Flash Fiction - Something Ugly, a Plan, Food

Flash fiction based on mystery prompts is tremendous fun to write. If you're isolated at home with any other creative people, turn it into a party game! It can be a literary exquisite corpse, if you will. Turn it into a drinking game! Have a celebratory drink every time you complete a round without anyone using the following terms: coronavirus, COVID-19, pandemic, quarantine, social distancing, apocalypse.


Something Ugly

The siding was sea-foam green, at least after we gave it a good power washing in the spring. It wasn’t a hideous color for say, a throw pillow, but it was a curious choice for an entire house.  Of course, this was Idaho, and there was no accounting for taste, or property value. We paid cash and we moved in in a hurry, right before the winter descended on the panhandle like a straitjacket, stark white and restrictive.

A Plan

The plan was to fix it up, live there for a year or two, and sell it for a profit.  Problem was, our savings were gone and neither of us had ever swung a hammer, much less flipped a house.  The closest we came was a long, drunken night watching HGTV in a Montana motel room, but that’s how it all started.  To this day, I can’t hear the words “open concept” without feeling a bit of bile rise in my throat.

Food

The first part of the house we tried to reno was the kitchen, for the “return on investment,” another phrase I can no longer stomach.  We gutted the old appliances and sold them on Craigslist, only to find out the Home Depot would have to special order new ones to fit the proportions of our tiny 1950s kitchen.  Neither of us were cooks, it was no great hardship at first, but I sure wish we would have had a drunken night of watching Food Network before we acted in such haste.