I came across this old-school meme on Facebook and couldn’t resist. You know the kind—pick your birth month, day, and the first letter of your name to generate a weird sentence.
Mine? I killed + My best friend + To Kill Time
Instead of sharing the sentence, I followed the feeling. The result? A short flash fiction piece:(Spoiler: there’s cereal, a peanut, and a fan that thinks too much.)
Want to play? Look below, grab your sentence, and turn it into something weird and wonderful. Drop it in the comments if you're up for the challenge.
If You’re Going to Be Caught
Some people knit when they’re bored.
Trevor bought a kazoo. I counted ceiling cracks like clues. We were twenty, broke, and restless. Summer had nowhere to go—and neither did we.
“Let’s do something,” he said one afternoon, his mouth half full of dry cereal. “Something they’ll remember.”
He always talked like that—like he wanted someone to quote him in the retelling. I didn’t answer. Just watched milk inch toward the counter’s edge. The fan flicked overhead, irregular. Like it was stalling on a thought.
We’d run out of distractions—Sharknado marathons, expired pudding, reshaped into nothing. Even the jokes felt like reruns.
Then he said it: “I’d die of boredom.”
He grinned, threw a peanut at my chest, then picked up the kazoo and hummed something off-key. I didn’t flinch. Just watched it roll off my shirt and hit the floor. It sounded louder than it should have.
Outside, a lawn mower started up—someone else’s summer.
I don’t remember standing. Just the fridge’s hum. Air, suddenly too thin. My fingers curled against the counter. The knife drying by the sink. The clock stuck at 2:57.
Three minutes to spare.
They called it a slip. I nodded. That’s the story they needed.
The ceiling’s still cracked in the same places. The kazoo disappeared.
He wanted to leave a mark.I made sure he did.
I killed my best friend. To kill time.
Most days, I get away with it. But around three o’clock, the silence starts to hum again.
And it sounds almost like music.
Your next favorite story might be a short one.
