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 124: The fields of multicolored flowers stretched out in every direction with the shining water of the lake on the horizon.
The fields of multicolored flowers stretched out in every direction with the shining water of the lake on the horizon. The dream returned again. Penelope looked in one direction and saw the lake in the distance. She turned the other direction and saw a lake in the distance. She was certain it was the same lake. She looked to the flowers. Any attempt to color block them was over. The flowers of all shades and colors were mixed and mingled until they were just a field of flowers.
Penelope felt the urge to walk forward. It felt as though someone was calling her. She wasn’t feeling pushed but as though someone very insistently wanted her to join them. She huffed and decided she didn’t really want to go. She sat down cross legged where she was on the center of the pathway.
‘It may not make for a very exciting dream,’ she thought. ‘But I don’t want to go into the lake again.’
She sat there and wondered what would happen. Would the sidewalk grow hot again? Too hot for her to sit?
‘I’ll roll into the flowers if it does,’ she decided. After all the water was at either end of the trail and not to the sides. Stepping off the trail would just put her in a vast sea of flowers. ‘And they at least have the ground underneath them.’
Penelope decided that was a big improvement over the lake. She could stand on solid ground and not worry about drowning. ‘Always a plus.’ She decided.
Drowning had never been something she worried over. She was a strong swimmer and when she was younger she often swam laps. She relished being underwater and feeling isolated from the rest of the world, especially when things got bad. It was a way to block everything out. She never joined the swim team even though she was asked a couple of times by the school’s coach. She didn’t want to worry about particular strokes or speed, even though she could do most of them. She wanted to kick off one side of the pool and see how far she could swim under water before she had to come up for breath.
‘Not exactly team spirited.’ Penelope thought.
She was good enough that she never really feared drowning. She stuck to well maintained swimming pools and didn’t really swim in lakes, rivers or even the ocean so there was no fear of currents or creatures. ‘And there was usually lanes so I didn’t need to fear other people either.’
Penelope leaned back on her hands, still sitting cross legged. She felt moisture on her hands as though she placed it in a puddle. She frowned and looked down, not recalling a puddle. While she was sitting and staring blankly across the field of flowers the lake seemed to have come to her.
Behind her the field of flowers was swallowed by water and when she looked down the pathway it seemed to have turned into a river, the water rushing down the path from both sides with her in the center. She pushed to her feet as the water reached her and realized the field in front of her was now covered with water. Despite not moving, she was standing in the center of the lake.
Ten til Midnight 