Friday Flash

Dropped Wallet & Mysterious Photo

This Friday’s Prompt: A woman drops her wallet on the street, and it falls open. You pick it up and are about to return it to her when you notice a strange picture inside.

First thought… Wow, that’s boring! Very mundane. Sounds like the type of thing a teacher would give to kids for some busy work on a Friday afternoon.

Let’s see what I can do with it. As usual, 15 minutes of free writing and posting it unedited.

The Snake In the Grass

“Mm—” The word ‘Miss’ was on the tip of my tongue, ready to call out to the woman who just dropped her wallet in the middle of the sidewalk. I bit my tongue instead, the sharp tang of blood on my teeth for a second before I swallowed it down.

The wallet lay open in my hand, a couple bills fanning out slightly, an ID I didn’t need to look at to know whose it was, and a debit card with the faint edge of trees printed on the plastic.

And one of those plastic photo inserts. The first one showed a boy of about twelve forcing a smile. The second showed a coiled black snake in a messy yard, the grass grown high enough it was obvious no one had mowed that week. Maybe the boy was supposed to. Maybe it didn’t matter.

There was nothing that unusual about the snake. I get them in my own garden sometimes. And there wasn’t anything too unusual about the fact that there was a foot in the picture too. Surprise feet when taking photos top-down weren’t odd either.

I don’t know why I was trying to justify the normalcy of it. There wasn’t anything normal at all. It wasn’t a foot. A black, shiny, cloven hoof stood there, tamping down the grass in a wide arc, and I tried to figure out how the person took the photo to get a hoof in there.

From the back of a horse? You’d get the horse, not just one hoof. And why wouldn’t the horse freak out about the snake right in front of it anyway?

I glanced up, but the woman was so far down the sidewalk that I could only make out her green hat anymore. She’d miss her wallet, no doubt. I tilted my head to peer into the billfold section. It was only fourteen dollars, but no one really carried cash anymore. I thumbed the debit card to the side. There was a folded piece of paper I had no business looking at, so I didn’t.

My gaze strayed back to the photo. The snake. The hoof. Then I saw something else that hadn’t registered as anything before: a shadow. It stretched out across the messy grass like you’d expect on a summer afternoon.

Now, shadows can do funny things. They don’t have to look human depending on the angle of the sun and… other stuff. I’m not a scientist. They didn’t usually have horns though, right?

A breeze hit the back of my head, and I whirled around as if it meant something. The sidewalk behind me lay empty and still. The leaves on the sad birch in front of the laundromat didn’t move. The sound of traffic seemed to fade out. I turned back the other way just in time to see someone duck out of sight around the far corner.

…. That was 15 minutes and it certainly wasn’t very interesting! Still, my fingers and brain are warmed up for the day.