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…”

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?

Loveless

Create a character around this sentence: Nobody has ever loved me as much as I have loved him. Do not use this sentence in the fraction of fiction that you write. The sentence comes from Guy Davenport's aunt, Mary Elizabeth Davenport Morrow, via his essay "On Reading" in the The Hunter Graccus. Resist the temptation this exercise offers for a completely self-indulgent character. Resist applying your own tale of woe to the formula here. Extend yourself, inhabit other people—friends, enemies, people who puzzle you.
(from prompt #27 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

Read my response:


"Bass guitar" by Jsome1


Bassists are the wide receivers, lead guitar is the quarterback. Why play bass? For love of the music, for love of the band, for love of the guitar. Love of the guitarist. He became successful, buoyed by the girl, by affection. And here I am, with my hands dangling, with my fingers curled, with no one to hear what I don’t have to play.

What I remember most is after. Long before now, before myself as I am now. I remember after us, before me. Let me clarify: I try to forget all the rest.

After the band, I felt free. That’s the time between being trapped, when nothings bound. Between imprisonment by commitment and by brick and mortar restriction. That free space, if I recall, lasted long enough for me to see him off, to go see about a girl. Was I angry? I ask myself. Yes. Didn’t he love the band and didn’t he know how much it meant to me? No. I don’t know how to fill in the blanks. That’s what I remember. I saw him off, wished him the best, said, don’t worry about me.

Here. The moment is the length of a hand before it snaps into a fist. When we were full, tiny pots and pans laying out in the world, collecting everything that leaked from above. Or felt like we did. When life was hard enough to sing about it, easy enough to turn into a song.

He wrote the most, I filled in the blanks where I could. What brought us together was inconsequential, circumstances like any other band. Two play an instrument, eventually it gets to testing who plays best. He did, of course. Which is why where he is is far from me. I played bass, I tried to deserve good graces, but. The struggle in playing is the audience. I always played for him, and he played for himself. I don't know how much he heard. Enough to get away, ha. Just kidding, right, it’s never so bad. I wish him the best. We played well, we both had the same audience to please. Now I try not to remember too much, did I say so? Jail cells, when they are figurative, they're good imagery. There isn’t any real imagery in real jail. I mean literally.

My music after was an ode to him, to us. I played for different bands. I played for different audiences, never for myself. I tried to focus on the music, on what its all about. That’s what I try to remember, that’s what I don’t want to forget.

Eventually, with a hole in your soul, you know the story. Drugs, right, and fights. It's never so bad as you make it sound, it never sounds right when you try to tell a story that only you know. It’s nice to hear him sometimes, on the radio. It is. It’s nicer than anything else, better than sex. Well, maybe I just don’t remember sex, ha. But here I am, there we were. It was a pause between chords, my freedom, and it’s the only thing I want to remember.

The Closet: Guest Response

Epiphanizing is meant to prompt writing, and I'd like to start posting "epiphanies" from others, in addition to my own. Part of the fun of prompts, and of blogging, is seeing different views on a subject.

I'm very pleased to post Krissy's heartwrenching response to last Tuesday's prompt, "The Closet." She took a very different and exciting approach to this prompt, and I really like how she built suspense. Read more about Krissy at her highly entertaining blog "On the Border."

Read Krissy's response:

