Oh, who knows….

I find myself more than a week behind on story posts again (I’m writing this on April 22). This time I blame the delay on both my own fatigue and the news on April 15, which was the day of the Boston Marathon bombing. Boston feels very close to Maine and I know lots of people who once lived in Boston or the area, who have worked there, who have family there. Most of my friends take frequent day and weekend trips to Boston. And I was just there, in the same part of town where the bombing occurred, a few weeks ago, for the AWP conference. So the news reports felt intimate and I couldn’t turn away from the information and images, nor could I shake a sense of sadness the whole week. I know I’m not alone in that. In any case, I did keep up with my shorties, and I remember that the one I wrote on April 14 came to me without much trouble. The “Oh, who knows” refers to where I got the idea for this story, something I usually note in the Word file but not this time. I don’t know that it will ever be good enough to submit but I did mostly capture my (very small) vision.

Working Title: Just Checking
1st Sentence: Her nightly routine: Snap off the bedside lamp, snuggle into the flannel sheets, let out a long, controlled breath… then jab her husband in the back.
Favorite Sentence: “Indecent” is not a word she had ever held up to the light when talking about herself.
Word Length: 469

I’m often stunned by the serendipity of Wikimedia Commons, where I’ll do a simple search on some word or term connected with the day’s shorty and voila, the perfect (free) photo pops up. It’s happened countless times. I had nothing really catchy to search on for this one but I typed in “going to bed” anyway and what do you know, up comes this adorable picture of a little penguin heading to his burrow. It has nothing to do with the shorty, which is about people going to bed, but I LOVE penguins. Photo by Peter Gaylard, Australia, 3/2010.