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.

Synesthesia

Use synesthesia in a short scene—surreptitiously, without drawing too much attention to it—to convey to your reader an important understanding of some ineffable sensory experience. Use sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. According to M.H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms, synesthesia is a description of "one kind of sensation in terms of another; color is attributed to sounds, odor to colors, sound to odors, and so on."
(from prompt #17 in The 3 AM Epiphany)


Read my response:


The boys sat on the curb, leaning into each other without touching, splitting a cigarette like a reverse conch shell, in that whoever held the smoke also held his tongue. Cigarette in hand, head toward the ground, the taller one nodded along to the shorter one, who was speaking excitedly about a plot to sneak in. Add together the years the both of them had been alive and they were still barely legal, but on top of it, they looked guilty. Even if they were just sitting on a curb outside a club, “waiting for his mom to come pick us up,” they looked like they were up to something. And they were up to something, of course. No one believes two kids in skinny jeans, they don’t even believe each other half the time. That’s why they lie so much, no one would believe them anyway, might as well have fun while you’re as young as the night and as trouble prone. Inside the club, when the door opened to let someone in, they caught whiffs of what they were trying to get in to taste, dark syrupy music that wafted out smelling like cherry cough drops, overly sweet and yet just what they needed, just what they craved. Girls stood in line, peering in, catching the scent, shivering in clothes the likes of which the girls in school would have no idea what to do with. The boys stood up, finally, one throwing down the cigarette and the other rubbing it out with his shoe, black Chuck Taylors with potential band names written in ballpoint along the sides and on the white top of the toe. They took deep breaths, and if they knew no one would see they’d probably have held hands out of mutual, nervous support. Support for each other and for the general idea of the night. When they did get caught, and his mom had come to pick them up, the taller one cupped his hand anyway, as if waiting for someone to hold it. His mother couldn’t believe it—no one ever does—and so they found themselves retelling the story to the wrong kind of audience. And yet, though she wouldn’t admit it to anyone, scarcely even to herself, she was impressed, just like kids at school would be. How on earth does a twelve year old convince a club bouncer that they are the DJ’s roadies? How do they convince girls, or rather, adult women, old enough to drink, that they have highly contraband drugs? How did any of these things occur to a child, who just last year was posing with his little sister on the Easter Bunny’s lap at the mall, wearing a baby blue sweater vest and talking eagerly about hunting for eggs? Without any showy displays of vulnerability (the last person who can see you reaching for the hand of your best friend is your mother) the taller one tried, unsuccessfully, to sulk. He was buzzed, from the sips of cocktails he’d swiped and from the rush of doing something he’d set out to do. Inside had been just as exciting as plotting had been outside, the music just as sweet and dark and the air as dank. The shorter one sat in the backseat, relieved (for once) that his mother couldn’t be reached, but just as relieved someone’s mother had been. Without the cops involved, he could remember the night, untarnished, every time he sat smoking a cigarette, long after his best friend had left him.