Loving

Write about a person you love. This apparently simple instruction may be much more difficult than you think. Your greatest challenge will be to make you reader love this person, too. Healthy love is one of the more rarely written about emotions in fiction, especially smart, literary fiction.
(from prompt #28 in The 3 AM Epiphany)


Read my response:





She has a thick bruise on her arm and both my dad and I just ask her what happened to the other guy. The other guy was a middle-aged woman, and Megs laughs when she tells us we don’t want to know. Her soccer team played against some corporate office team, and this older woman started aiming for my sister.

“I wasn’t gonna let her push me around,” and she shrugs. She gets red-carded all the time. Usually for being the aggressor, and usually in defense of a teammate getting picked on. She’s quicker to fight for someone than against someone, but she’s a fighter all the same.

She’s standing in the kitchen, drinking Gatorade like she’s advertising for them. Her hair sits knotted up on her head, stray strands everywhere, and she’s got her usual “I just ran 8 miles for fun” flush. Seven years younger and three inches taller. It’s unsettling to look up to the growing up version of someone I used to carry on my hip. She’s got hips of her own, which she denies out loud (“I’m straight down like a boy”) and without speaking, wearing her soccer shorts and baggy t-shirt and standing straight up like a man. She doesn’t slouch, or bend easily. Even as a baby, she wouldn’t let herself be held. She’ll hold you, she understands people and the idea of comfort, it’s just not anything she needs herself.

She skirts around being the girliest girl, by her habits, but just barely: with blue eyes that inspire comparisons to clear skies, birds of happiness, Frank Sinatra, at first glance she's called angelic. But she uses her eyes to see, rather than be seen, and I don’t that it’s ever occurred to her that it could be the other way around.

Her boyfriend, in his Manchester United jersey, holds up her arm and she flexes. He and my dad nod at each other, mutually acknowledging whatever it is dads and boyfriends mutually acknowledge, and it’s heartbreaking to see how much this kid loves her. She makes a menacing face, flexing her bicep, and she moves from mock punching him to putting her arms around him without relaxing her muscles. She cocks back her head to look at him, and says, “You saw, right? She was being a bully.”

“She didn’t expect you to do anything, that’s for sure.”

Our littlest brother, autistic and a little bit of a drama queen, comes running through, practically knocking her boyfriend down to get to her. “Joshie! Be nice to Charlie!” Joshie is throwing all of his weight into his sobs. He has this amazing way of crying so that it sounds like demons dying, but sort of tenderly; simultaneously frightening and vulnerable. How I imagine Grendel sounds.

Megs bends, puts her hands on his shoulders, soothing and steadying him without saying anything. Sometimes when she talks, she gets nervous and talks too fast. Her words get jumbled together, and sometimes she’ll say something bland as if it were exciting. It frustrates me, hearing a story told so clumsily, and our fights revolve around this difference: my instinct for words, and hers for action. She struggles to understand my slowness, my reluctance for movement, my cautiousness and my laziness. She is quick to shove me when I talk over her, when I interrupt her stutter for a smoother, more mature interpretation of whatever she’s attempting to express. We approach problems from opposite ends. As much as this results in pulling against each other, it allows for mutual support, too. Once what I needed was money, and I didn’t know how to get it: dumb with fear, all I could do was cry, complain, telling my mother and myself that I just didn’t know what to do. Megs overheard but didn’t say anything, just left, and returned suddenly with more than I needed, handed it to me with a hug, and left again. I tried to express some fraction of the complicated emotions this provoked, and she just said, because it was all that mattered, “Well, you’re my sister.”

I keep staring at the blackened fist-shaped mark on her arm, and she notices, and turns a deeper shade of flushed. We have such different arms, the two of us, and hers so far today have defended, fought, flexed, flirted, calmed, soothed and steadied. They’ve barely rested. How can anyone look at her and not expect her to do anything?

