For years ino would give a writing prompt for a flash fiction story, and we both wrote one with the same title. Some of them are no longer on this blog. Here’s one of my favourites:

My story

My colleague passed round photographs, and I remembered my photo of a seagull alone in the blue sky. Then I remembered my many photos of flowers, the album I put them in, and later the folder on my computer.

But these were photographs of a wedding, and my wedding had been postponed on a rainy May afternoon and in the end, had never happened.

The bride and bridesmaids in my colleague’s pictures held bouquets of flowers framed by tufty, trailing leaves and starred with a smooth loveliness, just like the flowers in my album. The expanse of sky above the wedding party was a deep blue; they were lucky to have had a fine day. But no birds could be seen there, flying.

Ino’s story

I announced that the subject of my lecture was ‘seagulls’, and everyone turned their heads away and muttered about seagull droppings landing on car windscreens.

“Why aren’t seagulls more popular?” I wondered, and an albatross flew by outside flapping its long wings in a slightly overlapping way, right by the window of the lecture hall.

I began by speaking about pale blue and pale green eggs in nests, precarious on a windy cliff side. Mentally, my audience climbed and leaned out to see the eggs more closely, and then some stole them, and some smashed them, and only a few nurtured the young birds.

After all, who wants unpopular birds which do not hatch until the audience are back home and putting their dinner in the cooking pot? I can see them hatching, and I hear the crack.

This is my original grainy photograph from 1983!