Prose Fiction Questionbank

The following text is an excerpt from The Red Mitten, a piece of prose fiction. The passage follows Maria, a woman grappling with the aftermath of a significant personal loss, as she navigates the quiet rituals of daily life on a rainy afternoon.

The rain had started again, tapping faintly against the kitchen window like a memory that wouldn’t quite leave. Maria stood by the sink, her hands still wet from washing the dishes, watching the garden blur into muted shades of green and brown. A single red mitten lay on the patio stones, soaked through, a remnant of a morning forgotten in the rush of everything.

She had meant to call her mother. She had meant to write to Elise. She had meant to pick up the dry cleaning, to return the library books, to apologize to Tom. But instead, she had stayed in, rearranging the spice cupboard and alphabetizing the condiments.

There was a comfort in order, even if it meant nothing. The world outside could be chaos—spilled coffee, sharp words, late trains—but inside her cupboards, the paprika always came before the rosemary.

Behind her, the radio murmured something about traffic delays and foreign elections. The kettle clicked off. Somewhere upstairs, the floor creaked—she told herself it was the house settling, but the hairs on her neck rose anyway. Silence followed.

It had been six months since Elise left, and still the quiet was heavier than Maria ever expected. Elise had taken the cat, most of her books, and the navy scarf Maria had knitted during the winter of 2020. In exchange, she left behind two chipped mugs, a tangled phone charger, and an ache that settled between Maria’s ribs whenever she turned the key in the front door and found no lights on.

The neighbours had stopped asking questions. At first, there had been polite interest—“How’s Elise doing?” and “We miss seeing you both at the market”—but Maria’s short answers and forced smiles eventually built a fence higher than any hedge.

She moved through the day with a kind of stillness. In the mornings, she brewed coffee and drank it slowly, letting the bitterness spread across her tongue like punishment. She reread old postcards from Elise, trying to decipher subtext in every loopy sentence. “The sun’s just come out after three days of rain. You’d love it here.” Was that an invitation? Or a farewell?

On this particular afternoon, Maria opened the back door and stepped outside barefoot. The cold stones shocked her soles. She bent and picked up the mitten, wringing the water out slowly. The wool clung to her fingers. She turned it over once, twice, as if inspecting it might answer something. Then, in one swift movement, she tossed it into the bin.

Inside again, she sat at the kitchen table and traced circles into the condensation on her tea mug. The house sighed around her—pipes expanding, wood groaning with age. She thought of calling Tom, but she couldn’t find the words that weren’t soaked in regret. Instead, she reached for a notepad from the drawer. The page was blank, painfully white.

She wrote one sentence:

Today it rained, and I didn’t cry.

It was something. Not poetry. Not closure.

But something.

The following text is an excerpt from The Edge, a piece of prose fiction. The passage follows Luca, a young man grappling with rejection and desperation after losing a life-changing opportunity. As he flees through the city at night, the extract explores themes of identity, self-worth, and resilience through a moment of emotional crisis.

He was already running when the sirens started.

Luca didn’t look back. His shoes slapped the pavement, too thin for the cold, too worn to hold much grip. Behind him, the alley narrowed, shadows peeling off the brick walls like smoke. He turned left, then right, then left again—his feet knowing the route even if his mind didn’t. The city blurred: rusted fences, broken lights, graffiti screaming in colour.

He had the envelope in his coat pocket. He could feel it crinkle with every movement, too thin to matter to anyone else, too heavy to leave behind.

He hadn't meant to take it. Not really. It had just been sitting there—on the desk, unguarded, open. A letterhead, a signature, a number. His name.

They had called it a mistake. “Administrative oversight,” they said. “Not eligible.” But it hadn’t felt like a mistake. It had felt like being erased.

He turned another corner and reached the footbridge. Below, the canal shimmered like black glass. He paused. His breath came in ragged bursts, clouding the air. The envelope crinkled again.

They would find out. Maybe they already had. He walked onto the bridge, footsteps echoing in the silence. The water below moved slowly, pulling scraps of leaves and wrappers along its surface like secrets it would never tell.

Luca stood still, his heart trying to punch its way out of his chest. He remembered how proud his mother looked when he told her about the scholarship. The way she held his face in both hands, her thumbs brushing his cheeks like he was still ten. He hadn’t told her it was revoked. Couldn’t. She already worked too many hours, already pretended too hard that things were fine.

The envelope was still there. Still real. He took it out, unfolded it slowly. The paper trembled in his hands. His name. The signature. The award, the sum, the promise. It was dated last month. It was no longer valid.

But it had once been true.

He let the paper hang between his fingers, the wind tugging at it gently. The sirens had faded. The city hummed below him—trains in the distance, laughter from a bar, the hum of streetlights waking up for the night.

He closed his eyes.

Then he folded the letter again, carefully this time, and tucked it back into his pocket.

When he turned around, the bridge behind him was empty. No sirens. No footsteps. Just the quiet.

Luca began to walk—not fast, not slow. Just forward.

