For those just tuning in, this challenge is about taking a story idea from bare bones idea into a fully fledged story by writing consistently every week day for fifteen minutes. The sentence I end with on one day, is the sentence I start with on the following. Part one was Bob’s story and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story below. Part Two follows a character named Penelope. I have a few basic sentences to act as road marks on her journey. I am loosely calling that an outline. We will see where she ends up by the time the story is done. For now, we start Part two of the 2025 Fifteen Minute Writing Challenge.
Day 60: There was no mixing of the colors, each flower color had it’s own space.
There was no mixing of the colors, each flower color had its own space. The dream seemed to have color blocked the world and if Penelope let her eyes scan the area there were just irregularly shaped blocks of color between the trees. “Not very natural,” she told herself. ‘So maybe someone planted them.”
As standing in the middle of the path wasn’t showing her anything outer then the color separated plantings, she decided to walk. “But which direction?” She looked to her left and the path wound in a slight curve gently maneuvering around the trees as it proceeded to what looked like a lake in the distance.
She looked to the right and saw the path gently curved around trees winding through the area until it reached what looked like a lake in the distance. Penelope frowned and looked back to the left.
The same curve, the same blocks of colored flowers, the same trees. She focused on one of the trees. There was a branch arching over the pathway, a knothole about a foot off of the ground and another one a little higher showing where a limb was removed. She looked right. The same tree, the same knothole, the same lopped off branch.
Exactly the same.
“So I guess I’m going to the lake no matter which direction I choose.”
She turned right for not other reason than it seemed like forward as she arrived facing that way before she started looking around. ‘Although I guess it doesn’t matter.’
She found the thought odd, but not scary. She suspected that in the waking world she would find this a little more scary, someone or something choosing her path for her and leaving her with no options, but here there was no fear.
She walked down the path and enjoyed the light spring breeze that shivered the leaves of the trees around her. It felt like they were whispering and she wondered if it had anything to do with her walking through their park. ‘It certainly is someone’s park,’ she decided. Things were too neatly arranged for it to be an area left wild. Limbs were trimmed so they shaded the path but didn’t impede progress. The grass in the non flowered sections were neatly trimmed and the flowers were color blocked.
“Well not all of them,” she thought.
She stopped walking and saw one patch or white flowers where a small contingent of blue flowers had invaded. There weren’t many and th white flowers didn’t seem to mind the company, but the hand full of blue flowers was a stark contrast to the white. Penelope moved on and saw that there were a few white flowers now scattered in one of the patches of yellow. It wasn’t as deep a contrast as the blue, but it was noticeable. Most of the sections of flowers were still single color only, but every now and again there would be one with a hand full of another type scattered.
Penelope tried to see if there was a pattern. Was blue always scattered into white or the purple into the red? It didn’t seem so. The numbers also varied. One had about five flowers while another had enough to make her question which was the original color and which the invader.
Sher steps took her to the lake before she could find any discernible pattern. The path stopped at the lake and when she turned and looked back, the fog had swallowed the woods. She could see no flowers, trees or path, just a solid sheet of white as though the world behind her was a blank piece of white paper.
Ten til Midnight 