Election fever has set in with a vengeance. I’ve done a pretty good job avoiding the news for some time now but the energy of the Big Day is pouring over me, now, and I’m finding it very difficult to focus. No surprise that the day’s shorty is lackluster. It was inspired by my last texture prompt, a small die (as in one of a pair of dice) that the husband handed me this morning. For some reason after pressing my thumb into each side of it I began to tap my fingernails on it. That reminded me of the sound of high heels on a hard floor, so that wound up prompting the story. Yes, I know, a sound, not a texture. What can you do.
Working Title: Phyllis Power
1st Sentence: We always know when Phyllis is on a tear, because we can hear the frantic clip-clopping of those heels from a mile away, like a horse galloping on marble.
Favorite Sentence: She says this frightens her but she doesn’t seem frightened when she talks about the probing.
Word Length: 906
Photo of Egyptian dice (600-800 BC) by Swiss Museum of Games.
I put something over four hard hours into this one. I had three starts that refused to grow, so then I just made myself try to blend them. I cut one and made a story out of the other two. Didn’t really work—get comfortable on that hard drive, story # 188—but I always hope the sweat equity counts for something. The texture, today, came from one of those small, air-filled plastic pillow thingies used to cushion shipped goods. I was trying to get a good picture of it when someone came along to make enquiries. Don’t know what Maria thought of it, but holding this thing made me think of tearing into a bag of chips.
Today the husband dropped a Styrofoam ball into my outstretched hands. And in response I wrote a creepy story he much approves—the husband really enjoys creepy—which is only right.
Many years ago—I think I was still in high school—a man in our rural neighborhood plowed under his wife’s strawberry patch as punishment for something they had argued about. She was known for the amazing strawberries she harvested every summer, which might have been the problem—they were deeply religious and he often cited her pride for those berries and other accomplishments (she was an incredible seamstress and a wonderful cook) as regrettable sin she should repent. As even I know, despite two thumbs that will never shade green, it takes many years of devotion to get really sweet, fat berries, so when he destroyed her patch he was destroying years of work and love. I cried when I heard the story, because it struck me as such a cruel, hateful thing to do. The wife, also known for her unbreakable good cheer, replanted and carried on. Back to the present: The texture of the day was a small, soft, squishy puffball. It reminded me of cat fur and so inspired the first sentence of my story.
The husband handed me a piece of a geode this morning (it looks almost exactly like this picture I pulled from the Web), the texture (and inevitably the look) of which inspired one aspect of the protagonist of this gleefully short story. Yesterday the look of my “texture prompt” definitely inspired the story more than the feel of it. Maybe I should do my best to lock onto my story idea while holding my texture prompt with eyes closed, so that it’s more likely I’ll focus on the sense of touch in the inspired story? Or maybe I should just be glad every time I get an idea that develops into a story and not give into the temptation to grade my process. Yeah, that.
I am shocked and thrilled that I have written a story every single day for six months straight. And honestly, I’m afraid to say much more than that. Taking this project one day at a time has been crucially important since, oh, I finished May, so I’m not going to change tactics now. As for my virtual celebration treat, is it not exquisite?? I wanted to put up a picture of caramel apples—my all-time favorite Halloween treat—but although I bought the stuff to make them, I wound up devoting that time to watching a couple of Halloween-themed shows the husband and I love. And I couldn’t find a good picture online that I was free to use. So this fabulous caramel apple cheesecake will just have to do. I can’t say I’m disappointed. As for the day’s shorty, it was inspired both by a “page weight” my husband handed me this morning, an object archivists use to hold down the page of a book that shouldn’t be touched by the reader, and by Halloween. The page weight looks and feels like nothing so much as an oddly weighted shoe string, which inspired the first line of the story.
Trying a new set of prompts this week based on texture. I have asked the devoted husband to present me, each morning of this 27th week of my Daily Shorty challenge, with an object that has a notable and uniform texture. Today a rubber eraser, which inspired the first line of my shorty. After the first paragraph, the story went bonkers, in the same way that one of Barthelme’s really goofy, “What on earth is he on about” stories skip across the page just for fun. Not to suggest that my shorty lives in the same house as a Barthelme story. More to say that I thought of him as I wrote it. My story is out on the sidewalk, gazing up at a Barthelme story’s window, blowing kisses.
Daily Shorty 