2026 February Flash Fiction Challenge: Day 4
Write a piece of flash fiction each day of February with the February Flash Fiction Challenge. Today’s prompt is to write about inheritance.
Some first-week reminders:
1. There is no sign-up. All you need to do is visit WritersDigest.com every day this month and click on the day's prompt.
2. You share your works in the comments section. To find the comments, just scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, write your story right in the text box or copy/paste (whichever you prefer!), and hit submit.
3. You don't need to share your work to participate. A lot of writers aren't comfortable sharing their work here. That's totally OK! The main thing is that you're writing something every day.
4. The system will occasionally flag stories for review. There is nothing wrong with your work; our platform does it randomly. We will be going through and releasing stories periodically between the hours of 9 a.m.–5 p.m. EST Monday through Friday. If your story is flagged, just sit tight. It'll be released!
For today's prompt, write a story about what happens after someone receives their inheritance.
(Note: If your story gets flagged for review, be patient—we will be releasing comments every few hours throughout the weekdays of this challenge. Our system randomly flags comments for review, so just sit tight and wait for us to set it free! If you run into any other issues with posting your story, please just send me an e-mail at mrichard@aimmedia.com with the subject line: Flash Fiction Challenge Commenting Issue.)
Here’s my attempt at a story about inheritance:
After Inheritance
She hadn’t known her grandfather was an artist.
A waterman by birthright and training, he’d spent his life on the water, hands rough and scarred from opening oyster shells and handling crab pots, face weathered by the harsh winds off the bay. He was a quiet, straightforward man who drank a little too much but at least didn’t bother anyone when he did.
When they broke the lock on the last shed on the property, she was shocked to see the sheer amount of paintings, all with her grandfather’s name scrawled with a steady hand in the right-hand corner of every single one.
“There have to be hundreds,” Marco said, wonder threaded through his voice.
They combed through them slowly, as if afraid to break a spell. There were small ones of oysters, sailboats, houses crumbling into the bay. Birds—so many birds. Fishing nets, sunsets, calm water and roiling waves.
“Is this your grandma?”
Heather set down the stack she’d been sorting and moved over to Marco. Behind all the canvases depicting life on the bay, he’d found a sizeable stack of paintings of a young woman.
“I’ve never seen her before,” she said quietly.
They started looking through them together. Very quickly, it became apparent that this was not just any woman—there were dozens of portraits of her, some abstract, some hyper realistic, all of them radiating longing, love, lust.
“Who is she?” Heather asked.
“Maybe someone before your grandmother?” Marco quickly moved one aside that featured the woman in a state of undress, though Heather caught a glimpse of her hooded eyes, lush smirk.
“I guess,” she said. She felt close to tears.
“Hey.” Marco pulled her in and gave her a squeeze. “Everyone has a past.”
Heather hummed. “But we haven’t found any of our family…not my grandma, not any of us.”
They were quiet for a few minutes, just breathing into each other.
“C’mon,” Marco said. “We don’t have to do this today.”
Heather followed him out of the shed, letting the door swing closed behind her, swallowing her grandfather’s secrets back into darkness.
