[2010-01-16] 100-word sci-fi flash fiction for contest


This is a story I wrote for a 100-word flash fiction contest recently posted on Boing Boing. The theme was "Found in Space." It's 100 words exactly. I didn't win!


We found it out beyond the Pleiades, trapped in orbit by an unnamed star. We found the golden etching, bright as our memory of eons before, still secure beneath the antennae. We traced the curves of the figures we'd drawn and, with something like a sigh, recalled the weight of those limbs, the smells of that skin, the great terrors of birth and longing and loss. And with something like a shudder we remembered agony, and aloneness, and the world made of corpses that was our womb.

And with something like a laugh we turned outward, then, and moved away.

last modified 2010-01-16

sean@seanmichaelragan.com