edit less more

Here are the rules.

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.

Here are the rules.

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.”

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.

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.

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.