Vance collected mistakes, writing them down in a small notebook she kept tucked in the back pocket of her jeans. V, Eva noticed, only pulled it out on two occasions – when she took note of a mistake she had made and when it came time to take it back. This time it was the latter.

V stared desolately at the last page of her notebook.

“You know,” Eva let out, her tone melancholy, “this won’t change how she feels about us.

“I know.”

“This won’t bring her back.”

“I know!” V wiped her misty eyes. “It’s just, I can’t leave things the way I did.”
Eva nodded.

As Eva did, V swiped the matchbox from the floor in front of her, taking one out. She struck the black-headed match quickly, catching a flame. She looked over at Eva whose attention was drawn to V’s wistful eyes.

“Are you coming?” V asked.

Eva took in a deep breath. “Yeah”

Eva shifted herself closer to V, plucking the joint from the crevice of the rotting floorboard between them. Eva held the tip of it to the flame, letting it burn. Drawing it away, she then brought it up to V’s lips letting her take a drag. As she did, V whipped the match clean of its flame then let it fall to the ground. Eva then hastily took a drag for herself, afterwards letting it set in as V had done.

Eva’s and V’s hands soon met, their fingers intertwining; together they exhaled the grayish-white smoke, releasing it into the air. They could see it quickly begin to swirl then slow, soon pausing. Time itself had stopped. All things they perceived began to blur and fade. A sinking feeling came over them; Eva and V, together, fell backwards through time.

On “Trip” 

This short piece was conceived after being assigned a micro-fiction prompt for a fiction writing class I am currently in. I don’t personally like writing micro-fiction, mostly because I am terrible at it. If you love writing micro-fiction and are good at it, more power to you. The guidelines I had for writing this masterpiece (<- sarcasm) were the following: It must be under 300 words in length, contain one of the listed first liners (mine was “Vance collected mistakes…”), and be tied to one of the given pictures, which I provided above.

Surprisingly, most people in my class chose to write about the car in the picture than the house. I, for whatever reason, found the house to be a bit more interesting and inspiring, but maybe that’s just me. That said, in the end the house itself didn’t even end up in the final draft…only its floorboards. Sad day.

Disclaimer: I do NOT own the image in this post. I was able to trace it back to a fitness/life style blog titled Sunshine & Soup by a person named Amy. The title of their blog post was “Creepy houses & my 100th post.”