Flash Fiction: January 7, 2025

The writing prompt: A poet finds that his writing begins to predict the future.

He gazed down at the commotion from the window of his third-floor apartment. The sound of an ambulance was approaching, but it was the chatter on the street below that had initially grabbed his attention. Up until that point, the man had been toiling away on his typewriter, jotting down prose that had been seemingly going nowhere. The loud bang had startled him enough to drop his cigarette onto the wooden floor, rather than the ashtray beside him. Next, a woman screamed. The sound of footsteps came next, followed by a man shouting for help.

Just five minutes earlier, he had been completely lost in the silence of the midnight hour. Upon sitting down at his typewriter at the stroke of eight o’clock, the image of a small boy appeared in his mind’s eye. He immediately found it cathartic to lean into the idea, easing into the writing process as he did every evening after dinner. Four cigarettes later, he wasn’t sure how many words he had written, but he had become aware of the darkness now shrouding the typewriter. The poem he was drafting about the boy had taken a turn with the rising of the waxing moon. At some point between his first cigarette and the one now dying on the floor, the man had lost sight of his original idea. The sound on the street below him, however, made it seem like a moot point.

After a few moments, he grabbed his overcoat and decided to gauge the situation for himself. Carefully, he opened the front door to the brownstone and quietly took a position on the stoop. As the sound of the ambulance grew louder, his neighbors began to scatter. In the middle of the street was a small boy, face down on the wet pavement. As the man suddenly recalled the direction of his poem, he gazed up at his apartment. Smoke was now seeping out from the window.