STOP!

(A piece of off-the-cuff flash fiction.)

Things were finally adding up. When she clicked back into the here-and-now, the football had finished, and the proceeding advert for a betting site almost had. The first words Less heard were, when the fun stops, stop. She thought, yes, that’s only sensible, and wondered how best to take the advice.

Less went for a run, because focusing on the rhythm of her feet on the asphalt and her lungs sucking in air helped her to think. The quality of her thought would be enhanced by the endorphins produced by the exercise, so the Media said, so she went a bit further than usual. Unfortunately, Less was experiencing a fibromyalgia flare-up, and soon the pain in her wrists and shoulders became too much for the so-called ‘feel-good’ hormones to counterbalance, and she was forced to stop.

After warming down, stretching and showering, she was ready for a drive. Apparently, life is all about the journey, so journey she did. It was good to take advice, she thought. If you don’t, it’s obsolete, so she felt obliged to the good people who shared their worldly wisdom with her. You have to have faith. Less laughed at her own irony.

She must have clicked out again, because when she found herself clicking back in, she was on a motorway, approaching a flyover. Her attention was grabbed – as intended – by the spray-painted blue words someone had managed to mark on the concrete. ‘Look down for a quick death’, Less read. So she did. Watching her foot in its Converse trainer depress the accelerator further towards the metal, she wondered when and how things would start looking up for her. Because time heals, and you have to have faith that things will get better.

However, Less never got to look up. Things stopped there and then, and she clicked out, finally, with a bang.

(C) Morwenna Blackwood,2024

#FlashFiction #SignOfTheTimes