For this assignment we had to create a flash fiction using 500 words or less and have it be a completed story. I drew inspiration from WW1 to tell my story, I originally thought about having it be on the christmas truce but opted for it to be at the end of the war. I chose WW1 because of the history behind it and how to show that war is hell and that most soldiers just wanted peace and for the war to be over but showing it through the main characters want of the flower on the battlefield.
The Great Flower
The strange whistling sound from the sky, the horrific screams, and the smell of rot. They were all horrible and unnecessary in the eyes of James, he had always been a pacifist but now he was in the middle of the worst war ever: WW1. The war had raged across Europe for several years, but an end was in sight. The Germans were losing but James was still stuck here, on the front lines. He and his unit had been based in the trenches for months and the casualties were starting to take their toll on everyone, especially James. Today is the 10th of November, 1918.
Slouched over sitting on one of the many benches in one of the trenches staring blankly with his brown eyes across to the other side of the cramped and muddy trench. As James sat tranquilly amongst the yelling and the falling bombs, his commanding officer ran by but stopped suddenly. The officer took his rifle and put it in his hands and pulled him from his small hovil and gave him a pair of binoculars. James reluctantly surveyed no man’s land. He saw the barb wire, the mud, and the impact craters, nothing new in this never-ending slaughter.
His eyes then came across something new a bright object among the brown and the grey of the clouds. A bright red flower in the middle of no man's land, slowly his face molded into a confused expression. Nothing could survive in no man's land it had been shelled for weeks months even, it was impossible. His face contorted in to deep thought his posture released into an open and accepting, he then was brought out by a quick snap. He was torn. He wanted the flower, but he had a family to get back to. The moon had now come out and was hitting the flower it had color unlike anything else in the grey of no man's land. He made up his mind, he wanted the flower.
He started to climb out of the trench his hands slipping in the mud from the sides of the trench. He then felt a sharp tug on the back of his uniform and he fell hard and fast to the ground. His body made a huge splash in the mud, which k soaked his back in mud and water. The man who pulled him down looked at him incredulously. After the exchange of looks he moved down the trench, James then resumed his climb, finally finding himself standing in no man's land. Bullets whizzed by his head and he fell to the ground in search of safety.
He then spent all night crawling through the mud and barbed wire. James's hand was finally inches away from the flower. He reach out and picked it. He stood up and the bullets resumed firing, one catching the flower and obliterating it in a poof of pink. His eyes widened. He look toward the trenches with anger. But before he could speak, the sun broke over the horizon and the church bells rang loud through the trenches.