Trapped
Aidan played his flashlight beam over the iron bars of a door with a massive lock. “Is this the one?”
The door opened on a cell rough-hewn from rock deep under the ancient tower.
Behind him, Felicity murmured assent. In the tunnels, where gps was useless, she was reading a paper map with a penlight.
Aidan pushed the barred door, and it swung with an ear-splitting shriek. He ventured inside. The rock walls were slick with a pale fungus. The air smelled sickly-sweet. A rat streaked into a crack in the corner of the windowless cell. Aidan flinched.
The door shrieked again and clanged. Aidan spun.
Felicity was standing on the other side of the bars. “I’m sorry. It’s only a precaution.”
Aidan’s pulse pounded at his throat. “What?” He strode back to shove the door. Locked. “Felicity?”
She backed away. “I’ll bring you food and water.”
“Felicity!”
Her footsteps dwindled as she left. Aidan set down the light, grasped the bars of the door in both hands, and shook. Solid as the rock. He slapped his pockets for his cell phone, but he’d left it at home.
Sunday Photo Fiction: 200-word stories.
photo prompt: A Mixed Bag
Muninn's Memories 
May 7, 2017 at 7:19 am
What had he done to deserve that? Good story.
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May 7, 2017 at 7:21 am
Good question. Thanks for reading, Iain.
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May 7, 2017 at 7:28 am
Well, Felicity is a sweetheart! Nice one, Kecia.
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May 7, 2017 at 7:29 am
A real darling. Thanks, CE.
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May 7, 2017 at 7:34 am
For his protection or hers? A good story Kecia. I like it.
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May 7, 2017 at 7:40 am
Yes, that question is unanswered. I apologize–sort of. 🙂 Thanks for commenting.
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May 7, 2017 at 9:16 am
Nice one, Kecia.
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May 7, 2017 at 9:20 am
Thanks, Neel. 🙂
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May 7, 2017 at 10:07 am
Oh no! An intriguing tale in a chilling and wonderfully written setting. And with an important moral: Never forget your cell phone!
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May 7, 2017 at 10:13 am
Thank you for reading. I appreciate your time. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
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May 8, 2017 at 11:05 am
Oh, the beginning of the story had my heart pounding. I’m not sure if it was that intense, or I’ve had too much coffee. Haha I’m pretty sure it was the story though. I want more of this story, Kecia! 🙂 Great work.
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May 8, 2017 at 11:10 am
Thanks so much, Mandie! This is a little background story for a short story I’m writing about Felicity. I had to transpose the time and genre to make it work with the cellphone, but I still found it useful. I had to figure out how Felicity pulls off her scheme prior to the short story, and this was it!
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May 8, 2017 at 11:22 am
That is so incredible that you can take your other pieces and tweak them to fit into a flash fiction piece like this. It sounds like great practice.
I imagine it would be useful for editing too. I’m too attached to my characters and what is happening in the story that it really gets in the way of editing sometimes. I imagine an exercise like this would help me get used to the idea of my characters and plot being more fluid, so it didn’t feel so excruciating every time I had to make big changes.
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May 8, 2017 at 11:33 am
I know what you mean about being attached. You put a big part of yourself into them, feel their pain, struggle with them.
I’ve gotten to the point, especially in the novels, that I’m looking at the big structures and at organization. Right now, I’m writing an entire new middle for my Rhapsody Streets novel. It’s so much work that it’s killing me, but I care enough about my chars that I’m willing to do this for them and their story.
I just hope I survive the process. One day I’m manic and wallow in depression the next. And every day I have to overcome the resistance to work. No challenge is quite as high as the one that’s self-imposed, the one no one is pushing you to climb. Writing is a LONELY job!
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May 8, 2017 at 12:50 pm
This sums up what I’m going through with my current editing. There are huge changes, a lot of moving around of scenes, and changes to my characters to give them more depth and to better align them with their motivations. And a lot of it is painful. Some changes have that immediate feeling of success, while others are not yet fleshed out enough to give me the feeling that it’s worth the effort.
And I’m with you. Writing is a lonely job. I love it terribly, but you really have to want it. It is both the most challenging and exciting thing I’ve ever done.
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May 8, 2017 at 1:26 pm
Mandie, did you find that your characters grew up as you wrote them? That’s sort of what happened to me. Then the early chapters didn’t reflect that because I’d written them when my characters were more shallow, when I didn’t understand all their motivations.
And I don’t think any number of character sheets written before I started would have prevented my characters becoming more complex as I wrote. It was a consequence of their experiences and my own understanding, which I couldn’t have predicted accurately.
I think I just have to accept that I’ll have to rewrite all my books more than once. 😦
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May 8, 2017 at 1:42 pm
Yes! Here’s an example. As I was researching my novel and coming up with the plot and all the characters and their names I wrote down Kaitlyn as my main character and envisioned exactly who she was and her role in the story. The first time she appeared in the story I typed “Kaitlynn” and with the addition of one letter I realized that it felt right, and that she was different than anything I imagined before. She was an idea before, but it was as if she became real on the page.
Unfortunately, it’s still a learning process. The characters develop at their own pace, and by the end they feel like complete characters, and in the first chapters, exactly as you said, they feel “shallow.” And that’s exactly how I’ve described them to other people before.
On the one hand, the stories are all fragments of me spilled out onto the page. And on the other hand, things develop on their own as if I’m watching the story and trying to type as fast as I can to capture it. It feels apart from me and yet it’s also every bit of me.
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May 8, 2017 at 12:12 pm
Fun story. But why?
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May 8, 2017 at 1:18 pm
Good question. It’s not here.
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May 8, 2017 at 3:25 pm
I bet he’s a werewolf but he doesn’t know it.She’s just trying to help him.
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May 8, 2017 at 3:46 pm
Crow! You made me chuckle! You clever bird, you. You’re on the right track. The short story I’m writing is for a contest at writing.com with a May 31 deadline. It’s only in a first draft. I’m writing around it while letting it brew. Once the judging comes back, I’ll post it here. Then you’ll see just how close you came. 🙂
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May 8, 2017 at 4:22 pm
Ha ha ha! Excellent!
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