Flash Fiction / writing prompts

The Facility #5

Chris Hall55 Comments

Days become weeks, the visits to the basement continue, the treatment-experiment-conditioning, whatever it is, each time washing over you in a stream of detached disinterest; each time, returning to your room and recovering in bed after another steady shuffle around the green garden with your fellow patients-subjects-inmates where, trapped on this endless treadmill, no-one speaks or makes eye-contact.

Food arrives on a tray – greyish porridge, brownish soup – delivered by the blank-faced orderly; later, a shot-glass of something sweet and very orange; later still, the lights dim and you sleep: is the orange liquid drugged you wonder, as you drift away again.

You request a newspaper for some distraction, but the request’s denied; instead, the orderly brings you a mindless magazine filled with photos of people you don’t recognise; you consider the art of paper-folding, but your fingers won’t cooperate. You study those fingers; your fingernails never seem to grow, still short and neat, just as when you arrived; your hair, as far as you can tell without a mirror, is the same; are you groomed in your sleep?

Another day, and when you return to your room, a TV screen has been installed, high up in the corner, just below the dull red camera eye; the orderly switches it on and just as the picture flickers into life, there’s a commotion in the corridor outside; a siren wails, there are shouts, running feet; the orderly spins around and rushes from your room.

In his haste, he leaves the door unlocked.

Confused? You might be! Read previous episodes of The Facility here.

Written in response to two challenges:

– Di of Pensitivity101‘s Wednesday’s Three Things Challenge – HIGH, DAFT, SHIN
– Denise Farley of GirlieOnTheEdge‘s Sunday’s Six Sentence Story Word Prompt – DISTRACTION

Photo credit: Scott Webb on Unsplash

Click here for more Six Sentence Stories. Better still, bring your own and join us!

55 thoughts on “The Facility #5”

  7. “…a stream of detached disinterest.”
    My ‘wish-I’d-written-it’ line of the week.

    Very visual, which, given my own tropism towards words-as-pictures(of-a-world), my highest of compliments.

    Then, from the learn-as-you-read lobe, excellent leaving the story with a ticking urgency scene,

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  10. I went back and read several of your previous sixes in this series. I hope this is the time for an escape and hope your subject is ready and the outside world is ready for him. Captivating series.

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  14. The mood of aimless confusion, really brought home by musing at the fingernails that never need clipping, the hair that seems the same…
    Wil the protagonist have enough focus to see and escape?…
    (Next week, same Bat time, same Bat channel!!)

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  17. Just when you think it can’t get more chilling, along comes sentences #3 and #4 and bam! Then you find your feet and drift into the novelty of a TV set in sentence #5… perhaps not the pixelated or HD drama you imagined, but a drama from outside? By sentence #6 you notice that a door has been quite literally left open…

    Your 2nd person pov prison chiller just took a sharp turn!
    (heck, and you realise suddenly you are commenting in the comments section in the 2nd person too 😨)

    (checks fingernail growth, checks hair length)

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  20. Ooo! I’m so desperate to find out what’s going on in the hallway, but I also want to know if the unlocked door will remain so long enough for escape. But then, is the facility on an island or an oil rig? As you can see, you’ve really captured me with this story. (I actually laughed when I read, “are you groomed in your sleep?” I wish I was.)

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  21. I haven’t quite worked out the detail for tomorrow’s episode… an oil rig? 🤔 But I too was tickled to find out about the overnight grooming – a pity that part of the story can’t be made into reality.

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  22. I’m glad I’m a couple of episodes behind because I don’t have to hang on that cliffhanger, I can go straight on. By the way there is something truly sinister about being groomed in your sleep – wonderful piece of detail!

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