Prompt #118

Sheesh, life goes by so fast.

…he was lying on his bed, still breathing. We were all with him—his kids, grandkids, his brother, his wife. At a certain point, I laid down next to him on one side, and my mother laid down on his other side. We waited, all of us. My mother spoke to her husband of more than sixty years. She said all the things, all the right things. And finally, he took his last breath and died. Among the last words he spoke were these: I want to go home.

There are about 20 novels in those words.

I was there, too, when my mother died, surrounded by her five children. I don’t know what her last words were, but I do remember that about a week earlier, she asked me for her purse and I had to say something like, it’s here somewhere, when, in fact, I’d thrown it out. Well, it was a million years old, and falling apart, and also, she’d been in that bed without moving for a long time already. It didn’t seem like she was going to need that purse.

There’s at least 50 novels in that story.

I was there for other last moments. I was there when my son left for college and I watched as the ferry he rode took off across the water. That was the end of his childhood and the moment he launched into his own life, away from his parents.

There was the last time I wore a jacket with padded shoulders. The last time I fit into a size 4 dress. The last time I drove my little Datsun B210. My last day as a cocktail waitress in a bar in San Francisco. The last time I kissed my boyfriend Gary—and then broke up with him. (And later, he died.)

Sigh—so many last things in life.

Here’s a short story (not a flash fiction) written by the magnificent Rachel Khong. It’s about the last days of a pair of friends before a massive transformation. The story, found online at Guernica, is called D Day. The story also appears in Khong’s collection of stories: My Dear You.

1. Write a story called “The Last Time.”

2. Your story can be about anything that happened for the very last time. It doesn’t have to be tragic, sad, or life-changing.

3. Feel free to write about something that didn’t really happen, or about something that happened to someone else. Maybe you want to write about something that happens in the future or in another universe.

4. If you don’t want to write about “the last time,” go ahead and write about “the first time.” Anything goes!

5. Stories posted that run more than 400 words run the risk of not being read by yours truly.