Friday Flash Fiction: Sweeping Up the Ashes
I drew for today's flash from a list of random titles Chuck Wendig shared a couple of weeks ago, and modified it to suit my own needs. It's 997 words, including the title. Sweeping Up the Ashes of a Dream It was a lousy farm. We believed everything the promoters told us, and we got our 160 acres, which felt like a dream come true. No one told us that our farm would nearly kill our mules, breaking the rocky ground to plant seeds that would only sprout if we hauled water ten miles from the creek, and then would struggle to a stunted life if they didn’t shrivel and die under the hot winds. We were among those too late for the rich prairie lands. We were trying to prove up on 160 acres of desert as though it was a bit of prime land in the Ohio river bottoms. It wasn’t possible, and we knew it the first season, but what choice did we have? There was nothing to go back to, even had we the money and equipment to make the trip. The best we could do was struggle on. And we did struggle....