Welcome to Flash Fiction Fridays! Every Friday I use conversational AI to generate a new flash fiction prompt inspired by the changes and updates to my digital garden.
Flash fiction is a unique and challenging form of writing that requires creativity, brevity, and skill. By using conversational AI to generate the prompt, I’m tapping into the power of machine learning to come up with interesting and unexpected ideas that I might not have thought of otherwise.
I use the weekly changes and updates to my digital garden as a starting point for the AI to generate the prompt. The prompts are designed to be open-ended and flexible, allowing me to explore a wide range of themes and genres that are aligned with my interests and experiences. However, it is important to remember that these pieces are fictional. But that’s not all, there is a piece of AI generated art to go with every story as well! If you want to dive deeper, check out the updates to my digital garden.
The Prompt
Craft a flash fiction piece that begins with the line: "She woke up to the smell of burning roses." The story must explore the protagonist’s journey to uncover the mystery behind the scent, revealing a hidden truth about her family’s dark past and the sacrifices made for love.
The Story
She woke up to the smell of burning roses. The ashes of change clogged her nostrils. Her room seemed different. A dark, glowing fog filled the atmosphere with mystery. Rose petals twirled amidst voluminous light shafts, dancing to a rhythm only they could hear. Each petal had its moment in the spotlight, to burn and fade into the night. What remained was decay. Combusted matter. A fate she needed to avoid for herself at all cost. Traversing this environment was borderline suicidal. Nothing made sense. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. This was her home, torn and ripped apart by a love so strong that it burned itself, like a star taking its last cosmic breath.
She crawled down the stairs and stumbled into the Grand Salon. The nucleus of every family. A space for cohabitation, for the expression of leisure and love. Glistening marble floors, white walls adorned with floral patterns of gold, pristine chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and the grand masters of old populating the linings of the space with their finest works. The pain of change raged within her innocent heart as she saw them fall to the fire, one by one. She knew what was coming, even if she failed to grasp its eternal significance. They were waiting for her in front of the fire place.
She recognized them. It was their silhouette that spoke to her, in the absence of any facial features. They looked like papier-mâché life-size copies of themselves, with burned, carved out faces, replaced with a black that ran so deep it took more than it could ever give back. She lost her purity to that darkness and at that moment, she knew that in the absence of parental guidance, she too would go on to take more than she could give back.
The flames roared with a fierce intensity, licking hungrily at the walls and ceiling as they spilled out of the confines of the fireplace. A thousand roses burned in the light: the singular source of this implosion. A joint decision she would never understand. They had not only propelled themselves from this world and to the depths of hell, but were committed to take with them as much as they could. Even her.
She had been nothing but a casualty of their furious passion. Love without restraint. Too many problems without an answer. Too much money to keep a level head. She came into their world with a need to be loved, and that desire would remain beyond this sacrificial burning of everything she knew, hated and loved.
Her feeble body barely made it through the cracks as the building collapsed behind her. With a single foul swoop, the towers of her past fell. She felt her sense of reality drifting, and as hard as she tried to hold on to the dry summer grass and count the stars across the night sky, things would turn from red to white, from white to black. She woke up to the smell of burning roses.
