Very Short Story: Foliage

If you’re not familiar, there’s a writing prompt on Twitter for the writing community with the hashtag vss365. The “vss” stands for “very short story,” and the number is self-explanatory. Each month, a new Twitter user is tasked with posting a new word each day to prompt people. With the 280 characters available in a Tweet, a user has to come up with a story of some sort incorporating the posted word-of-the-day, although because you need to include the hashtag, the story itself is typically 273 characters (if you try to be exact, at least).

It also doesn’t necessarily have to be a story. Some play around with the form and structure by doing poetry or a haiku or whatever else.

For Sept. 18, the prompt word is “chiliad.”

Here is my entry:

Calvin was one of at least a #chiliad in the U.S., maybe more. His type tended to not advertise. In rural areas, where he operated, the foliage became the body bag for a statistic, another number on a spreadsheet somewhere. The missing were a blur, a chiliad of their own. #vss365