Flash fiction: Ticky Tacky by Phil Yeats

Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt was created using a random generator. Use these five words in a writing: suntan, paint, waterfall, inflation, exposure.

Today’s post is written by Phil Yeats. In December, 2019, Phil (using his Alan Kemister pen name) published his most recent novel. Tilting at Windmills, the second in the Barrettsport Mysteries series of soft-boiled police detective stories set in an imaginary Nova Scotia coastal community is available on Amazon.

Ticky Tacky

When I was a young man in university, I imagined I’d make enough money to guard against inflation eroding my nest egg and killing my dream.

And my dream? To sail to a tropical island where I’d live in blissful isolation. Not a coral atoll where the maximum elevation was four feet, and I’d constantly fear exposure to global warming and sea level rise. No, I dreamed about an isolated spot on the flank of an extinct volcano where I could paint a waterfall and maintain an all-over suntan.

It didn’t work out that way. When I awoke from my university dream, I found myself in suburbia with a house, a wife, and two kids. If you want the gory details, you can look up the words to Malvina Reynolds song Little Boxes. It describes my life—the one I lived, not the one I dreamed.

 ‘Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes made of ticky tacky

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes all the same’

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: https://valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/