Every week we post six lines from a work of ours, a work-in-progress or published or a recommendation of someone else’s work with at least one LGBT character. Posted at Rainbow Snippets here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974

I promised you a love story for this week, one that might not have existed if I had read a submissions call more closely! “To The Ends of the Earth” was written for an online anthology (“Seat 14-C”) whose deadline was just a few days after I discovered it! I started writing the story before I double-checked! Here’s our first snippet:

It isn’t even like “The Jetsons.”

No moving sidewalks, no flying cars, no robots everywhere. I got a big payment (we all did) after “The Incident” (as they call it) that slipped Flight 008 into the year 2037. The card they gave us to access any cash we had left in our savings accounts (assuming we hadn’t been declared dead when the plane disappeared from radar back in 2017) was pretty much worthless to me as I’d spent everything following Kyle to Japan and then back to the U.S. when I heard he’d left.

If only we’d gotten on the same plane.

I’m pushing the buzzer on Kyle’s apartment, going over the speech I’ve been rehearsing in my head.

Okay, here’s the second snippet:

I lucked out finding his apartment; it was unlisted but I found out there are ways around that. It helped that the airline was bending over backwards for me, for all the passengers.

The woman who answered the door proved to me that women still wore hair curlers and kept cats in the year 2038. I asked if she knew a Kyle Carruthers, as I was thinking: please don’t be his wife, please don’t be his wife, please don’t be his wife.

She wasn’t. She said she didn’t know Kyle and she slammed the door in my face even as I was showing her the month-old plane ticket I’d bought twenty years earlier in 2018.

I’d written a few stories with romance in them, but this was my first real full-blown full-length romance story. Of course, I never finished the full-length version as I was too late for the deadline and the narrow theme precluded my submitting the story anywhere else. So, I wrote up this condensed version. Check out the link https://authorjeffbaker.com/2018/05/03/to-the-ends-of-the-earth-by-jeff-baker-friday-flash-fics-for-may-4-2018/ to find if our unnamed narrator finds Kyle and if they have a Happily Ever After! —–jeff