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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.