Evil

Write a fragment of a story about a villain who gets away with a serious and perhaps brutal crime and enjoys the fruits of his crime (or simply enjoys the fact that nothing happens after this crime). Love this character, and try to make him somewhat loveable to us. Think in terms of class distinctions, an uncomfortable subject in the United States, as we tend to deny they exist here. Crime is often an act of envy. According to an early meaning of the word, someone is evil who crosses class boundaries.
(from prompt #29 in The 3AM Epiphany)

Read my response:




*disclaimer: this is an exaggeration of a perception of a public figure; it was loosely inspired by Sarah Palin, but is entirely fiction. by pure coincidence, the prompt had a word limit of 600, but somehow, I ended up writing 666 words.

Naughty Monkey pumps clip clop and echo more than other brands. This truth comes from experience, not science, because the only truths worth recognizing are the ones in your mind, from personal experience. The “clip clop” conveys power and a sharp efficiency; she likes the echo of this sound even more. She imagines an army of women in fuck-me pumps marching behind her, as the sound of her heels is magnified in an empty, narrow hallway. Just as importantly, these shoes show sass, they show she’s a woman with a girlish determination to pinch her body into something desirable. No matter how much power she has, men can still masturbate to the image of her, and that’s important. She may act like a man but no doubt about it, she looks like a woman. Some things just go against nature—butch women even more so than effeminate men, because what woman doesn’t want to be beautiful?

Today, as she walks, she catches a glimpse of herself in a darkened window. She likes what she sees. She’s thin, thinner than she’d been in her twenties, and it elevates her above, well, everyone else. The women who like her, they aren’t like her. She hasn’t been fattened by the middle age spread of middle class Americans living in the mid-west. She doesn’t eat any crunchy granola or that damned Whole Foods, she doesn’t buy into that propaganda about “going green,” but she’s better than those fast-food addicted idiots stuffing their faces. What they see when they look in the mirror is a nightmare, she imagines. Pausing for a moment at herself, she reflects. Here is a woman in control, a woman who takes control. Thank God for, well, for God. For God and for country, both of which she has been called upon to serve—called, if by nothing else, then by virtue of her superiority. Her beauty, her drive, her faith. Her obedience to God, to ritual, to tradition. Her discipline, her focus. All these qualities, these treasures she values as dearly as she values her home or her children. These treasures that she’s acquired by winning, by playing the right game the right way. These treasures she has been awarded by virtue of being better than white trash, better than her roots, better than the small town whore she could have been.

In the moments before the press conference, she goes through a little ritual. It’s like any competitive sport, any arena where one person emerges as the victor, the better competitor, against another, less worthy person. She visualizes her success, and she must be alone. In this most private moment, she imagines all the enemies she must go against, all those she must destroy. She thinks about sodomites, about godless heathens, about terrorists, foreigners. She imagines all their tiny deaths, she shrinks the whole world of them away in her mind until they are tiny enough to shut up in a little box. She closes the lid and she hears their screams, she hears them begging for forgiveness in fading voices. They call out to her, beg her to help them, but she doesn’t bend. She imagines herself crushing them under her stiletto heel, until they flatten out and disappear. Then she imagines the world she will create instead, a new pretty world, where everyone will listen to her. She breathes in and out, in a Christian fashion, visualizing her success just as her political coach taught her to do daily. People will be thin and healthy, women will know their place, men will be heroes. Breathing in, breathing out, until she can just see this new world, her new world, and she is ready to speak to the masses.

Stepping out onto the stage, lit by lights and by an internal passion, she is suddenly flanked by her four bodyguards in dark suits. She grabs the podium and begins to speak. “I was just your average hockey mom, and signed up for the PTA…”

Alarm Clock Dream

Write a short story in which an alarm clock going off in the middle of the story plays some kind of crucial role. Half of the story will be dream and half reality. I don't usually encourage my students to write about dreams (it is very difficult to do it well, and the results are usually clumsy and obvious), but in this case, try to construct a mirror image on either side of this alarm clock sound.

(from prompt # 22 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

Read my response:


"grab" by wheat in your hair



Medusa appears suddenly, behind me but I can see her, from the corner of my eye or so it seems. I wonder if she’d been there all along. We are at the church, my church, where everyone believes in me and what I might say, before I say anything. It is true, whatever it is I will say. I am on a mission, the most important mission. I have to talk to these people, tell them the truth, and it is just out of reach, the truth is just past my reach. I am busy, I have things to do, and Medusa comes suddenly to my side. Following me and watching me closely as if I am teaching her a dance. She matches my movements. I am aware of her presence now throughout the church, my honey colored church. I have to prepare my words, I have been interrupted while preparing to speak to the people of my church, and as we move through the hallways Medusa gets closer and closer, assuming control. I fall behind her and watch in awe as she speaks to the man who built my church, the man who gave me control of my words. They move into an office and I have been so caught up with her that I don’t notice the waters rising. The water is waist deep now and brown, ugly, tepid. It is warm water that keeps rising and I haven’t noticed it, and as I shout out the truth I am muted by the loud loud words of the people in my church, some blaming me and some warning me but all of the words are loud and insistent and more important than mine. There is an urgency now. I look for Medusa, she has been at my side this whole time, I had felt her, but amidst the yelling I hear her, standing in the rafters and pointing down at me, saying my name like a curse word, “e! E! eeE!” Someone pushes me, telling me in a sleepy voice that it is 7:40 and I will be late for work, I am almost late. I wake up and try to wade through the water that isn’t there anymore, I try to push myself into the day, but the weight of sleep and of my dream pulls me down and under the covers and close to the warm bare back of my someone. I am wading through images and all I remember clearly is the honey colored planks of wood and the supposed safety of a church. I get up, slowly, and as quickly as I try to move, time is moving faster than me. There is a pile of clothes that I sort through, eyes adjusting in a dim morning, and I pull out pants and a shirt and I try to think analytically. Do these clothes match? Does it matter if my clothes match if I am late? I remember I parked farther away than I care to walk this morning. I brush my teeth in the bathroom, walking on my tiptoes through the quiet house; I go to someone’s bedside and kiss him before I leave and I try not to let the door slam. Suddenly I realize that I have to think of why I am late, if I am. Instead I listen mindlessly, half-aware, to DJs on a morning talk show. I am anxious to get to work, locked in a kind of race that doesn’t matter. Try to think of why I am late, I construct excuses, I plan the execution of my lie of the day. Traffic, not my fault, car troubles, something. Either I lie, or I say nothing, slipping into my place of work with a quiet prayer that I won’t lose my job, my silly job, because it’s all I have. And I do, I appear and it’s as if I’d been there all along.

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.