"Hide and Seek" by Faithful Chant

He is there. That is why I am here, in this closet. I didn't expect anyone to be home. I can't see him. He must still be in the front of the apartment. My heart is thudding in my chest. Adrenaline? Fear? Excitement? The smell of him permeates my nose and no doubt when I get out of here, if I ever get out of here, my clothes will smell of his detergent. Why did he have to come home?
Wait. Footsteps. More than one pair. The bedroom door squeaks open but the light is left off. There are whispers. He's with someone. The clickity clack of heels indicates he's with a woman. Her breathy giggles float through the closet door and into my ears. I know that laugh. It is the laugh of the woman who I have known since we were in elementary school. The woman who, when we were girls, I shared my favorite clothes with. The woman who rode the bus with me, as teenagers, to summer camp. The woman who I confided my deepest secrets to. And she is here with him. He brought her here. To his apartment.
Questions reel through my mind. When did they start seeing each other? Why didn't I know? How long has this been going on? Why her?
There is a rustle of material. I can see nothing through the slats of the closet except for a very dim shadow cast on the far wall by the sliver of the moon shining in the window. The thudding of my heart quickens. I don't want to witness this. I close my eyes, inhale. Him. That is all I smell.
Wait. No, I smell her too. That familiar perfume. The one we shared. The one I have given her as a gift every year on her birthday since she was seventeen. My throat closes. I open my eyes. I don't want to see, but I must see what can be seen. The creak of the bedframe as weight is set upon it startles me. Can they hear me breathing? How can I make this stop? There is silence, more material rustling, the bedframe creaks again and there is soft whispering. No movement. No more creaking.
From the dim shadow on the wall it looks as though one or both of them are lying on the bed. But what are they doing? I still hear faint whispers but I see no movement. My heart still thuds a steady, almost painful beat in my chest. I close my eyes, brace myself on the wall of the closet. This isn't happening. And then, there is only the sound of deep inhales, staggered by the other's exhales. No other noise accompanies the breathing. They're asleep. Together. Lying on his bed, where we used to lay. Together. And I am stuck here in his closet, accompanied only by his smell. Alone.

Names/Exes

"Alphabets" by kvanhorn

Take the full name (including middle name) of someone you love. Write down as many words from this name as you can. You can repeat letters from the name as many times as you wish. Treat the letters of this name as the only letters in a new alphabet. You cannot use any words containing letters that do not exist in this name. Because this is so difficult, you'll probably only be able to come up with about 200 words for this exercise--that's okay. When you have built a sufficient list of words (maybe breaking the list down into nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.) write a fragment of fiction that has to do with a fictionalized situation this person, or someone like this person, would be involved in.
(from prompt #25 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

and/or

As an alternative to "Names," use the letters of the first names of four or five ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends as your only alphabet for a very short story. The effect of this change, (from "Names") when I tried just the list of words (not the exercise) myself, was electric. See if you can look back to earlier failed relationships with something like affection--or at least some balance.
(from prompt #26 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

Read my commentary on these prompts:


Look, I did do it, okay? Ask my roommates: I sat around with this list of words, obsessively organized into parts of speech (at the conjunction junction, I was incredibly grateful for my TWO highly functioning words: "if" and "and") and I wrote a silly little story involving barf, and running (although I couldn't use the word "running," just the form "ran"). I used my baby brother's name, which gave me this alphabet:

ABDEFIKNRVZ

Please note the lack of any of the letters given to the finalist trying to make a phrase at the bonus end section of "Wheel of Fortune." No 's,' no 't,' no kind little 'm' or 'y.' No, I couldn't even make the word 'no.'

I also started to do the one with ex-boyfriends, which would actually have been way easier. That alphabet, in comparison, is awesome:

ABCDEIKLMNOST

Until you remember that in normal life, you get all the letters. Unrestricted! Weird experience, to be sure. I had such gratitude for letters, for the use of words. Weird, but rewarding.

The reward is not necessarily what it produced in writing, however, and that put me in an awkward position. The writing that came out of this felt silly, gimmicky, and I wasn't sure how to post it. Kiteley, in The 3 AM Epiphany, said as much elsewhere in the prompt: "happy for the difficulty and the experience but...failed at a proper piece of fiction." His advice was to let it gestate, unmolested (so, very, very much like a child, I guess) and in a few YEARS look back at it. Great, but I'm posting every week, and I'm itching to start at #27 and #28. I was just gonna skip over them, but it was weird how much it felt like I was breaking my own rules. Coincidentally, this prompt was inspired by the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians who meet in Paris to create almost impossible restraints; one description is "rats who build the maze from which they plan to escape." And here I am starting to feel like that with my own blog.

So, what you've just read was the solution to my self-created problem. I do recommend trying both prompts. I had to fight my self from dismissing these, as in, aw, this is just a game, not real writing, doesn't count. But, as I'm also choosing to look at each prompt as a lesson, it does count. (Plus slippery slope, if don't do one cause it doesn't appeal to me, how am I gonna stay disciplined to do any of them?) The lesson in this is really the heart of creativity: what do you do with what you have? Anyone can find a way to fill a blank canvas, but can anyone still find a way to create art without paint, or even a canvas? It was looking at the myriad meanings of common words, and at the power of rare ones, using each one carefully. A trite metaphor, but a lot like stringing beads together, looking at each word as a little bead, and evaluating its worth and where it belonged. So, yay for that. Meanwhile, do I post all the words I had (175 words) to use, do I post a story that is sort of adorable in its repetitive nothingness? (Sample sentence: "A barn, deer, fern: an errand in Eden.") Kiteley wrote that the voice used in this exercise is so forced, so unnatural, that it seems useless, but that, with patience, that becomes precisely the use: it teaches you to use something unnatural, a voice besides your own, which a good writer should be able to produce.

