Micro Monday - August 26, 2024

The Search

Happy Monday! Here’s your weekly microfiction:

The Search

On August 15, 1994, Rebecca Smith disappeared into the woods behind her school.

Thirty years later, her sister stopped searching for her.

Not because she’d moved on, but because the little blond girl by the bus stop looked so much like Becky that she turned to stare, dumbfounded with hope, while her patrol car nosed into the intersection and clipped a bicycle.

After, during the disciplinary hearing, she realized that she wasn’t looking for bones, or old clothes, or even the woman her sister would be by now.

No, the reason she’s crying in her sergeant’s office is because it’s still August, always 1994, and her mother is telling her to bring extra flashlight batteries in case they have to search all night.

One of the joys of the 100-word format is that it forces you to take a story down to its barest essentials. It helps you drop the pointless words in a sentence or the pretty prose that doesn’t advance the story.

Occasionally, though, you find yourself with a story that can’t survive another cut. That’s always a dilemma, for me, because one voice is telling me that I’m being wasteful with my prose, that the extra 25 words are an unnecessary indulgence, that I may as well buckle down and commit to 3,500 words if I can’t tell the story in 100.

Another, kinder voice is telling me that the story is worth telling, it just needs a little more room to breathe, and that’s okay. It’s hard, sometimes, to figure out which voice is the wise counselor.

In this instance, I trusted the second voice, which is why this one ended up being 123 words instead of 100. I prefer it this way, but if you’re mad about the extra 23 words, feel free to ask for a refund.