NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge

NYC Midnight runs a series of writing competitions. They all involve writing a short piece of fiction in 48 hours. I noticed them about a year and a half ago, and this year signed up for the NYC Midnight flash fiction challenge. Participants are assigned a genre, a location, and an object and have 48 hours to write about a story with no more than 1,00o words. My mother had signed up first, and encouraged me to do so… I though, why not? I have serious issues writing an academic paper in less than 5,000 words. This would be good practice at brevity.

(link to the story I wrote for my second challenge: The bucket, the snake, and no pot at all.)

My first flash fiction challenge: Rom Com

Romantic comedy. I’ve never written rom com, and I don’t even really like rom com. My boyfriend does, though. He has made me watch many of his favorites. I am happy to watch them (though I sometimes fall asleep). (When he doesn’t poke me every time he notices me nodding off.) I don’t know how he watches them twice though. Probably more than twice… he makes his daughter watch them too 😉

Rom com. Location: Ice Cream Truck. Object: a dart.

The time was terrible. I was travelling home from an academic conference this summer when it was assigned. Having left the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in La Jolla, I drove to Riverside, where I stayed with old friends. By the time we’d finished dinner, talk, and wine, it was late, so I checked my assignment and went to bed. The next day I drove home to Springville. (Well, it’s not exactly home now, but it is my hometown, and I was staying with my boyfriend there. And it will be home again next year!) Then I was busy… but it doesn’t take long to write 1,000 words. I did it Sunday morning, proofread that afternoon, and submitted long before midnight EST (9pm for me).

“Half a turn, give or take”

Synopsis: Livy and Ollie meet at the ice-cream truck as children. Six years later, Livy revives her childhood rituals and possibly their relationship.

Livy set the dart on top of the post, pointing towards the house, and then turned it slowly clockwise 195 degrees. Just over half a turn. It was 12:55.

She sighted down the dart and through the trees and then walked forward, counting. She could hear the music. The Entertainer. You’d think they’d have a new one by now.

39 steps.

Used to be 55. Then 46.

The ice-cream truck was still in the street. She stood in the shade and looked around. Ollie wasn’t there. Of course? Yet?

Livy and her brother had christened the small grove of mulberry trees that separated their house from the “ice-cream street” Mirkwood even though it was not more than thirty feet across. Livy’s brother had helped her clear out a straight-ish path from the yard gate to the street on the other side of Mirkwood before he went to college. He showed her the dart trick so she could cross without being caught by monsters (she still had to run, until she met Ollie).

It took 46 steps, the summer she met Ollie. Then she stopped counting. She was thirteen.

So was Ollie. She told him about Mirkwood and the monsters, to distract him from problems she’d never imagined having.

Livy ’s brother moved out when she was seven. Her parents wouldn’t let her get a puppy. There were orcs and trolls in Mirkwood. Her best friend Amy went to camp during the summer. Those were Livy ’s problems.

When Ollie moved into the house where the ice-cream truck stopped he had to change his surname—and he couldn’t contact his friends. Ever. The last time his family had run away, it had only taken the Russians five months to find them, and it had all been Ollie’s fault.

At least, that’s what he told her, at first.

Later it turned out they had moved to La Jolla for the summer because Ollie’s father was working on a grant at UCSD. They’d be going back to Boston the last week of August.

Before Livy figured out he was lying, they’d spent weeks pretending to be hobbits and elves and orcs, setting traps and leaving messages in Mirkwood for each other, eating ice cream in the “fort” Livy’s brother had built for her, just pieces of plywood propped against a bush, listening to music and watching Netflix in Livy’s basement.

Then Livy met Ollie’s sister and learned The Truth.

She had printed a picture of Ollie and stuck it to their plywood wall with the dart through his heart.

He left a paper with many 😥🙏 and placed the dart back on the fence post.

Livy spun the dart to face the house and decided she didn’t like ice-cream.

Ollie’s family came back the next summer. She refused to talk to him. He took to hiding in Mirkwood and leaping out at her. As an incoming high school freshman, Livy thought herself too old for this—but by the end of June (and after a groveling apology on Ollie’s part) they were fast friends once again. They would have been more than friends, perhaps, had either one been a little less shy.

Amy wasn’t shy and the following summer, she didn’t do camp. She did Ollie instead, Livy thought spitefully.

At first, Ollie made an effort to see Livy too. Every day at 1pm they would meet at the ice-cream truck.

Every day at 12:55 Livy would spin the dart 195° from the house to the path.

They ate ice-cream and talked, then Ollie left. Livy knew he was going to Amy’s.

She went home and spun the dart back.

By August Ollie didn’t show up half the time. Then on August 8^th, he showed up with Amy.

Livy thought, 12 months of Amy, 3 months of Ollie, and she didn’t shove her ice cream in Amy’s face. She shoved it in Ollie’s.

The next year they were all 16. Amy and Ollie fell into each other’s arms in June (Livy refused to follow that thought through), but Amy could drive now and had a job in Del Mar.

On 4^th of July Something Happened. Later Amy would tell Livy ALL, and Livy would regret knowing, but the immediate result was Ollie texting 🎯 the next day at 12:55. Livy was only a few minutes late.

They ate ice-cream that day and every other day that summer. The fort having shrunk, they sat in the swing on Livy’s front porch. She listened to Ollie talk about Amy. He listened to Livy talk about her goals; they would be juniors, and everything mattered now. Livy had every class and successive SAT exams scheduled. Ollie just wanted to play piano.

Ollie held her hand, twice, in the final days before leaving for Boston, reaching across the cushions on the swing to pull their hands to rest midway between them.

Livy spent the next summer in Costa Rica working for a primatologist. Ollie spent one week in La Jolla—he left a backpack (contents: two darts and a USB drive with recordings of him playing piano) in their fort, buried under a pile of leaves—before flying to Paris. That was in 2013.

They didn’t see each other that year, nor had they since. Ollie had spent his summers in New York or Paris (piano), Livy had been busy keeping all her ducks in a row (Berkeley). They’d texted. Never Facetimed. But he’d texted a week ago, today’s date and 🍦.

Livy looked at her watch now, June 2019. It was 1:05. She left the shade to buy an ice cream, and then walked slowly back through Mirkwood. She didn’t count the steps. The ice cream was gone by the time she reached the backyard.

There were two darts on the fence post. Hers still pointed towards the path, the new one pointed towards the house.

She spun hers 165°.

For now it was their turn.