Free your ride: #7
Here is the prompt:
Now write:
She did not know why she had agreed to meet him on Golden Road, under the Franz Kafka sign. “I’ve never read Kafka,” she told him.
“Never read Kafka?” he was incredulous. “Who hasn’t read Kafka?”
She watched him take a bite much too large of his potato salad, dressing forming a teardrop formation from the corner of his cracked lips. The sun was too bright. She squinted and felt the sear of the sunburn on her forehead when it wrinkled.
“I mean, come on! I bet you read Danielle Steele.”
She wished he would close his mouth when he talked; his tongue speckled with mustard and mayo and partially masticated potato chunks.
“Nora Roberts? Jesus. I can’t believe you haven’t read Kafka.”
“Ucet, prosim” she said to their Czech waitor. He nodded and disappeared into the darkness of the cafe interior. The family at the next patio table spoke French and laughed.
“What? Are you mad?” He wiped his mouth.
He was ugly. There was not a single thing about him that she found attractive; but she was lonely, already two weeks in Prague, and such time spent encased in solitude made her feel the universe had swallowed her half way and then belched her out.
“I can’t believe you’re mad.” He threw up his hands and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his belly. “Okay. Danielle Steele is a genius.”
The waitor came. He stood. He smelled of garlic, and she liked it. He smiled at her, apologetically, and she felt embarrassed to dine with the rude American who talked too loud. “Dekuji” she said to him. Thank you.
“Fine, but we’re still meeting up at 8, right?”
The French father glanced sideways and slurped his drink.
“You know nothing, yet think you know everything,” she said to her rude companion. But still, she would meet him at 8 under the Kafka sign.
Free your ride: #6
Here is the prompt:
writer’s block
Now write:
I have come here to write, but my words are lined up at the door. They are lazy children swinging metal lunch boxes — Holly Hobby, Skeletor — against corduroyed knees.
I have come here to write, but my words are lined up at the door. They are full-bladdered children wiggling willy nilly at the water closet, striped sleeves pulled over nervous thumbs. Whiney, impetulant children who have had too much juice to drink.
I have come here to write, but my words are lined up at the door. They are leaderless children, pestering one another about the neck, about the elbows, about tiny crooks of knees, waiting for an absent teacher. So grouchy she has become, this tardy molder of brains. So contemptuous (Is that a word?) she is, so split at her ends. She is nipping from a copper flask in the teacher’s lounge, distracting herself with vending machines and carpet stains. She will leave them there, she thinks. Each child slouching in v-neck sweaters. She will abandon them fully, as she can no longer bear the clumsy manner in which they bobble down the hallways — narrow pathways, so straight, they can only hint at containment (stupid line). Whoever designed these pedestrian tunnels did not understand the inflated bravado of young people-rockets on their way to recess. Goddamn these dependent little creatures. How they wait so mindlessly to be led. Can they not shoot out waving autonomy’s flag?
I have come here to write.
Free your ride: #5
Here is the prompt:
Now, write:
He hated the color green. “But I’ll put it everywhere you want. Fuck, you want a green dog?”
She smiled coyly, and her eyes were blue as blue as blue. “This is not so much green as it is pine.” She pulled a straight line in the upturned lid, smeared pine, a darker shade of green. She rinsed her painted finger tip in the sink.
Their bedroom was green: She called it sage. The bathroom was green: She called it mint. The living room was green: She called it jade. And room by room he obliged every hue, ceiling to floor, until his shoulder ached. “Fucking green,” he muttered sinking into his dirt brown recliner. It would not go, the recliner. He refused. He wondered how long before she pointed it toward the door, to replace it with everything wine. It was to be her new accent color, shades of plum and burghundy splicing across their living space.
“It needs another coat,” she told him, fingering the corner of a patterned swatch.
“That’s purple,” he said.
She did not look up; dismissed him with a quiet, breathy, “Merlot.”
Free your ride: #4
For instructions on how to be a free writer, go here: *here*
This is your prompt:
Now, write:
Late for the train again, too much time looking for cigarettes.
“Quit smoking,” she wrote in the notepad she pulled out of her pocket.
She would wait for the next. It was empty now, the station, but she sensed the vaporous trails of people in a hurry. They shuffled quickly out of the rectangular silver cars, down the steps, past the angular grafitti, past the man singing off key, up the next set of steps, and to a different platform.
“A bridge across the tracks would be faster,” she thought. A retractable bridge with warning lights that dinged and flaired before folding up on you as trains crept in.
Trains don’t creep. They are railed bullets with windows. They brought her here; they would take her away. They were agents of birth and death, in and out of chrome and concrete wombs. Such an intricate arrival and departure schedule. The woman in the control booth and the man beside her — they ate donuts and drank coffee. It was fresh; she could smell it. The woman laughed loudly through the plexiglass, and she noted they must feel a lot like God. A small black toggle switch could cancel or delay her journey at any time.
She watched the board without blinking. The 15:08 to Stuttgart, and she had never felt so vulnerable.
