to.
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This entry was emailed to me by seventeen year old student, Heather Shakespear
She recognised this place, she recognised the rusted pipes and dampened walls, the smell of waste and despair filled her nostrils. Though she was confused she couldn’t help but wonder where were the others? Did their plan work? Memories came flooding back as she looked at the empty beds and tears streamed down her face as she thought of the screams escaping her companions lungs, the cries from young children as they were strapped down to their beds. She rubbed her wrists only to feel the scars, the scars left behind from the leather straps that once bound her to the metal frame. Her toes tingled as she recalled the sensation of being held down against her will on a bath of ice. She took a few steps forward to see clearer into the room she was once held, but stopped as she stood on a lump. Holding her breath she gazed down to see what she had stood on, she gazed at the remains of the leather strap. She fell backwards and then the screams became real, circling her and water ran down her face,
“Not the hose, no please anything but the hose.”
The cries got louder and the fluid colder.
“Not the ice bath! I can’t bare the ice bath!”
She pulled at her clothes trying to shake the feeling of being pulled and touched, they ripped and blood seeped through but then someone grabbed her head and long lock of blonde hair fell silently to the ground. It was all happening again! But it couldn’t, but it was! She wished it wasn’t, but it was.
She pulled her knees to her chest and wept, she felt blood dribble room where she had pulled her hair out and she realised the water she had felt was her own cold sweat, she held bits of cloth in the palms, then a cold dark voice echoed through the room.
“Welcome to WARD 5!”
She screamed!
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Ward 5
‘Welcome to Ward 5’, the words above the door read, the letters fashioned from what was once brightly-coloured paper. Of course, that’d been long ago and now the paper, like everything else, was faded and tattered and worn away by the abrasions of time and the hundreds of hands that had caressed and palmed and cupped everything within reaching distance.
Grace had been a Nurse, then, and she only had to close her eyes to see it as it had been on that day she’d first stepped through that doorway. Henson had been in charge here then and she’d been freshly qualified and keen to make a difference to the world, albeit only one person at a time. She’d wrinkled her nose at the smell – you eventually got used to the smell of the urine and faeces, although all five of the men she’d dated while she’d worked there hadn’t, each of them citing her peculiar odour as one of the strikes against her when they’d eventually parted – but it’d been no worse than any of the care homes she’d worked in during her works placements. The same acrid bite at the back of your throat, the same pale green and beige corridors and, strangely enough, the same faces on each of your charges.
“Well?” the policeman said, his no-nonsense manner yanking her back from her reminiscences. “Do you remember anything? About Henson. And Raymond Carter, the Director?”
I nodded. I could recall everything. About the ‘innoculations’ and the psychological profiling exercises and the way that we were told the doctors had clearance from the Medical Governance Board to do those ‘tests’. Remembering it was all too easy. It was the forgetting of their wild-eyed faces and their continual screaming that was far more difficult.
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