Once upon a time…well, it was actually just a week ago, a beloved Sepia personality asked:

yay! I love Fast Fiction Fridays at the Mutiny. Can we do it again next week?

Of course we can, darling. “55 Fiction Friday” is a meme I’ve been faithful to for a while; I’m happy to infect the Mutiny with it.

For those of you who missed last week’s brilliance and have no idea what I’m going on about, the idea behind “Fast Fiction” is simple:

Flash fiction, also called sudden fiction, micro fiction, postcard fiction or short-short fiction, is a class of short story of limited word length. Definitions differ but is generally accepted that flash fiction stories are at most 200 to 1000 words in length. Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word flash: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Traditional short stories are 2,000 to 10,000 words in length…One type of flash fiction is the short story with an exact word count. An example is 55 Fiction or Nanofiction. These are complete stories, with at least one character and a discernible plot, exactly 55 words long.[wiki]
More than a few bloggers have been writing a piece of nanofiction every Friday, for weeks. I was elated at the response that my post on this meme inspired— comment after comment containing perfect little gems of story— we’d be crazy NOT to create a tradition out of such goodness.

What goodness it was. By the time I closed comments at the end of the weekend (a practice I think I’ll continue), we were in the triple digits.

Umair made me lightheaded when he channeled the book I love most:
Transported back to 1951, the thought of making money by betting on cricket matches yet to happen was for some strange reason furthest from my mind, which should give you a sense of just how at home I felt with the whole affair. But then: “I wish she’d married either Kabir or Amit…”

Brand spanked anew Guest blogger Ads also penned a 55 I adored:

“OK, almost done. Better?”
F T O M Z became a smudge.
“Or worse?”

“Worse.”

“Ok. Well, your right eye is 20/125, but your left eye is actually 15/20.”
For a moment he wondered if he could be the guy that singlehandedly brought back the monocle, but ultimately, he went with the wire-rimmed Kenneth Coles.

Finally, there was one piece of nanofiction which moved into my home and loitered around corners like a ghost playing tricks on my peripheral vision. It was the story I loved most, out of the almost hundred that were contributed (and that’s saying something, because dozens of them were excellent). Paranoid Android, take a bow:

All that stood between Simone and her honeymoon was a report submission.

“He is never on time!” she fumed, as the office clock ticked 8:45 AM. She could almost see the single-engine plane they were flying to Hawaii. She gazed at infinity in clear NY sky, to divert her mind.

“Isn’t that plane flying too low?”

I can’t believe an entire week has passed since I read that for the first time. I’m sure I’ll be expressing a similarly incredulous sentiment next week, when I meander through what you are about to write, looking for my next set of favorites. No pressure.

Now…on your marks, get set…create. :)

:+:

An enormous amount of gratitude to MD-didi for leaving a comment last week which provided me with a title when I could not conjure an apposite name for this post today. :)