An Execution

In 700 words, gather together three or four ordinary people. Let them meet in a businesslike environment—a conference room, a grade-school classroom after school hours, a hotel room that is part of a suite so the bed is out of sight. These three or four people are going to decide to put someone to death. They are not government officials, rogue CIA agents, Mafia lieutenants—they're just plain folks. And the person they choose to execute is also a run-of-the-mill person just like them, except he is slated for death. Stay in this room. Don't follow through on the death sentence. Simply watch the group decide who needs to die and why. Choosing the victim is going to be hard. Keeping the group from simply going after someone who has angered them or cut them off in line or slept with their spouse—that is going to be your problem. This group of executioners should know one another but not terribly well. Don't tell us why or how they've chosen to do this; just accept the situation and try to let them accept it, too. POV—the executioners', as well as the intended victim's in a sense--will matter a great deal. One POV will predominate. You probably want to tell this scene from a dramatic perspective, allowing only spoken words to come out (don't show the executioners' thoughts).
(from prompt #12 in The 3 AM Epiphany)


Read my response:


"Serial Killer" by 'abnelphoto.com'"



The man at the pulpit, clearing his throat, said “She’s as good as dead anyway.”

“Right, but. What does that mean? Why are we, why are we getting involved then? Why get our hands dirty?” said the woman wringing her hands, staring up at the pulpit.

The third person, a young man, kept his eyes straight down and his arms crossed.

The man at the pulpit cleared his throat again, awkwardly, and the little chapel’s acoustics carried the noise too far. The woman wringing her hands jumped like she was being followed. The young man stayed still, standing slouched against the left wall of the stage that held the man at the pulpit. His shadow, in the dim light, fell around his feet and from above it looked like a dark child hunched over in grief.

“We aren’t. Getting our hands dirty, I mean. We are, well. We are cleaning someone else’s hands. We are,” and his voice started to rise,” we aren’t courting trouble by eliminating it, are we? Are we getting involved in a mess? We are involved, involved enough to gather. And now, I am standing here telling you all that we are not getting our hands dirty! We are cleaning the dirty hands of someone unable to do so herself. What is best for all involved,” and he looked at the young man, at the woman wringing her hands, and then at the shut door behind his audience of two, “is to simply, painlessly, stop the misery. Put an end to it.”

“How?” the young man asked without raising his voice, just raising his head enough to project. To avoid speaking directly to the ground.

“I don’t know if, well. This could be a bad idea? But I, um, think we could send her somewhere? To a home, or uh, what do you call it? A place that specializes in this.” The woman wringing her hands shifted in the pew a half dozen times before completing a sentence. Her jacket was stiff and gray with blackening circles under her arm pits. She also seemed to be shrinking inside her suit, like she was physically regressing to match her age to her infantile demeanor.

With a deep sigh the man at the pulpit spoke. “We talked about that, honey. And I don’t mean to be, uh, crass. But that’s stupid, and you know it. A place that specializes in what? Anyway we need to get to the point.”

“The point being, we want to kill her? Sure. Let’s kill her right now. Like you said, she’s as good as dead.” And with that the young man started to walk toward the shut door.

“She cannot live. She cannot. There is no…why can’t we just say it? You both can blame me! I am her mother’s pastor, I am this lamb’s shepherd. I will live with it. I will. And I will live with your anger, and with her mother’s. But not with the knowledge that I, that WE, sat idly by. What did you think…” he looked towards the woman wringing her hands, “when you found the little bird? With its twisted head? And what did you think, young man, when you found the cat’s tail in her lunchbox? Did you think that nothing would come of it? That, well, sometimes little girl’s like to mutilate their pets? That no one would notice or retaliate? Someone noticed, and now we have to do something. But I need you,” and he looked toward the young man’s back, which was still except for shallow breaths, “to be with me.”

“I’m with you. I don’t want to discuss any more. I’m with you. I’ll just stay right here and pray, and you boys can go while she’s sleeping. Don’t tell me anything.”

“I agree with you, sir, that things cannot go further than they have. I agree that she is as good as dead.”

"So, then, let us pray for her soul, for the strength to follow through on this agreement..."

