#Flash4Storms - A Flash Fic by Hope Denney

In my last post, I took part in a flash fic challenge for hurricane relief, organised by the fabulous Sarah Brentyn.

It is a blog-based challenge, and as not everyone maintains a blog, Sarah has confirmed that flash fics posted on host blogs will also count towards hurricane relief. I'm very honoured to be posting some other #Flash4Storms flash fic submissions here, and I hope you enjoy them.

This submission is by the brilliant Hope Denney:

Once upon a time (like right now), there were two women (none of you know them) who lived several seas apart. They battled all the monsters of yore (spiders, snakes, and improperly fitting undergarments) along with the monsters of now (workplace drama, too many dreams but not enough time, and improperly behaved selves). They didn’t always succeed with a lot of panache. In fact, there was often clumsiness, tears, and lots of swearing along the way. With each other’s support, dragons looked more like lizards and each believed a fairy tale ending was within reach.

This story was written in honor of those two women (again, people, social media is a big place and you don’t know them…gah!) and all the women who support the journeys of other women.

She seemed ordinary enough.

Unremarkable. Earthbound.

Early in life's journey, she'd entrusted pieces of herself to those she loved to make their travels easier.

Gifted feather after feather until her beautiful wings were almost bare.

She didn't mind. There was magic in watching her friends fly.

The Sun and the Moon

The following little story came to me while driving home one night on a dark road lit up in silver by a half-moon. I suddenly had a fanciful little image of a car smilingly gobbling up a crescent-shaped sliver of moon-flake which helped its headlights shine brighter. Such an image wouldn't normally find a home outside my head, but

I saw a UFO

In September 2024, while I was on the west coast of Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, I saw an unidentified flying object (UFO). My LittleOne and I were on a rooftop balcony. We were staring idly above the tops of the trees to the west, where there was still the faintest leftover pineapple glow in the sky. Then, we shifted our gaze slightly to the same tops of the trees, but in the south-west, where the sky had already darkened to a soft, purpley-crimson. There were three stars in the sky. One of the stars, just above the tree line was smudged. As though it had a faint mist around it. The other two stars, by contrast, were perfectly clear. In the above photo ( not taken on the UFO evening), if you look closely, you can see two stars. The third, smudged star was to the left of these two stars. I pointed out the smudgy star to LittleOne and wondered out loud 'why was it smudged?' There were no clouds in the sky. As we stared at it, we realised the smudgy star was actuall...

Making Mauritius-Style Banana Cakes (Gateaux Bananes)

I mis-managed my bananas. I got my timing all wrong and they were suddenly too ripe and too spotted and dotted to eat, and were sitting there looking at me with accusatory and reproachful looks. Banana cake was the obvious solution. But why go the way of regular banana cake, when there's the distant call of Mauritius-style gateaux bananes (you guessed it: banana cakes).

Dodo Au Go-Go

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