Flash Fiction #1 - Crashing Down

Picture Prompt

300-word Flash Fiction

Post # 1

Week Ending: 06/13/2025

Genre: Drama

Title: Crashing Down

   “Well, Mr. Hughes!” He emphasized his own last name with bitter sarcasm. “How’d this happen?”

   Mr. Hughes … He’d grown accustomed to people referring to him as though he no longer had a first name. Everyone revered how Mr. Hughes had climbed his way from ground-floor grunt to the heights of his profession. Everything that he had, he’d earned. As planned, he eventually had it all. What he hadn't planned was for it all to come crashing down around him.

   As Mr. Hughes sat in the storage closet of his office, on a wobbly chair with cracked, peeling pleather upholstery, he stared at an old, wooden desk. The cherrywood finish worn where his arms used to whir between keyboard and mouse while he toiled over graphs and charts amassing millions of dollars. 

   He recounted the recent months to figure out how he came to be sitting at his only remaining possessions. He kept this old chair and desk in storage as a reminder of where he started and how far he’d come. But, now they were all he had left that couldn't be repossessed or liquidated. In fact, he couldn't get anyone to haul them away for free. He decided that, if he couldn't get them out prior to lease end, it wouldn't make a difference to add the landlord to the long list of leeches trying to suck money out of the already dry pockets of his tattered sweatpants. 

   Distantly, he could hear a train just up the snowy white hill from where he sat and only wished that he could be on it to a safe haven, away from his wreck of a life. Instead, he sat and stared blankly pondering how he’d gone from everybody calling him Mr. Hughes to nobody, but creditors, calling him at all.

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