This is Drabbletober, the podcast of tiny fiction.

Hello, and welcome to Drabbletober. This is episode 22, season 2, for Wednesday the twenty-second of October 2025. I'm Elizabeth Guilt.

Your one-hundred word story for the day is:

Same Old, Same Old

by Elizabeth Guilt

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Trudy wakes up on her birthday, and groans. Fifty! She makes her morning tea, and wonders how this happened. Fifty? She's never been to Venice. Never ridden a motorbike. Never eaten alfalfa sprouts.

What even is an alfalfa sprout? An hour later she is deep in articles about home sprouting, wondering whether she still has those old Mason jars and whether she would really need mesh lids. Some people recommended cotton instead...

Trudy slams her laptop shut. This. This is how it happened. She digs out the number she saved, months ago, and calls it. She books a motorbike lesson.

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When, in the far future, schoolkids write essays about the decline of civilisation in the mid twenty-first century, I can't help feeling that our almost ubiquitous ability to waste time on the internet is going to be right up there in the "causes" section.

But for the record, I quite like alfalfa sprouts.

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Take care, everyone, and I'll see you tomorrow for episode 23.

https://www.elizabethguilt.com/drabbletober/s2episode22