The following text is an excerpt from Mirrors, a piece of prose fiction. The passage explores the quiet emotional distance between a mother and daughter as they navigate life after the loss of a family member, using reflective narration and domestic imagery to convey grief, memory, and unspoken connection.

Every morning, I find a new line on my mother’s face.

She sits in the kitchen as she always has—back straight, hands wrapped around a chipped mug, tea swirling in slow eddies as the spoon rests against porcelain. The clock ticks overhead, unbothered by the silence between us.

It’s not that we don’t speak. We do—about the bread going stale too quickly, the neighbour’s dog barking through the night, the price of onions. But never about the things that press against the edges of our words. Like how the garden has grown wild since Dad passed, or how my brother hasn’t called in four months.

There are photographs on the wall—sun-bleached memories of birthdays, holidays, smiles we used to wear more easily. One of them shows me at eight, a crooked fringe and missing tooth, squinting into the sun with a balloon in one hand and Mum’s fingers in the other.

She still has that dress from the photo, though it no longer fits. Once, I caught her folding it gently, placing it in a drawer lined with tissue paper as if it were something sacred. I didn’t ask why.

The mirror above the sink catches us both—me, still in yesterday’s sweater, hair unbrushed; her, with silver creeping into her hairline, the corners of her mouth tugged downward by time. I wonder if she sees me as I see her: a faded version of someone I used to know.

There are moments when I think I hear her crying at night. The quiet kind—no sobbing, no gasps—just the sound of someone trying very hard not to be heard. But when I knock, she always says, “Just the wind, love,” and smiles the way someone does when they don’t want to be comforted.

In the mornings, she hums while chopping carrots. She wipes the table twice. She sighs when the kettle takes too long to boil. She wears the same cardigan three days in a row.

Once, I found her sitting in the hallway, holding Dad’s watch. It had stopped at 5:47. She told me she couldn’t bring herself to wind it.

“Time should move forward,” she said. “But some things don’t follow.” Today, I ask her if she wants to walk with me to the corner shop.

“No, you go,” she says, as she always does. “Bring back some of those oat biscuits. The ones with the ridges.”

I go, but I walk slowly, hoping that when I return, she’ll have shifted somehow—turned a page, moved a cup, opened the window.

Something.

But when I come back, she’s still there, same chair, same mug, same silence.

Still, I pour the tea. Still, I sit across from her. And in the mirror above the sink, we look at each other, and say nothing.

But somehow, that feels like enough.

The following text is an excerpt from The Blue Bicycle, a piece of prose fiction. Told from the perspective of a younger sibling, the passage explores the emotional impact of a sister’s brief disappearance during childhood, reflecting on memory, change, and the quiet ways people drift apart.

I was nine the summer my sister decided to run away. She left on a Tuesday, just after breakfast, wearing Dad’s old army backpack and a pair of yellow sunglasses she found at a garage sale. She told me not to tell anyone until at least lunchtime, which I didn’t, not because I was loyal but because I didn’t really believe she would do it.

She took the blue bicycle, the one we weren’t supposed to ride past the post office. I watched from the porch as she pedaled past the fence and didn’t look back. Her hair streamed out like a flag, and I remember thinking that it looked like freedom.

After she disappeared down the road, the morning sagged into heat and silence. The garden buzzed with sleepy bees, and the dog lay flat on the concrete like a melted candle. I sat on the porch steps, holding the popsicle she hadn’t finished, watching it drip onto my hand.

By lunch, I was sure something had gone wrong. Not because she hadn’t come back—she’d said she was going for good—but because I had started to miss her. I missed the way she hummed while brushing her teeth, the way she rolled her eyes at Dad’s jokes, the way she always cut the crusts off my sandwiches even when I said I didn’t care.

I didn’t tell anyone until dinner.

They didn’t believe me at first. Dad laughed and said she was probably at the library, hiding in the air conditioning. Mum looked out the window like she expected to see her walking up the drive, barefoot and grinning.

But she didn’t.

That night, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling fan spinning shadows on the wall. The house felt too big without her. Even the dog kept pacing the hallway, whining. I got up and opened the window, hoping maybe I’d see her riding back, that flash of blue rolling down the hill like a promise.

Instead, there was only the sound of crickets, and the smell of cut grass, and the strange stillness that comes when someone you love is missing.

She came back two days later, sunburned and quiet. She didn’t explain where she’d gone, and no one asked. Dad made her toast. Mum handed her the shampoo without saying a word. I sat across from her at breakfast, watching the way her hands trembled when she lifted the mug.

The blue bicycle was leaning against the shed, one tire flat, its frame dusted with gravel. She never rode it again.

That summer, something shifted. She stopped playing records in the living room. She started locking her door. I never saw the yellow sunglasses again.

But once, in September, I found a crumpled napkin in her drawer with a map drawn in purple pen—lines, arrows, little trees, a river made of dots. It led nowhere, but I kept it anyway.

Just in case.