Control

If you are a man, write a short scen from the POV of a woman totally dominated by a boyfriend or husband who has a long history of controlling this woman. If you are a woman, write a short scene from the POV of this same man. In either case, avoid an eruption of physical violence and build a logical, reasonable set of explanations for the character's awful or humiliated behavior, no matter what you yourself feel about this character's behavior.
(from prompt #43 in The 3AM Epiphany)

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"Amber Fireworks" by wanathan101


A rat scurried under the fire pit and found itself trapped between the heat overhead and the surrounding threat of the people standing and talking around the fire. I watched the rat pace under the metal pit before darting for the garden wall, bravely going between the high heeled feet of our neighbor and nearly brushing her foot without her noticing. From where I stood I could see the pattern of the party, people gathered in groups and moving predictably. I watched Susie laughing, looking to me from time to time, nursing a glass of Chardonnay while she listened to her best college friend tell a nauseating story about her children. Susie and Gina had been far too attached to each other in school, calling each other sisters and developing their own language of codes; entire discussions could take place in my presence without me knowing, back in the day. It tested my patience for years, explaining to Susie how toxic Gina is; eventually Gina revealed herself to Susie, revealed how obsessed with Susie she’d been. Now that Gina had moved back to town and had her kids to obsess over instead, I’d allowed Susie to talk to her occasionally, but within reason. Given the option, Susie and Gina would never leave each other’s side, they’d fill each others ears with the nonsense of their mutual language, and where would that leave me? Out in the cold is where, with examples of their collected stupidity pouring out of my mouth but never quite making it in their ears.

Susie had always gathered people around her, I found myself drawn to her during a party just like this years ago. She was animated, her hands flickering around her while she imitated a professor. She was radiant, even in the night, and I felt warmer standing by her. But just as nice as it was near her, it was awful away from her, awful being crowded out by her gaggle of girlfriends and shoved aside by the healthy dose of male “friends” hanging on her, too. Just my luck, the one girl that’s actually decent, actually worth spending time with, and then just as I was knotting the noose of self-pity around my neck she came and loosened it, loosened it all up. She poked fun at me, poked me in the ribs and told me to relax—my wife, standing there with perfect posture and with her hair pulled back like Grace Kelly. Just like I like it, just like she knows I like it. She’s my wife, not a girl at a college bonfire, and all the same, there she is, keeping warm while I have to navigate through a sea of worthless work associates just to talk to my own damn wife. Let me stand out on the fringe of my own party, in my own backyard, watching rats scurry, and if I didn’t know better I’d think she was enjoying herself, enjoying the attention. Yes, she enjoys seeing me pace and sweat, swinging her Chardonnay around and laughing so much that she throws back her head. Careless drunk, like a little girl away from her parents, seeing what she can get away with, and I’m right here.

“How much have you had to drink?” I ask her. Not that it matters, it was too much. Gina rolls her eyes and murmurs something, and Susie snuggles up to her like it’s a conspiracy.

“She’s an adult, at her own home, does it matter?” Gina tells me. Did I ask Gina a question? I did not. Do I want Gina to shut her mouth? I do. Do I think a hearty slap across that mouth would help shut it? I know it would, but Gina is not my wife, nor my problem.

“Susie, honey, party’s over. Time for bed, the mess can wait.” Susie looks over at Gina and all I can see is the back of her head, Susie’s blonde curls resting on her neck after falling out of place from the crown of her head where the rest of the strands have been twisted into place. I’d helped pin them, in the places she couldn’t see.

The party is hushed now, looking sideways at our triangle to see the domestic squabble, and I can feel my place now. Pretty blonde and her strong best friend and then me, this mean man they don’t understand. Leave her alone, they think. I pace, threatened by the crushing opinion of the crowd and by the threat that if I leave her alone, I’ll be alone, I’ll lose her warmth and she won’t even notice if I don’t make some noise.

A scream from across the yard saves me, and everyone turns to see the rat’s tail whipping a woman’s ankle before darting under cover again.

Face Recognition

Write a short scene in which the ability to recognize faces is crucial to the outcome of the scene (it doesn't have to be correct face recognition--it could be mistaken face recognition). How do you describe a face? This is one of the most difficult tasks fiction writers encounter--describing something so ineffable that we nevertheless know instinctually so well. How do you describe a sudden understanding of anything, let alone a face?
(from prompt #37 in The 3AM Epiphany)

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"David Alexander" by Alex Barth


Before anyone sees him, he sees their kneecaps. He studies how calves and thighs bind together, how veins run and bulge blue, he watches joints bend and muscles twitch and flex. He looks at all these knees and other parts of people with his own knees tucked up under his chin, hugging his legs and rocking slightly. His mom is shopping for clothes, for girl clothes, and she doesn’t know it but he snuck away to a round clothing carousel and hid behind a curtain of women’s coats. It’s past coat season, and no one yet has rifled through his observatory cave.

