I enjoyed the pub last night, chatting with old friends, and I wish Ellie had joined us. But I should have listened to her, drank less, and popped a blocker. I’ll get no sympathy from Ellie today, waking with a hangover and viral thoughts I feel compelled to share.

Darryn looks awful, and I’m glad I stayed home with the children last night. “Hey, Ellie,” he croaks, squinting at me through bloodshot slits. “Guess what I heard at the pub?”

Ellie plumps a pillow behind me as I pull myself into a sitting position on the bed. I lean closer to her. 

Darryn tries to whisper in my ear. “No thanks,” I retort, pushing him back onto the pillow. “I told you I don’t want to share any conversations from last night.”

“It’s not viral, Ellie,” I lie.

These are the opening paragraphs from Viral Thoughts, a short story I shared on the Tall And True writers’ website in January 2025.

Please note: The Story Insight below contains spoilers.

Story Insight

I wrote Viral Thoughts for the October 2024 Not Quite Write Prize run by the Not Quite Write Podcast. The 500-word flash fiction brief was:

• Your story must contain the word PALM, in full with no spaces or interrupting punctuation, or within a longer word (e.g. palmistry or napalm)
• Feature the action of “telling a lie”. You don’t need to use this exact wording, and you can feature the action prominently or simply as an aside and have it occur before the beginning of your story or after it ends
• Break the writing rule “avoid head-hopping”.

I assumed “head-hopping” had something to do with shifting point-of-view (POV) and confirmed this in an article on the Not Quite Write Podcast website:

“Head-hopping” describes a jarring shift in POV within a piece of fiction. One minute, we’re getting the insights and observations of our protagonist, and the next, we’re observing the protagonist from an outsider’s perspective.

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Mental Ping Pong

I leaned heavily into breaking the “avoid head-hopping” anti-prompt for Viral Thoughts. However, I tried to make it less jarring for the reader by anchoring my POV changes to Ellie and Alba around Darryn’s perspective. I also used different voicings for the three of them. For example, Darryn refers to Alba and Archie as the “kids”,  Ellie calls them the “children”, and Alba sounds like a typical self-centred child.

As for the “viral thoughts”, I imagined a virus like COVID, but one that compels the infected to share the thought and spread the virus. An infection Darryn could have prevented by taking a “neural blocker”, the equivalent of wearing a mask. 

Writing this story in first-person present tense and shifting POVs felt like playing mental ping-pong. But I enjoyed the game and had fun ending it with a head-hopping metaphor. 

And while Viral Thoughts didn’t “hop” onto the short or longlists for the Not Quite Write Prize, I shared it in my latest short story collection, One Day in the Life of Alex’s AI and Other Speculative Fiction.  

© 2025 Robert Fairhead

Thanks to Małgorzata Tomczak for sharing the perfect image for this story on Pixabay.

N.B. My first Not Quite Write Prize story from July 2023 also dealt with internal thoughts, In Her Head, which I narrated for Tall And True Short Reads in December 2023.