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Into the Closet

Photo copyrighted: Rochelle Wisoff Fields
Photo copyrighted: Rochelle Wisoff Fields

Peter please take the axe,  then go down to the cellar and fetch some firewood back. But mum Rawhide is on the TV. Can’t it wait. No, your father will be back soon, and it would be good to have the fire lit in the front room.

Down four flights of stairs, muttering went the boy, then into the Victorian panelled cellar, where the axe swings with gusto into the panelling. Multiple coloured stars explode around the boy, before darkness descended upon him. The fireman’s axe had cut through a wood panel and the electric supply to the fire station.

Footnotes:

In this story the boy was locked in a cupboard for safe keeping until his father calmed down, for the fire station and its phone links were put out of action. That day the boys father was in charge of managing the county’s fire services.

This Post Has 34 Comments
    1. I can understand that Rochelle. My muse is taking me on some tangled routes at present. This story is somewhat historical and factual, however the boy did have a happy homelife. Sorry that the link to the closet is rather tenuous. The building in which the fire station is situated was built in the early Georgian period, this boy and his family live on the top floor. Fortunately for the boy the axe was heavily insulated, sometime prior to this period, firemen could die if their uninsulated axes cut into a mains electric supply.

    1. Hi Iain, sorry my writing is quite tangled at present. Although the axe was insulated, the boy received quite a shock. His mother put him in the cupboard whilst she calmed his father down. The story is set in the late 1950s

  1. I’m sorry Michael, this story is confusing. It could do with an edit or two, maybe.
    Some punctuation like quote marks, paragraph separation, etc.

    I appreciate the effort you take to let the story tell itself but, and no offense here, this feels like more of a free write than an exercise in flash fiction.

    Remember the guidelines: 100 words, a beginning, middle, and an end.
    I hope you will try again. I do believe you have a story here.

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