Another knight, two castles, and a tower.
A knight joins the ranks.
Dragons, a griffin, a Pegasus, and two wizards…blocks in progress for a mystical/mythical quilt.
And then I made a scarf.
Focus on an important life milestone (a birth, a wedding, a funeral). Slow time down to a crawl and zero in on the most important moment in that event. Describe in wrenchingly specific detail what goes on in those minutes. You can focus on many characters or stick to the perspective of just one.
The twenty men who file in pairs through the door are attired all in black and carry short black staves, broken in the middles. They surround the King, awaiting his motion to move on, and then accompany him out of the hall and down the corridor and out into the courtyard with its glimmering torches. The crowd, silent and anticipatory, parts at their arrival. Antony moves in a quiet fugue between the lines of escorts, noticing flashes of things. The torch smoke has a faint acrid edge that indicates some impurity in the oil. His new mourning robes, lined with silk, rustle faintly when he moves his arms. The guard immediately to his left has a slight sniffle, perhaps the result of a long night out in the dampness watching over the castle entrance. A woman at the edge of the crowd has bound her red hair up in a knot, but three or four strands have escaped and wave loosely about her drawn white face.
Ahead of the procession, illuminated against the night, the door of the chapel stands open. There are torches burning on either side of it and Antony, distracted in this surreal moment by the extraordinarily mundane, wonders whether the smoke will stain the door surround and how the castle’s staff will remove such traces if it does. The escort guards step aside as they reach the door, forming a cordon now against the sides of the building, where they will remain until Antony emerges the next morning. They wait until he has entered the building. Then they shut the door behind him. What happens now is between the King, his god, and the souls of the dead.
Prompt courtesy of figment.
I made the alphabet!
But I must remake the X.
The park stretched out verdantly around me, which was odd because I had no recollection of how I got there.
Nor, try though I might, could I at once formulate a solution to the confusing array of objects — a half-empty bottle of glue, one pink sock with a hole in the heel, two plastic spade-shaped spoons of the kind you get with expensive Italian ice cream, a felted hat — that surrounded the grassy circle on which, with no particular dignity, I lay sprawled. I tried the ancient trick of closing my eyes and opening them again. A particularly self-righteous wooden goat, which I had not noticed in the first dazed consideration of my apparent equipage, looked condescendingly at me. I sat up, looked around in all directions, received no further indication of where this park was or what I might be doing there, and resolved to cease worrying about the matter. If it pleased the world to reconstitute me whole and without apparent injury on the side of what, based on my admittedly cursory inspection, seemed to be a spacious and growing park, surely the least I could do was accept this odd botanic whim with grace. After all, it was so much better than the time I found myself in the abandoned coal mine. Even now, knowing that there is no way the authorities can connect me to the grisly doings that took place down there, I do not like to recall them in detail. And surely it was a positive sign that I had been allowed to retain my bottle of glue, even if only half of it remained for my use. With this very bottle of glue, I remembered with growing cheer, I had defended myself against the fire ants the time I inexplicably found myself on a sandy atoll in an unknown ocean. Yes: if it was to be a suburban park this time, I was grateful for it, and putting the goat in one pocket and the spoons in the other, I stood up and began considering my next move.
Prompt courtesy of Adam Maxwell’s Fiction Lounge.
“There was no other option than to surrender.”
What I remember most is the conviction with which he said it, that first time. There were still little flecks of bark in his hair and a track of mud down his face. I remember, too, that I knew at the time that he must be quoting from something, because I knew that words like ‘option’ were not in the normal rotation of his vocabulary. The silence went on for a minute or so. I waited. He stared straight ahead, then to the right, and finally down. “Maybe there was,” he said, uncertain now.
“I think there probably was,” I said.
“I mean, I could have kept going.”
“Indeed you could.”
“Rather than, you know. Surrendering.”
“Right.”
“To a stick.”
“Right.”
“I mean, it’s a big lawnmower.”
“Right.”
“OK then,” he said, and went back to explore the option of finishing the job.
Prompt courtesy of Adam Maxwell’s Fiction Lounge.
Coupons
I know, of course, that it is one of the things you must never do: go through someone’s wallet when he is not present and not aware. I know this in the same way I know, personally and from experience, that you must not defend yourself when someone discovers your incriminating emails by weakly shouting that he had no right to be reading them in the first place. But nevertheless the wallet was there, and he was not, and I slid my thumb between the worn leather and the even more worn grosgrain and flipped it open like a practiced reader with a new paperback. His unsuspecting face grinned up at me from the driver’s license behind its vinyl window. It should have made me stop. I didn’t.
There was no money, of course. There could not have been. There was a membership card to a gym that closed years ago, a movie rental card from the days when people still went to stores and rented movies, a gift card from a store that has no outlets for at least a thousand miles from here. And then there was something else, rubber-banded together and hidden behind the flap. I pulled it out. The rubber band snapped a warning across my fingers. The little papers it had contained spilled onto my lap.
They were pastel-colored with ragged edges, like post-it notes torn smaller. They were handwritten in his usual mixed case print, but neatly. MOVIE, said one. LAUNDRY. KISS. AFTERNOON ALONE. NEW BOOK. BOAT RIDE. SMILE ON THE TRAIN. Some had check marks. Some had been holepunched. Some were wrinkled. CALL FROM MY GRANDMOTHER. Little slips of life instead of the real thing.
The one I saved is in my wallet now, behind the license with the photo of me staring off into the distance somewhere.
HONEST CONVERSATION, it said.
It will never be redeemed.
Prompt courtesy of The Write Prompts.
Your topic is: running a marathon. Your form is: haiku.
On the list of things
I will never do, that one
Comes in at the top.
Prompt courtesy of The Write Prompts.
