I was so directed yesterday, using contest guidelines to frame my composition. Today I didn’t count the number of starts I threw out. In the end I grabbed a paragraph from my idea file as a start and forced myself to build a narrative sentence-by-sentence. And an odd, creepy little narrative it is.
Working Title: Having the Heart
1st Sentence: That afternoon he had noticed one of his better students, Pauline, sharing her paper with that crap-kid Justin—the kind of kid he could imagine setting fire to stray cats—during a pop quiz.
Favorite Sentence: His ears were buzzing, his stomach too full, and he felt, just now, a bit weepy, a bit sad that his little girl had inherited his mother’s sharp nose, the nose that had sniffed every secret he’d ever tried to keep from her.
Word Length: 783
Image by Logan A. Williams 2/2006.
Daily Shorty 
Leave a Reply