Fiction Prompt:
Write a scene (150–250 words) where:
You enter a familiar place — your living room, a café, your office, your car — and everything looks completely normal except for one small detail that is slightly off.
Not supernatural.
Not glowing.
Not dangerous.
Just… wrong in a way that only you would notice.
In the scene, show:
- The moment you notice it
- The specific thought or memory that makes this detail meaningful
- How this changes your mood for the next hour
- A subtle shift in your self-understanding because of it
The detail should reveal something about the main character.
Response:
Last summer, one evening while running errands, something small and peculiar happened in my car.
I have my usual radio rotation—pop, classic rock, 90s hits. Those stations are part of the ritual: mirror, seatbelt, ignition, familiar music. Automatic. Comforting.
But that evening, when I turned the key, the speakers crackled to life with something foreign.
AM news radio.
I never listen to the news while driving. Not once. The shift was so out of place that for a moment I wondered if someone else had used my car—an impossible thought, since I’m the only one with the keys.
The strangeness clung to me. I switched the dial back to the hits and sat there, staring through the windshield at nothing in particular, letting the weirdness settle.
When something changes in your space and there’s no one else to blame, the mind wanders to strange explanations. Maybe I brushed the tuner on the way out last time, I told myself—though I couldn’t recall that ever happening.
It was a better story than thinking the car had a mind of its own.
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