Very Short Story: Breath Me In

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 Oct. 14, the prompt word is “toxic.”

Here is my entry:

Keith breathed in the #toxic gas each morning. His lungs became used to the toxin, and it coursed through the rest of his body, powering his movements. Even his brain swam in it. But Keith came to disdain another day of oxygen, another day of consciousness in a mad world. #vss365