Last summer, I was lucky to catch a tweet from the talented writer & editor, Laura Citino; she was looking for someone to exchange prompts & share stories for a few weeks. I only kind of knew Laura from Twitter, but I contacted her & the rest, as they say, is history.

Laura & I exchanged prompts for the first few weeks of July 2016 & generated at least ten stories each. Many of them have been published, which is pretty rad. Even more rad is that we became pretty good buddies.

Laura’s prompts (& friendship) came at the perfect time. I wasn’t writing much, & I felt kind of lonely & listless in the humid slump of Pennsylvania summer.

One of her prompts was to write about a strange weather event & it gave me the push I needed to write about the “blizzard” of mayflies that had closed a local bridge almost 150 years to the day after Union troops had burned an earlier bridge to stop Confederate troops from crossing the river.

I took some liberties but most of the things in this story really did happen.

This story was my most rejected to date before it found a home at one of my favorite journals of micro prose, CHEAP POP. You can read it here, then go read everything else on the CHEAP POP site.