In rage and disbelief, I followed them, my Nikon capturing irrefutable proof for my client. A stone’s throw ahead, the faithless husband paused and passionately claimed my wife’s willing mouth with his own.
Ever a glutton for punishment, I’m pushing the minimalist limits by accepting Trifecta‘s weekend challenge, the Trifextra for week 58. The instructions were simple…write a 33-word story featuring the word “stone,” using any definition of the word. Constructive feedback is appreciated!
Scaling walls to find creative freedom
It’s been years since I’ve done any creative writing. Once I hit high school, writing became strictly research papers, persuasive essays, and lab reports. I’ve gone through random spells of journaling in the past two decades, but there’s been no creative writing. No poetry, no short stories, and certainly no novels. And it wasn’t just that I wasn’t writing creatively…I wasn’t even thinking creatively anymore. As I got older and life filled with more and more responsibilities, I allowed all of my creative outlets to shut down–writing went first, then crafty projects followed, and for several years I even stopped reading because there was “no time.”
Making this commitment to blog daily throughout 2013 might just be my own personal prison break. I’ve scaled the wall of responsibilities, both real and imagined, crawled carefully over the barbed-wire of my own inhibitions, and now find myself standing, somewhat bemused, in the world of anything is possible. I’ve read three books since January, and have two currently in progress (that doesn’t hold a candle to my high school reading pace, but it’s a vast improvement over the wordless drought that’s parched my life since the mid-90s). For my first tentative attempts at fiction in more than twenty years, I’ve found great support from other writers in the blogosphere, and I credit that encouragement for a marked increase in the number of spontaneous creative thoughts I’ve been having the past week. I hope the trickle implies that a dam burst is imminent. For the first time, I feel like a notebook that goes everywhere I go might actually be an ally in capturing some of these thoughts for future use, rather than an enemy sitting in silent accusation, adding more pressure because of its disuse. The taste of creative freedom is as addictive as Oreos, and I find myself willing, even eager, to spend more and more time in front of the computer chasing words and ideas down long-disused pathways, brushing aside cobwebs with every step. Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope, after all, that I can be a writer, not just in thought, but also in deed.
Photo Copyright Jennifer Pendergast
Above me, in the glare of the light, my parents urge me with outstretched hands to join them, but the drama in the lobby below halts my upward progress. The concierge frantically punches numbers into the phone. Guests circle the blue-lipped man on the marble floor. Smartphones capture the hotelier pounding the prone man’s chest. Suddenly, I lose my grip on the railing and am pulled violently downwards. Gasping for breath, I look up into a sea of curiously concerned faces. I trace a trail of drool from my chin to a complimentary mint lying wetly on my aching chest.
This is my second attempt at a Friday Fictioneers challenge, and after an hour of editing, I finally managed to pare it down to exactly 100 words! Hopefully I didn’t pare out the entire plot in the process…
If you’d like to read other authors’ responses to this photo prompt, click on the blue froggy guy below.
My inaugural attempt at Thoughtful Tuesdays morphed into Deep Thought Thursdays when I laid out my official blogging map last week, but the premise remains the same. I have randomly selected a question from Gregory Stock, PhD’s The Book of Questions, available online.
Question 202
Would you be willing to commit perjury for a close friend? For example, might you testify that he was driving carefully when he hit a pedestrian even though he had been joking around and not paying attention?
Short answer: no. I would not commit perjury for a close friend, or even a family member.
I have lots of friendly acquaintances, but by choice, I have very few close friends simply because I believe true friendships require energy, attention, and maintenance. That makes it sound like friendship is a job, and that’s not at all what I mean. But I don’t think it’s fair to call someone my friend if I am not willing to invest in the relationship to make it strong and lasting. I never really stopped to think about it before, but in my mind, I guess I take my friendships as seriously as my marriage vows. My close friends are like blood relatives to me, and can count on my love, devotion, and loyalty in good times and bad. But I will not sacrifice my values for anyone, and if I’ve chosen my friends as wisely as I think I have, they would never ask me to do so. I like to think that my honesty and integrity are integral qualities of my character that make others amenable to claiming me as a friend in the first place. If I were willing to surrender them so easily, I would not be able to respect myself, much less ask anyone else to respect me. Lying in such a serious situation might save one friend initially, but as it would cost me my self-worth and potentially ruin other friendships and relationships if word of my dishonesty got out, resentment would build and the friendship would die anyway. The price of perjury would be too dear, one I am not willing to pay.
So, fair warning my friends (and family members). If you hit a pedestrian, I will not lie for you. You can, however, count on me to visit you in jail, to make sure your family is okay while you’re incarcerated, and to bring you a nice outfit to wear home on your release day. I expect you’d do exactly the same for me.
