I wrote part of this story during the 3-hour drive to Haystack. More on this beloved Maine institution very soon but for now I’ll just announce to the world that every delightful thing you’ve heard about it is TRUE. What an extraordinary treat. And amidst all the great pleasures of the day, I was able to find enough time to finish the story. My prompt was the photo of shells here, which I gazed at for a few minutes before packing the car. Then I meditated on my memory of the shells for a while and… wrote a story about Komodo dragons, of course!
Working Title: Komodo Killah
1st Sentence: By the time they began confessing their greatest fears, they had stopped slicing neat, narrow wedges and transferring the cheesecake to their plates, in favor of forming a tight circle around the platter and hacking off hunks that went straight to their mouths.
Favorite Sentence: If you’re walking along the street in a small town in Maine and the sound of a cat’s hiss makes you drop your latté and run shrieking to your car, and then your keys slip from your tangled fingers, twice, because you are so terrified that you’re being pursued by a Komodo dragon… yes, that irrational response rises to the level of phobia.
Word Length: 547
Photo of fig cone shell from Indo-West-Pacific by H. Zell, 3/2011, picture of the day at Wikimedia Commons 9/4/2011.
Daily Shorty 
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