Mysterious Photograph
Each issue features a Mysterious Photograph. Readers are invited to submit a 250-word (or less) flash fiction story based on the photo. The person who invents the best mystery story receives a prize of $25, and the story is published in a future issue.
The Story That Won the March/April 2025 contest:
The Value of Time
by Joan Leotta
I wanted Pa’s oversized watch after he died. My much older siblings, Bill and George laughed. “It’s worthless like this house and himself.”
But when Pa took walks with me after prison, when Bill and Gorge were already living far away, he’d hold up the watch, saying, “Time is the most precious thing, the only truth worth anything.” He’d add his biggest regret was missing the first seven years of my life since I was born right after he and his pal went to jail for bank robbery. His pal died, but Pa came out, lived through Mom’s passing, and died just after I left for art school, after mortgaging the house to pay my first year’s tuition.
I knew he tinkered with the watch every so often, so I also took the cigar box of watch parts from the basement.
A few weeks later, I dumped the parts onto my kitchen table and with a book on watch repair by my side, I pried open Pa’s watch. No works! Just a rolled-up piece of paper, a note wrapped around seven shiny stones—three rubies, two emeralds, two diamonds.
Pa’s note revealed that after prison he had dug up the heist money and since his partner was dead, converted it into the stones inside the watch—one for every year he’d missed in my life. “Use these to make the most of your time, daughter.” Pa lived the true value of one thing—time.