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. 30, the prompt word is “seaside.”

Here is my entry:

Ophelia road the wail of sirens to the #seaside, moving opposite the throng of cars and people. Nobody noticed her, like she was a seagull, doing her duty to eat the dead that washed up on shore. She tossed her ring at the coming storm, not expecting it to be a bulwark. #vss365