Yesterday, on a windy little country road, I found myself playing a game of chicken with…wait for it…a chicken! I’d just come ’round a bend at about 40 mph (20 mph below the posted speed limit, thankfully) and found myself hood to beak with a puffy brown hen strutting around in my lane. I fully expected that when she looked up and saw my little silver cheese-wedge of a car bearing down on her, she’d make tracks for the safety of the grassy shoulder. Not this gal. She stopped dead in her tracks and faced me head on, not the least bit ruffled by the rapidly decreasing distance between us. I nearly punched a hole through the floorboard trying to brake in time, closing my eyes at the final second in anticipation of a sickening thud and an explosion of fluffy brown feathers. The car stopped; the thud never came. I squinted one eye open, and I could see the hen’s red comb hovering just beyond the nose of the car. It was at a height that I was confident I hadn’t squished her, so I opened the other eye and idled in the middle of the road, waiting for her to brwaak in victory and parade her bad self to the shoulder. Apparently, she had not yet learned the finer points of sportsmanship, for she wouldn’t budge; I was forced to make a 90-degree turn from a complete standstill in order to swerve around her. In the rearview mirror, I could see her pivot on the spot to follow my progress, unabashedly gloating as I slunk off in defeat.
As the surge of adrenalin slowly drained away, the vision of my car eating up the limited pavement between the hen and me replayed itself on an endless loop, accompanied by a soundtrack of increasingly ridiculous questions.
Wanting to keep the answers to those questions on a strictly need-to-know basis, I very cautiously approached that fateful bend in the road today. The pavement was clear, but pecking around in the tall grass of the shoulder were my opponent and at least a dozen of her closest friends. It wasn’t clear as I inched past whether they were daring each other to reenact yesterday’s classic game of chicken, or working on their material for the ever popular “Why did the chicken cross the road?” gag, but they all looked decidedly shady.
I am fully aware that is a rooster in the photograph–I had to dig through my personal archives for a poultry picture as I was late for work yesterday and had no time to jump out of the car to snap a portrait of my feathered foe standing victoriously in the road.
I turned twenty-five today.
I didn’t mind the number too much until Garrett pointed out at lunchtime that I’d been on the planet for a quarter of a century. Why did that particular wording make me feel ancient? Even more troubling, why did it make me feel impotent?
I hid in my cubicle for the remainder of the afternoon, pondering the life I had lived until now.
Did I believe I had lived each day thoroughly? No, after overhearing Heidi holding forth in the break room after many an adventure-packed weekend, I definitely couldn’t claim that I had.
Had I grabbed every opportunity that been offered? No, I’d been convinced by an inner dialogue not to reach too far beyond the familiar.
Could I be proud that I’d been in command of where I’d been and what I’d done? No, I tended to try to make other people happy, and that need to gratify had herded me more than once down a path I’d rather not have taken.
I did not like what I found in the examination of my initial quarter century. Without fail, I had done what had been expected of me. I had not rocked the boat. I had not created conflict. I had not incited worry. I had not provoked excitement. I had merely been.
No more.
In that moment, I vowed to approach life, MY life, with a different attitude. If only I had an indelible reminder of that pledge to break free from the predictable routine I’d formerly permitted…
Garrett appeared over the top of my cubicle, joyfully offering a chocolate cupcake while brazenly murdering the time-worn birthday melody.
“Thank you, Garrett. Hey, I’m going to get a tattoo tonight, wanna come?”
You could have knocked him over with a feather and I’m willing to wager he won’t be the only one left with mouth agape in the next quarter century.
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Hee hee! I took some liberties with this one, in my classic overachiever style. The original prompt from The Daily Post was a challenge to choose one letter of the alphabet to omit from my post, using only twenty-five letters instead of all twenty-six. I decided while I was at it, I’d also make the theme of the story twenty-five, and use twenty-five sentences in its telling. This post-script excluded, can you tell which letter I omitted? (Hint: I did not take the easy road by choosing q, x, or z.)
No one can argue that Mother Nature creates some spectacular sunset displays, especially for those lucky enough to find themselves on a beach in Jamaica. But sometimes the scene painted across the canvas of the sky isn’t the most beautiful artwork in the gallery. If you can tear your eyes away from the classic, clichéd picture-postcard features of gilded clouds and fishing boats silhouetted against a fiery horizon, you might notice the fading rays also play with often over-looked elements in the scene, highlighting unique textures in ordinary objects and drawing forth unexpected colors from normally unremarkable surfaces. In this case, I was particularly taken with the colors and patterns surfacing, frolicking, then dissolving across the undulating surface of the ocean.
Today’s post is my entry in The Weekly Photo Challenge: Lost in the Details, in which we were encouraged to examine the typical scene we’d normally frame in our camera’s viewfinder then look for new and unexpected angles and details to capture.
Things I See and Know 