“For all of
man’s cleverness in making guns and tanks and gas, God proved again that he was
the best at killing. A flu, stop that, if you think you’re so clever.”
For the last five years, I’ve entered a series of writing
contests conducted by NYCMidnight.com. The organization runs several contests
throughout the year including screenwriting, flash fiction, and short story. In
all the contests, writers are provided prompts and a set amount of time to
write a story based off the prompt.
"The Second War" was created for the Flash Fiction contest in
2020. I was given a genre (historical fiction), setting (a fort), and an object
(scissors), and I had 48 hours to write a story no longer than 1,000 words. One
of the appeals of this contest is that it divides writers into groups based on
the prompt, and then judges rank the top stories. For the Flash Fiction
contest, you are guaranteed two rounds of writing, after the second round the
five writers in the group with the most points move on. I
think there are four rounds.
"The Second War" became a happy and timely accident. I’ve
never written historical fiction, so I went out searching for forts, and I came
upon information on Fort McHenry being one of the epicenters of the Spanish Flu
following the first World War. Considering we were suffering through the first
few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed appropriate to write this story.
The other interesting part of the story is that Fort McHenry was also the
staging ground for what was called the “Second War,” the U.S. Military’s
project to rehabilitate returning troops and train them to become productive
members of the American workforce.
Obviously in 48 hours, one can only do so much research, and
I tend to find too much research bogs down the narrative in fiction stories,
especially when you only have a thousand words to work with. I gleaned enough
about the environment and the public reaction to the flu to realize that things
were pretty much the same in the early 1900s as they are now. Many folks didn’t
want to trust the government or doctors, and politicians and public health
officials were balancing the welfare of the citizenry with their own political
and financial aspirations.
The story didn’t fare quite as well as I would have hoped in
the contest, but I did some minor revisions and later submitted it to Clever
Fox Literary Magazine, which picked it for its first issue this past summer.
The 2021 Flash Fiction contest is ongoing at NYCMidnight. I
was really pleased with the story I wrote for the first round and will find out
how it fared the second week of September.
Here is a link to “The Second War” as published by Clever
Fox Literary Magazine:
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