Every week, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields (thank you, Rochelle!) hosts a flash fiction challenge, to write a complete story, based on a photoprompt, with a beginning, middle and end, in 100 words or less. Post it on your blog, and include the Photoprompt and Inlinkz (the blue frog) on your page. Link your story URL. Then the fun starts as you read other peoples’ stories and comment on them!
PHOTO PROMPT © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields
Genre: Historical fiction
Word count: 100
Mugabe’s Gone
The television booms in the background.
He’s gone. Mugabe’s gone.
I can’t believe it. My breath comes in gasps. My legs wobble as I stand.
I go to my little store room. There is the clock, exactly where I threw it at 11:15 on the evening of January 15th 1983. Shuddering, I feel for the photograph, hidden under some cloth.
Yes. Here it is. I hardly dare look.
My beautiful boy, my son, my Joshua.
“Don’t view the body,” they said. But how could I bury him without looking one last time?
Tears flood down my cheeks, my own Gukurahundi*.
* * *
*According to Wikipedia, Gukurahundi is a Shona word which loosely translates as “the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains”. It was the term used by Robert Mugabe and his supporters for the purging of political opponents during the 1980s.
Autumn Leaves 