The three heads bowed down. The man at the pulpit cleared his throat for the third time, but the echo didn't frighten the woman, who stopped wringing her hands. And the young man's slouched back began to straigten as he prayed.

Historical Omniscience

Write 700 words about an event set well in the past, twenty or one hundred years ago. Write from above, as if by means of researched opinion (but doing little actual research). Write about several historical characters or an interesting event, imagining any POV. All fiction is historical fiction in the sense that we write about what we knew prior to beginning our stories and novels.
(from prompt #9 in The 3 AM Epiphany)
Read my response:



Travelers had a certain tenacity to them, and yet a certain glamour as well. Their mere presence implied value, not of delicate bone China, but the intrinsic kind, like a solid leather trunk. Travel for leisure, so recently a concept, still required some strength and durability in its participants. And money, of course, but more than that, at least for women. Arriving by train, women dressed more practically than in their daily life. A little girl passing by a train station hardly ever took a second glance at these unfettered women, except for those few girls who had great stores of curiosity, those who noticed exceptions rather than rules. Hats covered heads, rather than decorated them, and gloves protected from the unknown, rather than keeping palms in a state of unknown.

For Martha, traveling was a way of life, and clothes had always been a practical matter. When she was younger she sought out books instead of fashion clippings, and explored with her brothers instead of knitting with her mother. The tenacity of a traveler was innate in Martha, but the glamour was acquired, slowly, as a result of her grit and her journeys more than any learned appreciation for personal style. Even when Martha went to Europe—which, except for during the War, was still regarded more as a shopping port than a haven for the artistic and literary expats, numerous though they were—she was unaffected by the markets. She rarely thought of material items, and in her presence, it was hard for others to think about anything other than her words, which were of far away places on the earthly plane and of the nearness of the spiritual world.

By the time Martha met with the Queen of Romania, she held all the dignity of royalty, without the aid of embellishments or stylish accessories. Martha, while not the sort to command attention, held it. Those who encountered Martha en route to a teaching location, be it Australia or Austria, South Africa or South America, nearly always walked away with similar expression: that of rapt attention and a glowing, almost ludicrous smile.

Meanwhile, Queen Marie had never not known glamour, and grew up as celebrated as a jewel. When she met Martha Root, Marie had already survived a scandalous youth and had come into her own as the face of Romania, the Soldier Queen, and she held control as easily as a crown rests on a head. The difficulty for Marie, striking as she was, wasn’t in getting attention, but in having her attention kept. The Queen had less of the wanderlust that pushed Martha further and further from known comforts, and Martha traveled with, and out of, love for her cause. Instead the Queen was restless internally. By volunteering as a nurse for the Red Cross and orchestrating an intelligent and effective defense against the invading Russians, Marie had employed physical and political efforts to lessen the carnage of the War, but for all that she did, as much as she would end up being celebrated, the destruction that had occurred worldwide left Marie, privately, with a broken view, and she felt deeply the moribund spirit that lingered long after the dead were buried. Like many, Marie yearned for something to revive her soul, and this is where Martha found her.

The two women, one the child of an American dairy farmer and the other with a lineage memorized by British schoolchildren, met in the Queen’s palace after brief correspondence. Martha had begun sending books and earnestly written letters to various ruling figures, eventually even the Emperor of Japan and the Shah of Persia. Marie responded emotionally immediately, and then she responded literally. The Queen felt a connection to Martha. Marie was just under fifty and Martha was just over, and both felt the weight of their years without letting it slow them down; though they died within a year of each other, over ten years later, both continued to travel and teach and lead with ever increasing fervor. Martha helped Marie to embrace a spirituality that the Queen had long suspected within herself but hadn’t known how to grasp. And Marie, as the first monarch to share the faith Martha taught, increased Martha’s sphere of influence and helped to publicize a burgeoning religion.

