As you may have seen in Saige’s post this Sunday, we’ve done a fun little exercise together. We picked a prompt together and each wrote a flash fiction piece! We thought this would be a unique way to showcase our individual writing skills and see what each other comes up with based on the same prompt. We set a soft limit of 1,000 words.

We have agreed not to peek at each other’s pieces until their respective posts go live, so Saige hasn’t seen this before, and I only saw hers when it came out on Sunday. I think the most fun part of this was to see the difference in where our respective brains went, and I think both of our pieces are a great representation of our personalities as writers. It was a super fun exercise and I encourage you all to try it out with a buddy!

The prompt, couresty of EA Deverell at Lady Writer: “The floor tasted like…”

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Head Trauma and A Big Problem

by Ava Christina

The floor tasted like piss and blood.

My body was like cracked concrete where it lay against the linoleum. Hot bands of burning pain stretched across my nose, forehead, and cheek. I bit back a scream of agony as I rolled myself off my face and onto my side, groaning and willing my eyelids to peel open.

I saw the room on its side, the metal table and tools on the wall hooks still in their place just past the bars of the metal cage.

What happened? The last thing I remembered was the feeling like a train hit me in the skull.

I lifted my hand and felt around for wounds. An angry throbbing gash spread from my ear to the center back of my head. My hand came back tacky with drying blood.

How long was I out?

I felt a sense of panic begin to build, but I didn’t know why. Just that I was missing something.

Bracing myself on my elbow, I heaved my battered body up to a sitting position. The motion made my head swim sickeningly, and before I knew it, I was vomiting into my lap.

The room still spun, but after blinking a few times and taking several deep breaths of sour stinking air, I felt okay enough to look around the room.

There were the bars of the cold metal cage. The bucket in the corner, now knocked on its side, a spray of cloudy piss splattered across the floor.

Of course, I stopped smelling the bucket a long time ago.

The steel surface of the examination table shone in the light of the single naked bulb hanging out of the ceiling, the plaster cracking around it. There was some blood on the table, but it looked like it was almost dry.

This caused my panic to take a stronger hold of me, though I couldn’t bring to mind exactly why.

I focused on my body, what hurt and what didn’t; though honestly, most of it hurt, and bad. My nose was smashed crooked and the right side of my face would be a hideous blue bruise tomorrow. There were a few long but shallow scratches on my right forearm, just deep enough for little scabs of drying blood to poke through the skin.

 Wincing, I unsteadily pulled myself to my feet, which caused another wave of vertigo to smash into me like a wave. I threw out a hand and caught myself on the bars of the cage. My chest lifted and fell as I took several fortifying deep breaths.

“Okay,” I said aloud to myself. “Okay, you’re okay.”

I lifted my head and looked out into the room, inspecting the wall. The tools hung on their pegs, many of them rusted and decaying from lack of proper care. The hacksaw was stained brown and broken on one end, barely usable. The screwdriver was stained black from constantly being heated by the torch, which lay waiting on a workbench against the wall below the peg rack. The forge hammer-

The forge hammer wasn’t there. An empty spot stood out on the peg board like a mouth missing a tooth.

“Shit,” I muttered to myself, “Shit, shit, shit.”

My heart quickened, and I heard blood pounding in my ears. I whipped my head around the cage, causing my vision to flicker and my knees to buckle, but not before I saw it.

The door to the cage was hanging open.

When I came to the second time, I was leaned up against the bars. I hadn’t cracked my face on the floor again, thankfully.

The cage. The door. It’s open.

I repeated this in my mind as I slowly pulled myself to my feet, scrabbling at the bars for support.

I didn’t want to black out again; something was wrong here. I needed to clear my head enough to put it together. Thoughts were so hard to hear through the church bells clanging against my skull. Just the pain alone made me feel like I might be sick again.

I managed a few steps out through the open cage door and past the examination table, and a cold breeze blew in, turning the tacky blood on the back of my head to ice against my throbbing skin.

Wait. A breeze.

Then an image flashed through my mind, and my body went cold.

The van in the parking lot, where the streetlight blinked on and off in the death throes of old fluorescents. The figure cloaked in shadow.

The screaming, the begging, the tears.

The blood.

I could see it, hear it again.

I spun around, forgetting my condition, and would’ve went down again if I hadn’t thrown a stabilizing hand out onto the exam table.

The door to the room was wide open.

A wordless groan vibrated in my chest as I realized I was probably much too late.

I lurched forward anyway, careful to move my neck gingerly, not wanting to lose my feet again. My toe kicked a pair of rusty pliers as I stepped toward the open door, sending them spinning across the filthy linoleum.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I grunted through gritted teeth.

Emerging through the door and into the chill of the deepest part of night, I looked around wildly, cursing.

Aside from a few drops of blood leading out toward the treeline and a scrap of torn blouse hanging from a bush, there was no sign of her.

Incensed, seeing nothing but blood red rage, I screamed out into the night, the echoes of my enraged cry dampened by the rustling of leaves in the wind.

She was long gone.

Shit, shit, shit.

How had she overpowered me, managed to get the forge hammer out of my hands?

That’s when I knew it was all over.

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Writing flash fiction is a great exercise to get your mind in a creative headspace, and it can be a great way to explore just a little snippet of a scene or story. Thanks to Saige for doing this fun exercise with me!

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