Crushed (Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge)

Changing our perspectives challenges all of us, the more so as we got older. Perhaps it is because we have acquired so many set ways of looking at the world, or maybe it is a lack of emotional flexibility, that makes it harder as we age to give up our prejudices.

But youth has its own challenges in this regard. When I think of how easily my mind changed about things when I was a youngster, I realize that the pain was still there. It simply seemed that the world was changing me rather than I shifting my own perspective.

Buried deep in a deadlined project, I almost decided not to partake of the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge this week, but something about the prompt kept scratching at the back of my mind:

July 22, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that has a shift in perspective. It can be a transition of one character or a change between character points of view. Go where the prompt leads, either technically or creatively.

What follows is wholly fictional, and yet it incorporates a real emotional shift from my own youth. My real teacher was named Turner, and in retrospect my crush had more to do with a bright red Mustang fastback than a pink silk shirt.

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Crushed

Miss Pivik stole my breath and my heart away. Each boy in the science class was crushing on the substitute. Immense green eyes were made more enticing by the gleam in them when she wrote on the board: "Call me Irene."

I learned nothing about science; I was daydreaming about kissing the new teacher, my hand brushing her pink silk sleeve.

Uncomfortable, I darted for the boys' restroom when class ended. Afterward, I saw her meeting young Mr. Woodsworth, my history teacher. His hand lightly rested on her sleeve as he bussed her cheek. Alas, all my dreams, crushed!