If anyone does try this and create something super cool, please please e-mail me at ehbarnard (at) hotmail (dot) com or leave a comment, and I will post that bad boy on up here.

Also, I recommend loving someone named like, Molly Bonnie Moorehousecricketski, or something.

Ways of Seeing

Imagine a person with an idiosyncratic way of seeing the world. Have this character witness a traumatic event that does not directly involve her. Narrate the event from a first-person POV in 600 words, making sure that the perspective is carefully built around the idiosyncrasies of this personality.
(from prompt #24 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

Read my response:


"Daily Traffic" by Burning Image

Like something in a movie, the only way to describe it. Day started out bad; clouds hanging heavy overhead, traffic stopped dead. The soundtrack to There Will Be Blood has been stuck in my car all week, setting the tone. Tense. Just another Joe driving to work, in my suit, blank face. What kind of films would Hitchcock make today? Something about our faceless society, anonymity thanks to cell phones, the internet, all the rest, I'd bet. There hasn’t been a good cell phone related thriller, has there? Like Birds did with birds, can’t see a flock flying south without looking for where I’d run for cover. So my phone rings, scares the shit out of me, thought it was on silent. I keep it that way, less disruptive. I don’t need a lot of dialogue in my life, I’m okay just watching things happen without a lot of discussion. Cell phones scare me even when they aren’t ringing, maybe its good no one has made “Final Destination VIII: Death Calls Again.” I’d see it and have one more thing to watch out for, one more symbol of terror. God, it keeps ringing. Look at the phone, asshole. My sister.
“Hello?’
“Joe?”
“Yeah. Hey. It’s early, its way before noon, what are you doing up?”
“Sorry…hold on.”
“Okay?’
“Okay sorry I’m back. Scout won’t stop barking this morning, you know how dogs can tell when it’s gonna storm. Joe. It sounds weird but okay, so I just had this dream. Is everything okay?”
“Uh, yes. I could ask you the same thing. What dream?”
“I just, I um. Had a dream that you killed yourself. So I got scared and wanted to make sure. Sorry. I mean, you know how sometimes you just wake up and you feel super weird like something bad is gonna happen?”
“Yeah, yeah. Jesus Christ. I am not suicidal. Everything is completely normal, I’m driving to work. Scare me enough, Jesus.”
“I know, I’m sorry. Okay. Well that was all. So you’re okay?”
“Yes, everything is fine. Go back to sleep.”
We hang up. When we were kids we used to make fun of how in movies no one says bye when they hang up; it stuck.
So that’s my morning, her call repeating in my head like bad omen, no matter how much I’m trying to concentrate on the present scene: just stop and go cars, like a goddamn traffic montage, same old every day of my life. Plus I’ve got this accelerating music in the background making me want to tear my hair out the way nothings happening in my car on the road.
Then it happens. Inching along, finally get to the exit. Red light. Changes to green, I make my right and some fuck cuts me off, perfect. Slamming on the breaks I almost rear end this Lexus piece of shit, I lurch forward and back and my heart rate soars. I take a deep breath and start to relax cause I didn’t hit him. Disaster avoided. I’m under the overpass and the car in front is just beyond. Then the body falls.
I see it hit the Lexus and bounce off, like a dummy. But a dummy with real blood and guts. Its all viscera, on the road, on this jackass’ car. Vivid, red so red its purple. I’ve never seen anything like it, I’m on the edge of my seat and everything is so real, like the whole world got digitally re-mastered. Playing my morning back in my head it, its like there were clues everywhere, but. Damn. It shocks me, it’s so fucking dramatic. Just like that, someone is dead. I don’t know if it made sense, I don’t know what lead him to this. Lexus is freaking out, I can see him through my window; it’s like it was scripted, getting cut off meaning I got spared.
What does one do, call 911? I’ll call 911. Tell them they need to see this…

The Closet

Write a story in which the character is snooping around an ex-boyfriend’s (or girlfriend’s) apartment because he or she still has a key. The whole story takes place in a closet in the bedroom that the narrator retreats to when the ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend comes home with the narrator’s best friend. The narrator must endure, inside the closet, maybe the sounds of this couple making love for the first time or perhaps simply a loving conversation unlike any the narrator has ever had with this former paramour. Describe only what the narrator can see and smell inside the closet and what she can hear and guess is going on outside the closet...you will show us your narrator’s deep sadness or anger or a combination of the two, without having to describe it.

