Bringing Bright Ideas to Life:  My Flash

His name is Atlas. People expect a story about a man and his dog to be simple. Loyal dog. Grateful man. End scene. But love is never simple. Especially the kind that rebuilds you. I met Atlas on a Tuesday that smelled like bleach and old newspapers. The shelter lights buzzed overhead, a tired fluorescent hum that made everything look lonelier than it already was. I had gone there because I was tired of my own silence. My apartment felt like a sealed jar. I’d been living insid

Winter had fallen upon the valley with a severity I had scarce witnessed in my thirty winters of toil. The mine shafts yawned like gaping maws beneath the frost-bound hills, and the village whispered in fearful admiration of the dark wealth buried beneath. I, Enoch Hartley, had descended into the bowels of the earth since my youth, knowing the mine as one knows one’s own palm. Yet that night, as the storm gathered above, I knew a dread unlike any prior—an unease that shivered

The room was gentle. That was the first wrong thing about it. Soft grey walls. A neatly made bed. A dresser with folded clothes in her size. A framed print of a meadow—lavender fields under a pale sky. No locks on the inside. No restraints. Just a door with a keypad on the outside-facing wall. Four digits. Above it: WHEN YOU’RE READY. Elena ran her fingers over the words until her skin felt raw. Ready for what? There was food. It appeared on the small desk each time she slept