Free your ride: #3
In the comments below -or on your blog with a link -or in your very very v. private pink diary, Write (Ride).
Start with the start — a photo, a quote, a word, a story. Produce words, one after another, until you are done. Spelling and punctuation, inconsequential. Grammar preferred but not required.
Editing strictly prohibited.
Start here:
“behind the greenhouse”
Write (Ride):
I don’t know who spilled gasoline in the rhubarb patch behind the greenhouse, but it was much too literal for my taste: the greenhouse gas, that is. I imagine it was Amelia and her penchant for fire, for setting fire, watching fire, roasting things in fire, for she was all things fire from the inside out. She was not redheaded, though, and I think we were all surprised by that; such flamability on the inside demands some kind of show on the outside, is what I say. But she did have a spiked ring of gold around each of her pupils. Could never say for certain that her eyes were exactly blue or exactly green or exactly hazel, but only that whatever color they were was only an approximation, and it was interrupted, of course, by the hot glow. That’s what I meant about fire on the outside, because it wasn’t for her hair, you see.
What I think happened is just before she shot west, just before she theived Rodney’s old Yamaha crotch rocket, she wanted to set the whole thing to blazes, but she was interrupted. Could have been anybody, but I’d put my money on Isabelle from next door, who was as nosy as anybody was ever nosy. Is what I guess, is that Isabelle saw what Amelia was up to, and clattered out the side door, crossed the gravel (when is someone going to finish that paving?), and waved a robed arm in the air. I’m sure that’s when Amelia dropped the gas can, straddled the bike, and took off.
I don’t know where she is now — Amelia, I mean — but I sure hope she’s stopped to wash her hands.
The piece unpuzzled, though, is why the greenhouse? Was she going to start there and work her way match by match to the house, past the shed, through the garage, and spray unleaded all over the floral print couch? I don’t know, except that it may have been the orchids. Leon loved his orchids, always his orchids, more than anything else his orchids. And of course the greenhouse was full of them. Maybe she just wanted to set him right and take down each delicate stalk by stalk.
Leon would have told her orchids weren’t as delicate as they looked. But they’d have burned anyway under all that heat.
Free your ride: #2
In the comments below -or on your blog with a link -or in your very very v. private pink diary, Write (Ride).
Start with the start — a photo, a quote, a word, a story. Produce words, one after another, until you are done. Spelling and punctuation, inconsequential. Grammar preferred but not required.
Editing strictly prohibited.
Start here:
Write (Ride):
I wrote Ronnie’s name with my mother’s stolen mascara. I knew I ought not; rain was coming, and I would read a sign when the next morning, he had disappeared and left the metal railing clean. I was always looking for signs. A framed photo dropped and broke, and I knew its subject was dead. A plant died in the garden, and I knew someone cherished would wilt with disease.
Nevermind perfectly acceptable scientific explanations: the clumsy execution of a cartwheel in the livingroom, setting the whole house to shake; months and months of drought that left corn dead on its stalks. At the age of twelve I alone lived in a cosmic bubble — wired for two-way conversation with the universe. I felt it course and separate my sinew; it eavesdropped on my thoughts.
I tucked my mother’s mascara into my back pocket, wiped the smudge of black/brown from my pinky onto my cut off denims, just under the hip pocket. The bridge shook when a semi rolled past on the neighboring Highway 75. Grit snuck into my flipflops. I thought of all the dead plants, all the cracked photos. Thought of Ronnie and his cow lick bangs. I whispered my disgust at the nosy cosmos and raced back to his smudged name in all caps, licked the heel of my hand and wiped.
Free your ride: #1
In the comments below -or on your blog with a link -or in your very very v. private pink diary, Write (Ride).
Start with the start — a photo, a quote, a word, a story. Produce words, one after another, until you are done. Spelling and punctuation, inconsequential. Grammar preferred but not required.
Editing strictly prohibited.
Start here:
Write (Ride):
You saw me in your conversion van. Drive by thrice, as if I won’t know? I am crouching, knees cracking, chin closer to dead earth (not dead, so much. Tired, maybe. Spent, certainly. It takes so much to be fertile.), hunting for the origin of sound beneath rusting undercarriage of abandoned truck.
I am trespassing, you know, you suspect, for this barn has been turned to ash and reconfigured into soil (tired, spent soil) for at least a decade. “There is nothing here to steal,” I say to your exhaust and the gravel you kick into wake along County Road 72.
I imagine you have turned the radio low — Alan Jackson in a quiet murmur, except that I do not want to stereotype you, so instead you will listen to Harry Connick, Jr. and thrumb the steering wheel. You will wear wrinkled dress pants and your interest in me will be less about suspicion and more about a philosophical question. I will be to you as a still photograph found in a ditch — a girl hunkering in what was once a yard and is now a Kansas farm turned to pasture. Crusted in dirt (survived plenty rain), yellowed and ripped at the corners, you will wonder where I went next, who took the photo, and the why of it. When?
Just as I will think of you as a fly that buzzed past, just long enough to know that I existed. My knees will crack again when I stand.
