It's a precious resource and I wonder if we always use it wisely.
With these thoughts in my head Lillie's Five Sentence Fiction this week couldn't have been more timely.
Time
Once more she checked her diary, flicking through each page,
frantically searching, she tipped it on its side, shaking it and hoping
something would fall from its pages to appease the debt collector.
Tossing it away she reached for the calendar hanging on the wall,
her last resort.
January, February,
March, she searched in vain, April,
May, June, there must be a month missing, July, August, September, like the hole in the pocket of her
favourite winter coat, October, November,
December, there had to be a rent in the fabric of time where the days had
fallen through and escaped her, lost forever.
Glancing up through the window she could see the man in the
bowler hat look pointedly at his watch, he shook his head sadly before raising
his hand to knock at her door.
She’d been frivolous and spent up, spent what she could ill
afford, she had nothing to show for her extravagance and now her time was up!
Love your months paragraph...and great message (at this time of year!) spend wisely!
ReplyDeleteso glad that paragraph worked - I wasn't sure when I wrote it.
DeleteAnd thanks as ever for your kind comments Lisa!
I agree with Lisa, the months paragraph is great. I so get this, the older I get time just seems to fly by faster.
ReplyDeleteTime does seem to fly - can you believe we are already almost half way through December and NaNoWriMo seems a distant memory!
DeleteBeautifully done, Sarah. Time moves far too quickly and I think, no matter if we live to 100, we'll feel the same way as your character when the final moment comes. I have one 'critique' though in that I don't like the exclamation point on the last sentence. But that is, as my mother would have said, a small detail in a large camp.
ReplyDeleteI always enjoy reading your flash fiction.
Always happy to have a comment from you Jo-Anne, even with a critique. (almost put an exclamation point, or mark as we would say in England, at end of that sentence but hasitly deleted it! LOL)
DeleteI can't quite decide if the collector has come at the very end of her life or is just there with other time demands to be settled.
She is certainly a person who has frittered away a few too many minutes here and there but haven't we all - youngest son was telling me just this evening I spend too much time on my laptop - hmmmm...