Fiftywords: Dead Lands Never Bloom (Flash Fiction)

ahmadmanga (65)in #fiftywords • 7 years ago

Spring, it's an awesome season. The word 'Spring' can mean many things but the first thing comes to mind is the yearly season, the second to think of is flowers. Guess what's the third thing?

Salam (Peace)

This is an entry to @janya #fiftywords (the initiative vice-leader until @miniature-tiger comes back.) The prompt this time is Spring, as usual the story is exactly 50 words excluding the title and the End tag.

Dead Lands Never Bloom

Shovels cracked the Ground.
Broken swords and shields filled the horizon.
Trails of smoke ascended from burning flesh.
For days they buried their comrades, then they went to the next campaign without looking back.

A flower stood in the graveyard they left behind, she welcomed the spring unaffected by war.

End

What are your thoughts?

While I really like this title, I don't know how it would sound to a Native English speaker. I'm also not sure if welcomed or greeted is better in the last line.

Please weed out any inconsistency, any typo & could I write any line better?

"Photo by Gianni Zanato on Unsplash. It's very easy to find flower pictures but very hard to find one that provokes the feeling I wanted.

#story #fiction

7 years ago in #fiftywords by ahmadmanga (65)

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negativer (62) 7 years ago

Nice job here @ahmadmanga! I can really see the visuals and the scene. It makes it clear that even after all the death and bad things, there can still be something beautiful at the end that lives on.

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ahmadmanga (65) 7 years ago

Thanks for reply, that's totally the feeling I wanted to provoke !!

It makes it clear that even after all the death and bad things, there can still be something beautiful at the end that lives on.

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brandonsadventur (52) 7 years ago

Wow, that was powerful. I love the dichotomy of the flower, life, nature against the death and destruction of war. Great job.

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ahmadmanga (65) 7 years ago

Thanks for reading, I love the Symbolism a lot in the stories that use them, just mentioning a flower makes the reader imagine all the nature all the life, when compared to the other deadly parts of the story.

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jayna (69) 7 years ago

It is never easy to write about war and death. You did a very nice job of writing about this difficult subject, and juxtaposing it against the beauty of spring.

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ahmadmanga (65) 7 years ago

looks up juxtaposing in google translate Wow!!

Thanks for reading, the war part in this story wasn't hard as I only wanted to make the reader feel "a battle just have ended." Still not sure if the "burning flesh" was a brilliant or stupid choice.

For the flower I used "she" instead of "it" because it will give her more life. (In Arabic there's no "it" but only male or female tags, we'll different use the female pronoun here. )

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jayna (69) 7 years ago

I’m glad I helped you learn anew word in English! 😊

I can only imagine what it must be like to do creative writing in a second language. I’m impressed!

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