This exercise forces you to blindfold your observer. Every image presented in a piece of prose is like the image this narrator will perceive—imagined, reconstructed, simplified.
(from prompt #23 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

Read my response:

"Hide and Seek" by Faithful Chant

Oh, R.Kelly. How I wish I could fly. Or piss on someone. Anything besides trapped in the closet. It’s the way they talk, so quietly, as if it’s just the two of them and no one else matters. I mean. I’m not here, as far as they are concerned. But shouldn’t they be concerned? They should be. They talk quietly, they don’t want anyone else to hear them with no one else around. She even laughs quietly. She's in the door frame, he's walking towards the desk. He’s telling her…oh. No. Do not put on Dashboard. If there is anything I hate more than finding out my boyfriend, I mean my ex-boyfriend, is sleeping with my best friend, because apparently my life is a clip they make fun of on The Soup, it’s Dashboard Confessional. Please do not have Dashboard sex.

Chris Carrabba, sing. She giggles, and it’s like he’s tickling her to elicit more. Whatever he is saying, it isn’t much, or loudly, as she and Chris Carrabba wailing “Don’t you see, don’t you see that the charade is over?” are the only sounds, and feet barely moving, skimming the carpet, planting themselves standing. (1) Too close. So much fun she must be having. She must not be paying attention to the music, because it isn’t fun or even funny. A little funny.

“And all the best deceptions and the clever clever story awards go to you.” (1)

She stops, starts to say “I never…” and then he kisses her. Or punches her, who knows. He doesn’t punch her. She just stops and there are no sounds but crescendos of a song for feeling touchy-feely.

“So kiss me hard, because this will be the last time that I let you. You will be back someday, and this awkward kiss that screams of other people’s lips…” (1)

He moves, I hear his arms fall—he was holding her in his arms—and the song changes. Thank God for small mercies. He’s by the desk then, where the picture of us—he was holding me in his arms—used to be, the picture I printed and put in a frame from Ikea and gave to him when I had no money for better gifts. What sits there now, it was…well. Probably nothing yet. He probably moves his hand over the empty space where we used to be and doesn’t notice the absence. Or maybe he does, pauses over the laptop half-bent, remembers, rights himself.

“What do you want to hear?” he asks. Her. She moves over to him now, without the music I can hear her walking with bare feet, a skirt rustle. They are in the corner farthest from me, farthest from the closet, and I can just see through the grates that the skirt is pink and her hair is up, but I cannot see him. She leans into him before she bends to look at the songs, and it’s just a second before it starts to play. They move again, I can’t hear them now but if I squint I see them, broken in my view through the shades. I don’t recognize the song; how is it he has a song I’m unfamiliar with? That she knew to select. They are on the bed, just in front, I close my eyes when I see a pink flag fall from three feet in the air.

“And you feel like something is about to begin, but you don't know what, and you don't know when, so you tear at your hair, and you scratch at your skin.” (2)

I hear them breathing, heavy, with gasps syncopated, she breathes in, he breathes out. It reminds me I have to do the same, I take air in and slowly let it out.

“Caught in your room on a concrete shelf, fighting all alone, with yourself, with yourself, and you just wanna feel like a coin that's been tossed in a wishing well, a wishing well, a wishing well, a wishing well. Well, you're tossed in the air and you fell and you fell through the dark blue waters where you cast your spell, like you were just a wish that could turn out well. So you stand on the corner where the angels sit and you think to yourself, ‘This is it, this is it, this is all that I have, all I can stand is this air in my lungs and this coin in my hand that you tossed in the air and I fell, and I fell all the way to the bottom of the well, of the well, like those soft little secrets that you tell, that you tell to yourself when you think no one's listening too well" (2)