Fifties by the Fire — a fifty-word, prompt-based writing challenge. Feel free to share your response below…or simply read/comment to join in on the fun.
Prompt: Write a fifty-word story based on John Lightle’s photo, “A String of Droughts.” Here are the other guidelines:
Make sure your piece is exactly fifty words. Feel free to use Word Counter or the word processor you use.
Write a title with the genre in the first line. (Example: Old Soul, Fiction)
The title does not factor into the word count.
Good luck and have fun. Happy writing!
Special thanks to John Lightle for providing his photo for our writing prompt.
John Lightle is a Texas writer, poet, and photographer who spends many hours sitting on his woodpile contemplating. When away from his frame shop, he schleps his artwork among area art shows. The job takes him across the countryside, occasionally overseas, photographing the quiet resolve found within the golden hours.
Dusty relics off old Route 66: rusted Winnebago, vacant motels. An abandoned homestead sat crookedly in a field, broken windows and fallow earth as beaten down as the economy. The town itself had dried up long ago.
So many empty places, she wrote, and they all remind me of me.
*Author Note: John’s stunning photo dovetailed perfectly with the journaling from my cross country road trip a few years back. Love how this week’s prompt is an image!*
Abandoned, the building sat like an open sore on the otherwise empty plain.
Brett stared at the house in which the pain of a childhood best forgotten had unfolded, willing the ruin to crumble and fall. He had buried his father yesterday. It was time to leave the past behind.
Dust poofed with each step I took into the house. The silence was deafening and achingly familiar. A thread of memory tugged at me. With it came pain and a voice.
“Welcome home.”
I knew that voice, but before I could place it, blackness swept in, and I was gone.
Looking back at the house I realized why I'd always felt safer outside it. For too long I'd believed it was I who was haunted and not the walls themselves, like a rib cage of stone and wood and plaster where the beating heart of my childhood terror sat caged.
New World - Fiction
This is the house that saved us.
We were passing through – on our way to Albuquerque – when the first bombs fell. The doomsdayer poked his head outside and waved us in emphatically.
Months later we emerge to a world of ash and ruin.
For some reason, we choose to rebuild.
Reckless Abandon - Nonfiction
Dusty relics off old Route 66: rusted Winnebago, vacant motels. An abandoned homestead sat crookedly in a field, broken windows and fallow earth as beaten down as the economy. The town itself had dried up long ago.
So many empty places, she wrote, and they all remind me of me.
*Author Note: John’s stunning photo dovetailed perfectly with the journaling from my cross country road trip a few years back. Love how this week’s prompt is an image!*
Crumble (Fiction)
Abandoned, the building sat like an open sore on the otherwise empty plain.
Brett stared at the house in which the pain of a childhood best forgotten had unfolded, willing the ruin to crumble and fall. He had buried his father yesterday. It was time to leave the past behind.
Amnesia - Fiction
Dust poofed with each step I took into the house. The silence was deafening and achingly familiar. A thread of memory tugged at me. With it came pain and a voice.
“Welcome home.”
I knew that voice, but before I could place it, blackness swept in, and I was gone.
Lost Treasure – Fiction
“Mitchell, there it is!” said Jen.
The ancient house was crumbling from the decay of old age.
Entering the stone building, they found the trap door.
Spider webs clung to the ceiling and stairs as they crept down and into the basement.
Jen screams as she gets to the bottom.
Life, Surrendered (prose-poem)
She’s come back here now,
but everyone and everything are gone,
the family home, an empty frame.
No more days of tending animals,
digging up turnips,
shoveling snow,
washing overalls.
She stands now before the persistent wind
that blows across the heated fields,
listening,
breathing in the fragrance of grass.
Sharron at 🍁Leaves
The Honeymoon Inn, Fiction:
"It's a fixer upper, but it'll do."
"Honey, this looks nothing like the picture on Airbnb."
"Don't worry, it was a really good deal."
"Does it even have plumbing?"
"All we need is a sturdy shovel. One hole to drink from. Another to shit in."
"I'm sleeping at my mother's."
Safe as Houses — Supernatural Horror
Looking back at the house I realized why I'd always felt safer outside it. For too long I'd believed it was I who was haunted and not the walls themselves, like a rib cage of stone and wood and plaster where the beating heart of my childhood terror sat caged.