The fashion of the time, for Martha and for the Queen, left a great deal to the imagination; necklines were high and hemlines were low. Martha, when she traveled, met women whose breasts were on full display and women whose faces and bodies were veiled. As a little girl this had been of no interest to her, and as an adult women, it was indicative of nothing. Women’s clothing revealed where they came from but had nothing to do with where they were going or what was contained underneath. Martha knew this as a child, when she looked out her world for what wasn’t there instead of what was, and as she traveled this was her lesson for anyone who saw her, trunk in one hand and China in the other.

Journalism

Write part of a story in the form of journal entries (700 words). Keep all the entries close together in time (within a week or two). Everything that happens in the story will most likely happen between the entries; make sure your readers can see the events offstage, but also present your journalist's blind spots.
(from prompt #5 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

Read my response:




TUESDAY:
Every night is so different but the cycle has become more familiar. Like the days but more intense. Tonight was so much like a play, we each had our own hidden plate of sorrow to eat from, and then CRASH! we throw them in the air and hit ourselves and retreat to dark corners to lick the crumbs. It was at such a high, with so many different conversations, right before Ashley fell on the table and half full cans flew and spilt and made a huge mess and then all the undercurrents of what we were trying to ignore rose to the surface. Nothing was solved but everything was blamed. Poor everyone. Ashley crying and Emma caring for her but not about her, Jordan at Emma's side, Heidi talking and talking, Katie and my brother agreeing with each other, mostly about me, little Kim not pushing or being pulled, Katie's home all lit up on her mean dark street, Ashley still crying, Heidi still talking. I can't see myself, thankfully, I don't like where I am and sometimes you can forget about how you make the picture look, you just know what fits and what doesn't, but you can't also know that about yourself.

THURSDAY:
Caffeine addled alcoholic manic depressive desperate girls blinded by accidents with glitter. Vanity isn't stressed enough as a vice, as a deadly sin, faces don't realize they are being spited, or we don't realize we've shot ourselves in the foot, strawberry sundaes at 2:30 AM taste too good, smiles last too long, too short. I could have lied I'm such a fool my eyes could never ever keep their cool, collections of short stories left out at a party to read in the bathroom, critics raves too good, too intelligent to resist, vain imaginings of raves for my name burn a hole in the bookshelf, my books. Books like Hemingway said, write what is true. No windy introductions, said Stephen King. I wish I could write so well. Kurt Cobain filled so many journals, Edna St. Vincent Millay too. Everyday.

SUNDAY:
Kim left for college.
Here is how Heidi said goodbye: "Okay Kim! I have to go to the bank! I'll miss you so much! Later!" and hugs her and walks out the door.
Here is what happened with Katie and Kim, how they said goodbye:
(Kim and Ashley-not virgins)
(Me, Emma, Katie-virgins)
Before Emma, Katie says: "Half virgins, half non-virgins!" Emma and I update the count, Katie goes "Oh yeah! Virgins could kick the non-virgins asses!"
Ashley doesn't want her ass kicked and makes a growling noise and gives Katie a dirty look. Then Katie says: "Nevermind! Ashley is too tough!"
I say: "Ashley's tough, but Kim's a pushover?"
Katie: "No...well...oh...nevermind..."
I say: "What?"
Katie: "Well, thinking about how she lost her virginity, she kinda is a pushover..."
Kim doesn't say anything. Me and Ashley defend her loudly, Katie says all these empty protests, like, that's why I didn't want to say anything. Like we begged it out of her.
So we're keeping it light, laughing and stuff, and Kim says: "Remember how we thought you were retarded when you were little? You were dumb!" And so on. But instead of all of us being involved, it gets to be primarily Kim and Katie saying you're dumb, you're retarded.
Katie taking it personally: "I really was retarded when I was younger!"
Kim: "And now you're just not?"
Katie: "YOU'RE RETARDED!"
Kim: "No, I'm not."
On and on, Katie as a special ed kid.
Then, Kim: "So being ugly was never a factor?"
Katie bursts into tears as everyone, out of desperation, bursts into laughter. Neither apologized. That was that.
This how I said goodbye to Kim: I cried and I hugged her and I told her we'd visit soon.