Changes – Flash Fiction in response to a prompt from The Rusty Nail Literary Magazine

Hey all,

Quick note first- been totally tied up with a serious family emergency the past few days and am still working with the situation- so I will be in and out but I am around.

While my brother convalesces (he’s napping at the moment) I had to get some of the stress out- and I saw the writing prompt from The Rusty Nail and had a thought. I'll bold the lines that the prompt consisted of.

Please forgive any formatting errors, I am dog tired. But this was too good to pass up.

Enjoy. Talk to you soon. 492 words- including the title.

~bru

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He hadn't always been this way, but he recognized and appreciated the change. How could he not? This wasn’t the kind of change that was mildly noted by others, when you changed the part of your hair or bought a new hat.

Today the beginning of a new life, something really big, and it was going to start with him telling his boss where he could stick those spreadsheets.

Once, he would have been beating the pavement in worn out loafers. The obligatory cheap, slack, aging tie slung lazily around the neck of his boring perma-press shirt. No one noticing him much at all, not at the office, not at the sales conventions, nowhere. No how.

For forty-five years his life had stumbled on this way. Being what everybody else expected. Going to business school, doing what his father did, what his brothers did. Never quite, however, doing it distinctly enough to make things really come together.

He pondered this at many points but he always ended up falling off the trestle of his train of thought.

Then- it happened.

The reason for his lack of success in anything he undertook came to him last night in an instant- the elephant in the room landed on him like, well, an elephant. It happened when he saw an image flash for a split second across the dust-layered television screen. When he saw it—them—he loved- truly loved- and wanted something for the first time in his life.

Well, at least for the first time in his life he was finally ready to admit.

All this time he’d been sabotaging himself, and the reason was all tied up in and as simple as the meaning of a single pair of shoes.

All these years, he thought, working so hard day in and day out and for what? To slave for a man who cared even less about the work than the amount he paid for it? Money to then be spent by a woman he loved less than his bowling ball Trixie…and the rest to be blown on cigars and rotgut whiskey? Was that what life was supposed to feel like, walking through a river of rice pudding with cannonballs strapped to your loafers?

Today though, all that was going to change.

Everything would change.

He wouldn't spend one more day making profit for that bigoted son of a bitch.

Not another penny would go to the scheming gold-digger who didn’t care how many hours of overtime it took to keep her in Coach bags, either.

Trixie he’d keep but damn it, he wasn't going to pound the pavement in those worn out loafers any more, either.

No, from now on he would never walk a road again without imagining a runway, and his elegant gait would be accentuated by the graceful arc of his brand new Jimmy Choos.

From today the world wasn't his anymore.

It was going to be hers.