This story is from the fiction contest NYC Midnight. They run different contests throughout the year with different groups of writers given prompts on genre, a required action, and specific word that must appear. My group’s genre was historical fiction, the action was washing clothes by hand, and the word to appear was ‘divided.’ I had 24 hours to come up with a story. The time constraint wasn’t nearly as difficult as the word limit—250 words. Here’s my offering.

She stood knee-deep in the stream, running the hide over the large rock when she heard her child’s desperate cry. Her mate had gone hunting, and as custom was not expected back for hours. She had decided to wash their coverings, hides taken from the wooly, mammoth beasts that roamed the land, before preparing the meal her mate would expect upon his return. ‘Do not stray far,’ she had warned the child in their truncated, grunted language, before returning to her chore.

But the child must have wandered too far, forgetting the rule to always remain within sight. This was also the land of the long-toothed cats, notorious for pouncing upon and dragging away their human prey. Hearing the screams, she dropped the child’s covering in the water and ran to their camp one hundred paces from the water’s edge. Foolishly, she’d left the spear her mate had insisted she keep with her at all times, and snatching it up, she ran wide-eyed and desperate back to where the child had disappeared. Nothing. Her heart now in her throat, she glimpsed the predator breaking for the trees, the child in its jaws, and without thinking she threw the spear on instinct, hard and arcing as she’d been instructed, and reaching the scene, finding her offspring injured but alive, the spear divided in two but having done its job, she swore never again to let the child from her side.