Flash Fiction February - Left Lost
This flashfic is inspired by a prompt posted on 20th February 2022 by the Writer’s Digest to write about “something that is lost”. This story is just under 300 words. Enjoy!The raw light of the first springtime sunrise glinted off the uneven edge of a lonesome cell phone. It looked like it might have been an iPhone, but with its cracked screen turned up at the sky, all its identifiable features were hidden besides its distinctive shape. Slowly, the sun caressed the smooth corners, briefly filling the deep cervices caused by the cracks and racing around the spherical edge of a thousand, glistening raindrops.
Gradually, the sun crept over the damp porch boards, lighting a path to the broken glass beneath the sliding back doors. A dull green moss already grew on the haphazard shards. A vine twisted around the top post of the railing descending down the porch steps. Lush, breathless leaves imperceptivity turned towards the sun, reaching out over the quivering horizon. Faintly, the sea hushed, its long tongues licking the final step and leaving it blistering with molluscs, seaweed and salt.
Who knows how the phone got there, how it still remained there, when a hungry sea could so easily of swept it into oblivion at every successive high tide. Was it the contrast of cold night and broiling day that had reduced its glass to pieces? Perhaps the tile now on the third porch step had struck the phone’s surface some time ago, the slate eventually coming to a rest in two halves several levels below. Or whoever once owned it had had a habit of dropping it on the hardwood, wearing its screen with every accident and brutal fall until, at last, they left it where it landed, where the world could look at it and wonder, who did it belong to? What happened to them all those years ago? And who had they been trying to call?20/02/2022
To Be Proofread