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Writing about a Heart of Stone #flashfiction

By 13/08/2008July 19th, 2017writing, writing ideas
Writing about a Heart of Stone

Writing about a Heart of Stone

Writing from a writing-prompt has become a part of my daily routine, a way to stretch and flex my writing muscles before beginning my work for the day. For today I picked up 5 random words from the dictionary, and they were:

Stone/ Blue/ War/Heart/Ice-cream

And then I wove a story around those words, giving myself ten minutes. Here is the result, after I corrected the grammar and punctuation, and generally cleaned it up a bit.

They’d eaten ice-cream on the warm beach, daring each other, pounds and pounds of it, till their lips turned blue and their tongues no longer felt like part of their mouths. They could not talk, could not taste, could not feel their kisses on each other’s lips, which made them laugh a faint hoarse laughter that seemed to come from somewhere else.

And then he’d left her. Left her for the war, its promises of glory, for those who didn’t give a toss he had given his legs for them, lost them in a landmine. While he fought death and lived, she pined and died.

She had wished for him to have her heart, and when he returned her folks brought it to him in a glass jar of cloudy liquid. As if the dead flesh, no longer beating, no longer within her, could bring him her love.

He stared at the pale thing, cold and small, and it spoke to him of its longing for the sand and the sun.

He took it with him to their ice-cream beach one afternoon, shivering in his winter coat, making tracks on the sand with his wheelchair, pushing it as far as it would go into the water, till the waves touched the stumps wrapped in his woolen pants.

There, stranded in the wet sand, he took the heart out of the jar and sent it into the water as far as the large muscles on his arms would let him. Like a piece of stone it arced into the air, and dropped into the waves.

He stayed there as evening fell, imagining that heart, eaten by shellfish and crabs, on its way to become one with the sand. Later, in the cover of darkness, he pushed his wheelchair further into the icy water, and kept going.


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Damyanti Biswas

Damyanti Biswas is the author of You Beneath Your Skin and numerous short stories that have been published in magazines and anthologies in the US, the UK, and Asia. She has been shortlisted for Best Small Fictions and Bath Novel Awards and is co-editor of the Forge Literary Magazine. Her literary crime thriller series, the Blue Mumbai, is represented by Lucienne Diver from The Knight Agency. Both The Blue Bar and The Blue Monsoon were published in 2023.

I appreciate comments, and I always visit back. If you're having trouble commenting, let me know via the contact form, or tweet me up @damyantig !

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2 Comments

  • damyantig says:

    Well Darc, ever since I started doing fiction, or may be even before, Dark has been my middle name. Try as I might I never come up with something light and cheerful. Someday, maybe, after I’ve got all this darkness out of my system:)

  • DarcKnyt says:

    I really like your exercises, Damyanti. I think you’re really onto something with those exercises, and I like the idea of the time limit instead of a word count.

    They always come out so dark. I suspect there’s a horror writer in you somewhere, lurking. 🙂