He waits for his mom and plots how he’ll greet her when she comes by, when he hears her shoes hurrying after she’s noticed he’s missing: he’ll pull the coats open and yell “Boo!” and she’ll jump back with her hand on her heart and say “You scared me! I was looking everywhere for you!” While he waits he pretends he is a spy watching everyone. He pretends he is a fox that is too smart for anyone to find. He pretends he is an orphan, and then he hopes his mom comes by soon so he can grab her legs and surprise her and then play a new game.

He sits rocking and resting his head on his knees. The legs he sees passing by march around like alien soldiers with faces but no features, just blank discs that pause and bend, different legs but with the same bald, expressionless knees. The longer he waits the more he wants to see her. When she wears socks she lets him pick them out, funny ones with stripes or little dogs, but today she’s wearing sandals, just like everyone else.

When he gets scared, when people ask him questions he doesn’t understand or when they stare at him too much, sometimes he holds her legs and hides behind them, with his face at the bend behind her kneecaps. When he does that, when he tucks his face away, she’ll smooth his hair and lets him hide for as long as needs. Right now though, he doesn’t want to hide.

He crawls out and there are women of all ages occupying themselves with price tags and sizes. He stares at all the different faces without shying, and studies how every feature, noses and cheekbones and eyebrows and lips, bind together and still aren’t everything. He studies how lips stretch and purse and pucker and spread into thoughts or smiles without saying words, eyes flick and follow and give as much light as they take in, and he watches all this to find one face. She is bent, searching knee-high among the shoppers. Before she sees him, he sees her face.

Two Images Separated at Birth

Think up a vivid, haunting image (a picture in one frame that tells a great deal of story). Work hard to construct this image so that it is not only visible to the reader but exciting and thought-provoking. Then think up another unrelated but equally vivid image. Work at composing two unrelated images, two scenes or situations you do not think are part of any story. Then write a 600 word story fragment out of the two images.
(from prompt #15 in The 3 AM Epiphany)


Read my response:

Crowd is to Disneyland as rain is to Seattle. Everything takes so very long, and it is unsettling to realize what humans are willing to put up with in the name of having a good time. In addition to crowds in line for Thunder Mountain, crowds in line at the churro cart, and crowds in line in the Frontier Store Souvenir shop, there is a crowd gathered around the face painting booth. There is a murmur that there is a Make-A-Wish Foundation little girl, and like a car accident, everyone wants to see how bad it is. A little girl, about three, sits on a barstool with her feet tucked under her for added height. The span of her legs from knee to toe is still less than the diameter of the round wooden seat. She is completely bald, and it’s the lack of eyebrows that confirms the rumor. She looks like the poster child for a sympathy driven fundraiser, and also a little alien, with eyes that take up her whole face. The white face paint makes her eyes stand out more, and then there are red polka dots on her cheeks, exaggerated red lips, orange triangle eyebrows, and finally, a little black polka dot on her nose. The crowd oohs and awws at the patience the little girl demonstrates, like she is sitting for a portrait painting by Michelangelo. She doesn’t blink at the gathering crowd, or turn her head to acknowledge them, or smile at the pictures being taken. The face painter respects the little girl’s concentration, and mimics it by likewise ignoring the crowd. The two, painter and painted, make up their own little ring in the center of the circus around them, and despite the number of people in the Happiest Place on Earth, there is a somber hush.

Behind the little girl, her parents blend in with the crowd of concerned adults holding cameras and camcorders. The father long ago took it upon himself to be chief photographer, and while now his daughter is his most remarkable subject, she wasn’t always and won’t always be. He bought the camera, his favorite camera, when he was a kid, eighteen or maybe nineteen, from a pawn shop in Seattle. He went there as a tourist, which is to say, to see a girl. He hadn’t ever been to a pawn shop, or to the west coast, and as boy growing up in the Midwest both had seemed as unlikely a place to go as the moon. But there he was, buying a camera in a pawn shop in Seattle, with an old man behind the counter and a dark sky dimming the shop’s interior. There was no else in the shop, just a skinny white kid running his fingers over lenses, leather cases, flash attachments, tripods, all more involved than anything he’d had in mind. He had a pack of cigarettes in his back pocket and he reached for them, lit one, then thought to offer one to the old man behind the counter. The old man sat fat and cruel in his chair, his thighs hanging off the thin plastic edges of a low seated chair with insufficient back support. The back panel of the chair was like a little black stamp on a wide, overstuffed envelope. He grunted and adjusted his whole body to uncross his arms, and he accepted the cigarette, and the light, with a nod. The skinny man stood leaning against the pawnshop counter, all limbs, smoking a cigarette and considering the investment he was making by buying a photographer’s camera, while behind him, behind the counter, the fat man sat and cynically considered the likelihood of his customer using the camera for anything more than pictures of pretty girls.