Hello again everyone,
Here’s another example of fast fiction from my monthly writers group’s warming up exercises. For anyone interested in a full explanation, here’s a link.
A quick rundown of the rules:
Rule #1: These pieces of fast fiction were generated from a prompt chosen at random during one of my monthly writers group meetings. I will label that prompt at the top and where I use it in the prose.
Rule #2: WordPress allows me a ‘click here to read the rest of the story’ break, and that will be used before the fast fiction begins in earnest so people browsing through this blog are not overwhelmed.
Rule #3: The prose of the fast fiction shall be transcribed from my handwriting accurately: Line breaks, grammar, punctuation, spelling, what-have-you. The point of showing a 10- or 15-minute first draft is saying what you tried to do in that time, so what does editing really get me? The very rare changes I really do deem necessary shall be noted with an asterisk and an apologetic explanation at the end.
Rule #4: After the fast fiction I will include a few sentences about my first thoughts of the prompt. These entries are less about the actual prose and more about the exercise as a whole. Post-gaming that exercise will be a big part of the end result.
And that’s it. Here we go.
Prompt:
“We need to find out what’s at the core of your unhappiness. These things are only on the surface.”
He found it useful to talk to the thing.
You can be careless with an inanimate object in a way you never ignore someone you are speaking to, and this was not an audience to treat lightly.
“Hello Mr. Atom Bomb. How are you today?” He asked as a personal physician would upon entering an exam room. He often wondered if the men who watched him ever thought of him as a medical doctor, as a surgeon perhaps?
He wore a lab coat and surgical gloves. He consulted a clipboard. The radioactive exposure card dangling from his breast pocket could at first glance be mistaken for a hospital ID badge.
He looked over at his living audience, who looked back at him stonily. They were as unlikely to talk to him as the Atom Bomb. They had their orders: Watch him like a hawk, say nothing, shoot him if he ever deviates from procedure.
“It says here on your chart that you are 47 years old? You look wonderful for your age! Have you had work done?” He pauses for laughter, knowing none will come. Atom Bombs have no sense of humour.
“Okay. Let’s get you out of that jacket,” he says, pulling up a stool and going to work with the tool designed specifically to remove the bomb casing. There were only a few dozen such tools in the world. His guards tensed every time he put it in a lab coat pocket, and they did not breathe easy again until it was in plain sight.
With the casing removed, he saw the rats nest of wires leading to the explosive packaged around the sphere. The thing was wired to implode perfectly from all directions at once.
“We need to find out what’s at the core of your unhappiness. These things are only on the surface.”
He joked again, prying loose the explosive blocks one by one, gently but firmly. He kept his tone light and breezy as he exposed the radioactive core. The doseometer and Geiger counter began chirping.
“My, what a handsome plutonium core you have, Mr. Atom Bomb,” he said at last.
—
Note: A few months earlier I had already done a psychologist-themed prompt. You can find it here. I didn’t want to go back to the same well twice, especially with such an on-the-nose prompt. I tried to think of another situation where someone might ape the language of a therapist for some reason, and my mind went first to comedy, and then to a kind of ‘theatre of the absurd’ place where a man in a lab coat was taking apart a nuclear bomb while armed men glowered at him.
I never said so, but I envisioned this as an Eastern European –a Ukrainian or Kazakh technician—disassembling the aging nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union.
I will add as a final thing, I typed this up from my notebook weeks ago, and I only come up with the titles of my posts as I put them into the blog’s back end. I was pleased that I came up with ‘Light and Breezy’ both in the prose and the title. It was definitely the vibe I was going for.
Anyway, the writers’ group quite liked it. One of them called it the Patch Adams of nuclear disarmament. It’s not my best work, but it’s still fun.
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