Welcome to Prosery – dVerse’s flash fiction prompt. dVerse is the poetry pub, but once a month we have some fun with  prose. For this prompt, we ask you to write a piece of flash fiction in 144 words or less, including a quotation from a poem.

This week’s quotation is: No one left and no one came on the bare platform.

This seemed appropriate enough for these lockdown days, but I thought it also gave us a bit of room to breathe, stretch out and spread our story-telling wings.

The lines are lifted from Adelstrop by Edward Thomas, whose poems show great attention to, and delight in, nature. He was a close friend of Robert Frost, and I think both of them have the knack of producing something that can be read on many different levels.Thomas died at Arras in 1917, which adds extra poignancy to his legacy of pastoral poems and depiction of the British landscape.

If you don’t know Adlestrop, you can find it here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53744/adlestrop

So here’s what to do:

Write a piece of flash fiction in 144 words or less.

Include that quotation. You can play around with punctuation if you like.

Link it up to Mr Linky.

Take a wander round the other links – we may be socially isolating, but we can still link up online.