Friday Flash Fiction: A stopped clock

Friday Fictioneers is on Facebook hosted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. You can read other stories or, better, join in and write your own at https://rochellewisoff.com/. A complete story in 100 words in response to a photo prompt.  This week I realise I’ve been trying to channel my inner Merricat (I recently read and fell in love with Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and there are some wonderful descriptions of what’s kept in the cellars and the rituals of how it is used or not.

closet

When we moved here, the cupboard under-stairs was chill and full of forgotten things:

Ten jars of lavender honey

Plum preserve prinked with peppercorns and cloves

Old bottles of gin with sloes burst

A tray of skeleton mice laid out

Pickled frogs…

 

Which we ate and drank and threw away (the mice we buried in the garden).

Cleaned out the cupboard, added light and silly things, unmended-or-not-needed-now-but. Someone, someday will wear red monster slippers.

It is airy too with space for things we fear. These have multiplied of late. That clock for instance, always stopping at exactly the same time.

30 thoughts on “Friday Flash Fiction: A stopped clock

  1. This is a very chilling story to for some reason. I get an unsettled feeling of what those fears might be and how they might connect to the clock. Well done.

    1. Thanks Neil. It started off as a piece about someone who keeps everything extremely tidy and puts anything that doesn’t fit into the cupboard.

    1. HI Susan, thank you so much. We had a clock a bit like that when I was growing up and it seemed to me then that it had a life of its own!

  2. I adore this, Creepy but beautiful, gorgeously written descriptions with a chunk of mystery thrown in. No matter how much they renovate that cupboard, still the darkness reasserts itself. My favourite FF this weel, Rachel

      1. I sympathise! I groped my way into Word Press a couple of years ago, not being very tech savvy and not knowing how to add links or images or videos. But I discovered it all eventually. A link to your book would be good – it sounds wonderful, by the way 🙂

  3. An interesting list of items. You set the closing up well. Beautifully written.
    (don’t know what happened to my first comment. perhaps it’ll show up after I click “post”)

    1. Thank you so much. I hoped that the different elements would come together – but you can never be sure!

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