Alas, No Fireworks; July 1 2026

It’s Canada Day! It’s also 35 degrees Celsius outside! I will not be going to any fireworks shows tonight!

(Just as well, because the sound of fireworks freaks me out far more than it ever used to.)

To update y’all on the NYC Midnight competition I was part of – sadly, I didn’t make it to the final round. I did get an honourable mention for my story in round 2, though!

Since I didn’t make it through, I thought I’d take this week’s blog post as an opportunity to share what I wrote, according to the prompts. Both stories had to be 100 words or less. We were given the genre, the action (what had to be happening), and a word that had to be included.

Prompt 1 was: Drama, gifting, ‘comfort’. I wrote ‘From My Body, My Soul’, at 97 words.

I thought labor was supposed to be torture. Pain is an echo at most; a whisper of what was, easy to ignore.

My minute-old daughter wails like an engine. She’s probably wondering where the comfort of a dark, warm womb went. I want to apologize. All I can do is cry with her.

There’s a glow in her new mother’s eyes when the nurses give her over, affection in her father’s grin. My smile is as weak as their baby made my body; hollow, like she left my heart.

My surrogacy has ended. The real agony begins.

Prompt 2 was: Romantic comedy, feeling sorry for oneself, ‘equal’. I wrote ‘Just Needs a Little Mending’, 100 words.

‘Jack’, they were calling her.

In this age of new prospects for women, the papers nonetheless assumed her sex, miscounted her victims. Predictably, they neglected all the male ones. She was an equal opportunity murderess, thank you.

Dahlia shivered in her underclothes, hunched over a newspaper and sighing over every word. Her laundress coughed, lifting Dahlia’s bloody dress.

Were she anyone else, Dahlia would owe her an explanation.

“You’ve purged worse…”

Her lover twisted the fabric to show Dahlia a tear. “You’re not ‘the Ripper’ for nothing, dearest.”

Nevertheless, she began scrubbing with a fond smile, leaving Dahlia to pout.

Even though I didn’t win anything in the end, I like the little stories I came up with, and I’m happy to be able to share them here!