Each week, I will post three (or more) random words. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write something using all of those words. It can be a few lines, a story, a poem, anything. Don't spend too much time on it. It doesn't have to be perfect. The idea is to let your mind wander and write what it will. I'll also write something using the same three words.
Be sure to leave a comment if you participate.
This week's words are:
concrete
urging
slippery
Rita sat on the floor with her legs crossed. The coldness of the concrete and the barrenness of the walls seemed to go well with the emptiness she felt inside. She spends most of her days thinking. And now was a firm believer that too much thinking could drive a person insane. But she was unable to stop.
She thinks about a little girl who dressed up like an angel for Halloween when she was six years old. A girl who didn't have her first kiss until she was fifteen. How was that same girl now a user and a shop lifter? It didn't seem possible. She wonders where innocence goes to when it's gone.
She thinks about a boy she knew, who was always urging her to quit. And remembers the last night she saw him. His normally warm and pleading eyes turned cold and distant She imagines she might be sitting down to dinner with him right now, if she had listened to him just once.
She thinks about how if she'd had a different last name, or if her parents had known the right people, she would have gotten just a slap on the wrist. But she didn't. And they didn't.
She thinks about how it started. A single hit at a party. Then taking twenty-five dollars from her mother's purse. It had all seemed so harmless at first. But oh, what a slippery slope.
"She wonders how it ever got this crazy. She thinks about a boy she knew in school..."
I will use those three words on Friday. But master of grammar, and my official copy editor, how do you mean concrete?
ReplyDeleteI continued the story from last week. We'll see how it goes.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely perfect. I feel her lonliness.
ReplyDeletePia: I'm not sure how it was intended. But concrete may be used however you like. That only adds to the fun and variety, right?
ReplyDeleteDorothy: I like that idea.
Blondie: Thanks. I know it's not my best. But it's just a writing exercise.
So I'm hoping the goal was to depress me, right? Nicely written, but geez Bone! I agree with Blondie: you really can feel her loneliness.
ReplyDeleteThere was an honesty in that that is unshakeable. How many of us, when we make a big mistake, examine our entire road and recognize every opportunity we had to make another choice and we failed to do it? Oh how we love to bludgeon ourselves with the past instead of getting off the floor to walk in a new direction.
ReplyDeleteI loved the direction you went with this piece.
Like Dorothy I loved the direction, and like everybody else the story.
ReplyDeleteBut Bone I kept thinking how much I would have liked to have known the middle of the story--after she began her descent
I would have liked to have known about her childhood and what about it besides being the wrong ethnic group and having no connections made her more susceptible to becoming an addict.
I know, I know. It's just a wriing exercise. But I think that you have great uh, bones for a long short story or a novella.
I wonder, do you get inspiration from the songs or do you find a song to go with the post later?
ReplyDeleteat any rate this one is very good. I didn't get that she was in jail until much later and since it really doesn't have a conclusion (or the conclusion is at the beginning) I didn't jump to a conclusion. hee hee
Ya know... you really amaze me with your writing!!!
ReplyDeleteno running poolside
ReplyDeletebarefoot on slippery concrete
urging water fall
Traveling Chica: No, that wasn't the goal :) But I'll take that as a compliment.
ReplyDeleteDorothy: Thanks, D. I was also thinking how there is such a thin line sometimes.
Pia: I honestly wasn't thinking of any ethnicity. But it's fun to hear how different people interpret it :)
And you do make a good point. There could be a lot more added to at least maybe make it into a short story.
Definitely the writing exercises, for now, are just pieces of stories.
Renee: I always find a song to go with the post later. This one was easy. That one line kept sticking in my head.
Shayna: Aww, thank you :-)
Sage: Reminds me of being ten years old at my aunt's pool.
nice work bone.
ReplyDeleteHer boyfriend robbed the 7/11. She couldn't believe it. Not only was she in love with thief, she was in love with one who stole from a store that had coffee machines, almost on the honor system, and poor clerks who made miniumun wage, and sometimes were ordered to repay the money.
ReplyDeleteShe knew this because she had once had a summer job at that 7/11. But she had been sixteen and her parents threatened to go to the town's newspaper and tell them about this unstated policy.
She had told this story to her boyfriend when they were lying on the hot concrete in back of the bleachers at a concert. At her boyfriend's urging she drank too much Boone's Farm and almost got sick
She knew that Floyd had a penchant for doing misdeeds. Any parents who named a child Floyd had to expect that.
Floyd had thrown some beer on the concrete. She should have taken it as a sign and have known that life with Floyd was going to be slippery.
Thanks, Ms. Sizzle.
ReplyDeleteGenie: I'll never understand why girls continue to listen to our urgings :-)
I really liked this one. Her emotions were so palpable.
ReplyDelete