Here’s a few pieces I whipped up during a couple of 15 minute write-in sessions with Gotham Writers last year.
Prompt: Moonlight
Her nostrils were lunar craters, and her lips were two colliding asteroids. Her eyes held all the emptiness of dark matter. This was the most romantic I was willing to be about Ramona Trafenberg, my girlfriend by proxy. Thanks to an insidious double date with a former friend, Ramona had been foisted on me for the better part of a year. I had stared for hours into that charmless face, looking for a feature to hang my hat on, looking for something to admire. We had spoken on subjects real and metaphysical, and never once did a cogent thought come out of her mouth. Her body was always unforgivingly swaddled in pastel polyester pantsuits, which called even more attention to her burdensome presence. To tell the truth of the matter, the only reason I hadn’t left Ramona T in the dust eons ago was the foot rubs. My God. The way her fingers could press into my arch while her other hand pulled my toes out of their sockets - transcendent. When she kneaded into my aching heels, she was Venus. I endured her horrid outfits, her base personality, and wretched looks for the fifteen minutes a week she would work on my sore hooves. She was my tootsie idiot savant.
Prompt: On A Break
Frankly, this was bullshit.
Carrie glared at the clock again, that wretched timepiece that was signaling the end of her government mandated break. However, said clock never took into consideration the five minutes it took to cross the floor to get to the break room, the two minute obligatory conversation with Marcos the security guard, and three minutes it took the pitifully weak coffee maker to heat up. All in all, her posh fifteen minutes became a lean five, and each day it made her feel more murderous.
Steve always gets his full fifteen, she thought bitterly, looking over balefully to her former indiscreet lover’s office. That fucker made sure his office was RIIIIIGHT next to the break room. That fucker made sure to flirt with Francine every morning and sweet talk her into having a fresh pot ready so he didn’t waste a single moment of break time. Bizarrely, said fresh pot always seemed to be fresh the fuck out, despite Carrie only arriving minutes after Steve’s break. These bastards. Like Pop said, always trying to squeeze blood out of a stone. And Steve was the worst. After he was finished with their little affair (and it goes without saying that the entire relationship had been on his terms, beginning/middle/end), he had used some sly implications to HR about their relationship in order to secure a new office, a new job in a new department, and had left Carrie high and dry.
Wonder what it would be like to have him dead, she mused, not for the first time, and not with any real venom. More of a half baked contemplation she turned over in her head whenever she had a free moment. Wonder how one would do it. Could poison, bake it in an office birthday cake. That fat fuck always had two extra helpings. Before their brief entanglement, she remembered she had been slightly amused by him getting back in the cake line, justifying his third serving by, “Well, I got a corner piece and a middle piece, but I didn’t get one of those frosting balloons yet, so. Can’t make an informed critique without all the information!” Poison wouldn’t do. Whole office could go and that would make it easy for any half-wise detective. What about—
“Hey Carrie!” She blinked. She hadn’t even heard Clarissa sidle up to her. Clarissa, possibly the only bastard here she hated worse than Steve. “I’m thinking that break is over.”
Prompt: Skin In The Game
With a sickening crack and wet snap, the ligaments finally detached and Russell carved himself off a nice pelt with his too dull knife. Skinning an animal was always an arduous and intensely intimate process, but it was decidedly more laborious with this piddly little pen knife.
There was Greta to thank for that, Russell thoughtly grimly, tearing off another bit of fur. Greta, the boisterous redhead with her laughs that went on just a little too long and just a little too loudly. Greta, who had whispered in his ear what a man he was and how she found him more impressive than the seven wonders of the world. Greta, who had taken his last two dollars and Bowie knife before disappearing into the night. There had been far too many Gretas in his fifty years of wandering. Still, he reasoned, slinging the half-skinned doe over his shoulder. Better a Greta and a penknife than another lonesome night lost at the bottom of a bottle. All that was good for was a powerful headache and an unquenchable thirst the next day. And you more’n likely were just as apt to be robbed that way too, without any pleasant memories as comfort.
Bessie neighed a frustrated complaint as she slung the hide over her backside, but was soon appeased by a pat and Russell’s last half-apple. If only the Gretas of the world were as loyal and as easily pacified.
Prompt: Up At Dawn
Dawn lay awake in bed, as she had for the past seven nights. She stared at the ceiling, absently scratching at her chest as if that could somehow release the tension she carried. Faintly, down the hall, there was the plucking of strings. Her insomniac folk rock neighbor, Cassandra, was now on hour two of playing “Babylon”. Dawn couldn’t imagine doing two hours of anything, much less two hours of plucking the same six strings, over and over again. Now and then, some singing bled into the music. It reminded Dawn that she had misunderstood the lyrics as a child, doing chores with her mother while listening to Don McLean on a loop. What was a beautiful ballad to a Jewish homeland became a curious cry for self-identity with Dawn’s misheard lyrics.
“By the waters, the waters, the waters of that I am.
We lay down and wept, and wept, for these I am.”
She had glowed with her brilliant interpretation, and felt quite precocious to understand such a deep and powerful mourning for a lost sense of self at such a young age. Of course, this glow turned into a burn of humiliation when it was pointed out to her that, in fact, the words were “Babylon” and “thee, Zion.” Still, it was all she could hear when listening to it, even now. It seemed Cassandra was joining her in her grief, in that not knowing who she was. Who was she without that job? Without that house? Without...them? She turned over and wept, and wept, for that she was. And wasn’t.