FURIOUS FICTION

At the beginning of the year, March 2019, I began entering stories into the Australian Writers’ Centre Furious Fiction competition.

It’s a fun little monthly challenge whereby you have 55 hours to write a 500 word story that could ultimately net you $500. The only caveat is that each they provide you with a set of non-negotiable story prompts which much be utilised in your piece of prose. The prompts change every month, some more challenging than others, but the format remains the same otherwise.

I have yet to take home the $500 in any of my 5 attempts (I skipped July because I was on holiday), though I did make the short-list for one of my entries. Underneath the picture and related prompts below is my March 2019 entry, imaginatively titled, Untitled.

 

• THE PICTURE (shown above) should inspire your story’s setting
• THE THEME of your story is to be ‘CURIOSITY’.

 

Untitled

Round and round and round and round. He couldn’t quite work out if the constant churn of the front loader washing machine was tedious, exhausting or strangely hypnotic. It was probably all those things and none of those things.

This is what he thought about as he sat alone in the vintage laundromat, waiting for his small load to finish its cycle.  He had been coming here for almost six months now. Once a week, every week. And every time he was here, he noticed something he hadn’t seen before. Such was the meticulousness of the design.

There was so much going on in this quiet coin laundry that it was easy to miss some of the details. The washing machines themselves were the first thing he noticed. They were quite remarkable really, looking like they had come straight from the page of a 1970s magazine advertisement. They worked a treat though. In fact, between the machines and the equally retro selection of washing powders available for purchase – ‘Zap’, ‘Pow’, ‘Fresh’ – his clothes had never been cleaner. It was why he kept returning.

After the machines, the next thing that caught his eye was the floor (classic 70s parquet), followed by the seats (well-worn but surprisingly comfortable) and the plants (real and consistently watered, it would appear).

Today, on would have to be his 22^nd or 23^rd visit, the thing that caught his eye was a peculiar stain on one of the chair cushions. It stood out because, having sat on each of these chairs on more than one occasion, he was quite sure that this stain was in fact a new addition.

Thinking about how this stain must be new, and how if the stain was new then it must have been made by someone other than himself, he finally realised that, in all his time coming here, he had never actually seen another person in the building.

He wasn’t quite sure how to feel about this realisation. On the one hand, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a tiny laundromat in a small suburb on the outskirts of the city wouldn’t get a huge level of foot traffic. On the other, 6 months and not a soul? It was a little spooky to say the least.

He took a closer look at the stain on the chair and saw that surrounding this stain were several other, smaller stains. The smaller stains traced a path to a door that he had never paid much attention to, a door fitted with an impressive yet anachronistic looking padlock. He approached the door with some caution and, as he did, he heard some sort of commotion on the other side. When he was right against the door, he heard a scream and a bang.

That was enough for him. He stopped his clothes mid-cycle and threw them into his bag still completely drenched. Leaving in a hurry he thought of how maybe he won’t come back to this particular laundromat.