Write a story in exactly 100 words: the challenge thread

[ShadowPilot]

The 100 word constraint is one of the most useful creative exercises I know. Long enough to establish character or situation, short enough that every word is load-bearing. The edit process for getting to exactly 100 is often where the actual writing happens.

Theme this month: a threshold. Literal or metaphorical, that is up to you. A door, a decision, a moment before something changes. Do not explain the threshold, show us standing at it.

Post your entry in the replies. Count twice before posting. No prizes, no judges, just the exercise and the reading.

[Kieron78]

She had written the email. The cursor hovered. Outside, a bus passed, and then the street was quiet again. The timestamp in the corner ticked to 11:59. She had given herself midnight as the deadline, which now seemed arbitrary. Most deadlines are. She closed the laptop. Made tea. Opened it again. The email was still there, still unsent. She read it once more, looking for the wrong word. Found three. Fixed them. Found two more. Fixed those. At 12:17 she sent it. At 12:18 she felt nothing, which was not what she had expected. At 12:19 she went to bed.

[AlexandrZakharyan]

That is a precise kind of 100 words. The deflation of the expected emotion is very well handled.

[StringTheory97]

The box had been in the attic since before he could remember owning the house. He knew what was in it. He had always known. The label in his mother's handwriting said only his name, which was enough to keep it closed for eleven years. Today, for no reason he could identify, he brought it down the narrow stairs and set it on the kitchen table. He made coffee. He sat across from it. He did not open it. He washed up. He put it by the door for the charity shop. On the way out he took it back upstairs.

[Andy99]

Oh that one got me. The recursive return is exactly right.

[Cass82]

Third story, 100 words:

The border was a line of paint on a road. She had crossed it fifty times in her life without thinking. Today she stood on the line itself, one foot each side, and felt the theoretical weight of the distinction. A car passed without slowing. A bird flew overhead without adjusting its course. She thought about all the maps in the world and their confident straight lines and their complete ignorance of grass and wind and the particular smell of this road in June. She stepped over. The road continued. The bird disappeared into the tree line.

[TeaSpiller]

These are all excellent and I feel slightly inadequate having not submitted one yet. The border one especially.

[VoidSentinel66]

That last entry about 'I find this alarming for reasons I cannot fully justify' will stay with me. Sometimes the most honest writing sounds like it is not trying at all.