Living or dead? A micro-fiction short short story by Rob Hopcott

Whilst walking alone during her lunch hour on the edge of Hyde Park in Central London, besides some bushes, Laura noticed a small rectangular box trodden into the dirt amongst the autumn leaves.

Had she not been walking head down, wishing that the whole world would leave her alone with it's constant demands, noisy traffic and smelly exhausts, the tiny box would never have attracted her attention.

Pulling her hoody forward for protection against the biting northerly wind, Laura knelt down and found it was an old cigarette packet bearing the curt message "Smoking Kills."

Perhaps it was her mood. Her job in a local Knightsbridge insurance office was rubbish. Her love life sucked. Christmas was coming up and she had little money saved to pay for it.

Laura's mum, always bright and breezy in her spotless West London home, called Laura's moods 'sombre'. Laura disagreed, which she was entitled to do now she was aged all of twenty four and three quarters.

Instead, Laura liked to think of the random thoughts that came into her mind as being 'creative'. One day she would be a famous writer and write a best selling novel to show her mum and Bank Manager Dad that they had been wrong.

Now Laura wondered about the owner of the cigarettes and whether the message on the packet had fulfilled it's promise.

Was the owner of the packet now lying in the earth somewhere?

Just as the butterfly is said to flap it's wings and through a long chain of events start a hurricane on the other side of the Earth, Laura wondered whether there was an umbilical link between this small packet and a much larger box which was now the smoker's final resting place.

Was the owner of the cigarette packet a mum or a dad. Or were they an eminent lawyer, a teacher or a doctor whose skills would be hugely missed? Had their sons and daughters wept at the smoker's funeral?

Perhaps these thoughts could become the heart of an emotional creative writing story for the writers evening class she attended.

An insect wriggled out from inside the packet. Could even now an insect also be wriggling out of the smoker's coffin?

At night, was the darkness in this lonely part of Hyde Park as dark as the place where the smoker now lay?

Laura was tempted to lift the packet and deposit it into a nearby rubbish bin but somehow it didn't seem right. Instead, she moved on feeling sad.

But not for long. On the other side of the bushes was a large plastic bag with it's contents spilling out and strewn around. It was obvious now where the cigarette packet had come from.

Somehow, Laura no longer cared whether the owner of the cigarette packet was now living of dead and definitely had no intention of writing about them.

The End

Rob Hopcott

(Online author - fiction - news)

Copyright Rob Hopcott 2007. All characters in this and other flash fiction, micro-fiction or very short stories on this site are fictitious and no reference is intended to any person living or otherwise.