Friday Fictioneers – Sticky Past

~ neilmacdon
PHOTO PROMPT © Jennifer Pendergast

Do you remember? The goats strolling down the middle of the evacuated street, nibbling on garden hedges? And how we stood at our doors once a week, waving hesitantly to neighbours, and clapped the nurses and doctors? Do you remember what we learned about who we depended on and who was truly important?

Can we have forgotten so fast? Once, we knew what building back better might mean. But the past is sticky. It has oozed back to submerge the future we believed we once saw.

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

60 thoughts on “Friday Fictioneers – Sticky Past”

  9. The other option, of course, is that maybe we never really learned any lessons in the first place, while we were busy clapping and staying safe while simultaneously demanding that the lowest paid put their lives at risk to keep our shops open and deliver stuff to our homes. But maybe I’m just a cynic.

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  12. I accidentally deleted the following comment from Jennifer Pendergast:
    “I think we are too busy trying to get ‘back to normal’ to worry about whether normal was all good. I love the phrasing in this – the past is indeed sticky.”
    Thanks so much, Jennifer

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  17. For some of my colleagues, who work with covid patients even as we speak, there is the disorienting reality of it being supposedly ‘over’ (or to some of their patients, even as they gasp for air, never a reality) … even while they themselves are faced with the stark awfulness of illness and loss and death on a daily basis, only that now they are also seen as enemies by some for even speaking the word that’s become synonymous somehow with political affiliation and color of one’s baseball cap. How strange people can be, when they refuse to accept reality, and how oh-so-very-shortly-selective some people’s memories are …

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      1. I think I can understand it, cognitively, as a very successful campaign of gaslighting (which is a known way to brainwash and make a non-issue an issue, while making the real issues, non-issues). I cannot, however, understand how so many allow it to happen. For to understand it, truly, is to realize just how many seek harm over healing, power over people.

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  18. Excellent story, you really make every word count. Humans these days have the attention span of toddlers. What we see is enlightening. I used to have illusions about humanity wanting to improve… Hahaha…

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  20. Wow. This really hit home. How quickly we forget, right? Just the other day, I caught myself thinking a bit fondly of the early lockdowns – how the world seemed to come together, then. Not that I want people to die or for a pandemic to rage, but I do wish we’d managed to hold on to some of the things that occurred during that period.

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  23. Karl Marx wrote: “”History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Bruce Cockburn sings “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.” We, as a society, have short memories . . .

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