I found myself unable to write anything meaningful. So in the bit of free time I earned myself I decided to do a little bit of exercising. Below is the end result. Before beginning I created some ground rules to work on.

1. Every entry should involve the randomly generated topic word.
2. Every entry should somehow use something from the previous entry.
3. Thirty seconds. No more. No less.
4. No editing.

Pick your favorite. I will write a 600ish word flash fiction entry for it by Friday.

About
“Well, what’s this all about?”

The headmistress said, her voice jaded and rough, born of a lifetime of bathroom smoking.

I glared up defiantly, the dead body of my best friend beneath me. His jaw was slack.

“What the hell do you think this is about?”

I replied with an edge that could not be placed.

Talking
They were talking about me when I found them huddled in the filthy men’s room. Julia was snorting up lines of coke on one of the cracked toilets. Michael was making sure he took full advantage of her vulnerable view.

“So, you see Pete the other night? Christ, he must have emptied his entire wallet on that whore.”

Gray
If there was one color that fit mister Peter Graham, it was gray. He was always the shifty child in school, the one that always had the air of a grave digger about him. He’d often play by himself, the other children too afraid or indifferent to bother with poor Petey.

Then one day he stopped coming to school altogether.

This is his story.

Bag
They found the body in a couple of heavy duty garbage bags outside the train station. It didn’t take them long to find it. I guess there were a lot of strays in that area.

A feral pitbull (an altogether nice dog, though) dragged one of the larger bags into the middle of a nearby kickball field. It’s a pity school was out on holiday.

Loan
Gregory was amusing himself with a game of tetris on his cheap disposable cell phone when the train platform shuddered. 9:25 was right on time and he didn’t even have to interrupt his losing streak to notice the rather busty woman getting off.

He loaned her so much money, it had become second nature.

Burn
Ian was used to the burning sensation by now. He even managed to control the fierce itching when on duty. What would the other bridge officers think if they saw their skipper sticking his hands down his pants to relieve a fierce case of crabs? If he had one vice in life, it’d be cheap women.

What he wasn’t used to was the bleeding.

You’d be surprised at how badly blood stains white slacks.

Lovely
Ken stared down the barrel of the combat shotgun that was suddenly thrust in his face. It filled his world and for a brief moment he could taste the gun powder and feel the shockwave.

He managed to mouth “Just lovely” before the buckshot tore off his lower jaw entirely.

Spring
A lot of people like spring. They like to go on about rebirth and reproduction. You know, the kind of stuff they write romance novels about.

I don’t. That’s when they defrost. And sure, there’s a lot of rebirth and reproduction. But I prefer to keep my lovely brains in tact.

Maw
She was discreetly shovelling ramen noodles into her gaping maw when I settled down on the far end of the cafeteria. A lot of the time she’d stop half way through to pick the bits of noodles from her braces.

It was a pity it’d be her last meal.

She’s was very lovely and I was so lonely.

Can
Jeremy was starving. It had been days without a single sign of civilization and he was becoming a little touched in the head. The heat was hard on them all, but Jeremy was taking it the worst.

When Jack found him he was beating the single can of creamed corn left in their food stores with his bare fists.

He never really fully recovered. Neither did the corn.

Ice
Aceline griped her gladius and gritted her teeth, but the wind kept driving into her. It was like a living, icy wall. It seemed determined to keep her away from the town’s tiny church.

Outside in the grassy green yard, a dozen or so children played telephone with old cans and bits of string.

She was mysteriously absent from their vision.