Janet Reid, the über literary agent, has an often weekly contest on her blog (not her Queryshark, which is another great blog).  The prompts are often five words that must be used, at least once, in a story that is one-hundred words or less.  I’ve not done many blog prompt contests with such short limits, but I went ahead and entered this weeks.  It was quick enough I might keep doing them in the future.

The Dangerous Fiction Writing Contest

1. Write a story using 100 words or fewer
2. Use these words in the story:
fiction
slush
spade
hear
262

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My entry:

Twenty minutes after they’d begun digging, the spade bit into a pine wood box, rotten with decay.

Sam bent over the hole, fat globs of sweat falling from his mud-caked brow, mixing with the slush and snow that coated the frozen Oklahoma plains.

“Box. Why a box?” Sam drawled, “I hear he’s been here, what, two-huner’t years?”

Paul thumbed on his flashlight, pointing it at the gravestone. “Yup. Two-sixty-two says here.”

Sam exhaled as if he were blowing out 262 birthday candles himself. They didn’t bury their kin in boxes. John Running Bear had told him a fiction: he’d lied.
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Update: I didn’t even get a mention, but this was a fun one to enter. I’ll be entering more of these soon.