This piece was written in response to the Flash Fiction Month challenge for July 21st, 2025. Each day, writers across the globe tackle a new prompt in pursuit of glory immemorial—thirty-one days of madness, muses, and microfiction.
Today’s prompt: “Thank you for my anger.” — by booksoverlookedblog
Below is my contribution to FFM, drawn from the haunted corridors of my fictional world Ashes at Dusk. It’s a quiet reckoning, a scene where rage becomes ritual, and memory refuses to stay buried.
Thank You for My Anger – Flash Fiction
The walls whispered tonight.
Not the usual draft through the attic crawl or the sleepy moan of old pine settling into its rot. No—this whisper carried syllables, names. Half-mangled memories clawing through wallpaper and pipework.
Rhett paced the parlor with a fistful of scorched photographs. Faces faded by flame, edges curled like dying leaves. The candle flickered violently when he paused at the piano. Still missing two keys. Still playing a funeral tune when no one’s touching it.
He hadn’t meant to start the fire.
Not the one in the chapel. Not the one inside his ribcage.
The boy deserved silence. But the parish demanded rage. Rhett gave them both, wrapped in velvet and soot. The book he’d written—thin, cruel, damning—sat untouched on the mantle, untouched because no one dared open it twice.
He ran a thumb across a charred corner and mouthed the words he’d etched into the dedication page:
“Thank you for my anger.”
Thank you for visiting with us here at the Ritual. Feel free to check out the rest of our Flash Fiction. Copyright Mind on Fire Books.
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