Do you use the colours or the images when you build your stories? I always wonder what inspired who. For me it's nearly always the words, though once in awhile the images lend a hand.
Last week's no lights prompt it was one single word shining out—bones. Somehow bones are elemental, like fire and water and sky. Everyone has something to say about bones. Scarpering right after bones was the prompt of light, and suddenly I knew what I wanted to write.
Writing Bare Bones and Angry Oceans
A sampling of last week's wonderful wee stories. Click the link above (or below) to read each story in full and then do, do, do add your own?
The ocean floor is made of bones. The earth’s great rocky bones of quartz, mainly, but others too. The calcium of shells and skeletons, the structures of coral and whales and clams and the great ichthyosaurs. And soon, too soon, my own…
*
Hi, I’m the girl who grew up with a skeleton in her closet. Well, in her parent’s closet anyway……It was bones. Real, actual human bones. It hung from the hanger rod in my parents closet, suspended from a hook connected to the wire strung through his skull. Dusty was family. But not actual family, if you take my meaning.
*
The harder the wind blew, the further the waves came, almost as if they were reaching for the small house on the dunes, trying to claw it back into the sea. She hated storms, not because of the waves or the wind, but because you never knew what it would drag up from the depth, be it wreckage, dead fish, or dead people. She’d made a deal with the sea, a lifetime ago, but…
*
“Watson.” I felt him pull the empty glass from my fingers and take my hand in his. I could hold out against his autocratic mien, it seems, but not his tender one. “It doesn’t end, Holmes. More wounded are brought to us every day. We do what we can, but—” “Oh, my dear fellow.” Holmes’ arms pulled me to him, and I found myself held in a fierce embrace, my head pressed firmly against his chest.
*
I turn the lights off every morning, because I sleep with them on every night. It's funny what people fear, you can't _decide_ can you? Some people are afraid of mirrors or peanut butter or school, so why can't I be afraid of my own bones?
Your turn. I'll ask every week for those that are shy…try to write a story this week. For this prompt. Just a paragraph. Maybe a sentence.
I promise that if you let your fingers start before you start to think, something left-of-centre will come out. And then more, and more.
Try it. This week. Come on?
There’s a patter of little feet on the floor like light rain on a car roof. I sit down on the floor legs crossed, I wait.
They’re coming.
Around the corner they charge, a drumming of little paws on the wood floor accompanied by the sound of tiny mews.
I hand out the treats.