This week, I want you to write something in the genre of fantasy or sci-fi, BUT I’m looking for a low-stakes conflict. Essentially, I’m looking for fantastical settings, worlds unlike our own, but I don’t want to see any action-adventure-pulp nonsense, I want you to write stories about robots and aliens having spats or a momma dragon that misses her recently nest-gone baby. Willing to take a pretty expansive view of what constitutes “fantasy or sci-fi,” but I will get mad at you if you fuck up the “low-stakes conflict.”

Here are some rules you should follow if you’d like to avoid a DQ:

• No murder and no violence in the events of the story (a reference to it in the past is OK but NO FLASHBACKS)
  
• No worse-than-death situations of lost sanity, eternal life in pain, or whatever -- nothing cute to get around the previous rule.
  
• Nothing about the fate of the world, or a large city, or that sort of thing.
  
• No poetry, no fanfic, no erotica, no screeds, no Google Docs, no quote tags.

Flash rules available on request, via Emily Dickinson.