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:
A formation of dust under a table seemed to represent the utter futility of staying alive.
One of the twelve labours of Hercules was to clean out the Augean Stables in a single day. He diverted a river to get it done, and went on his merry way without a care in the world for all the drowned horses trapped in their stalls.
I thought a lot about the labours of Hercules that summer, yet somehow I never managed to make a good water polo joke out of all those drowned horses.
I was an awful summer. I could have done with a good laugh, and gallows humour seemed the order of the day.
As with so many things for those months cleaning up the old family homestead, I never really got what I wanted to do done.
I got the call in the spring that my grandfather had finally poisoned my grandmother. She had had cancer for years, and palliative care on a farm out in the middle of nowhere was more cruel than kind. He put her down like a sick cow, then he went into the dairy barn and hanged himself. The overturned milking stool was still there waiting for me when I arrived to clean everything up, pack what was worth keeping, bin the rest, and then sell the family farm.
God, it was hot that summer. There was no AC, and so I wandered from house to barn to shed and back in a daze, muttering about Hercules and his cheating his way through the hopeless task of cleaning the Augean Stables.
One day after clearing the ground floor from curtains to carpet I wandered into the kitchen, poured myself a beer, and then watched the dust bunnies blow across the floor into the rooms I had just cleared. A formation of dust under a table seemed to represent the utter futility of staying alive.
The whole house, the whole farm, seemed sad and lonely and hopeless.
I baked cookies every day, trying to drive the smell of decay out, but in the end that was just a different way of making the place smell like grandma.
I despaired when the realtor came to inspect the place, but he had the good grace not to complain about the smell.
He did mention the dust bunnies, though. They roamed the floor like buffalo gathering strength and numbers under the damned kitchen table.
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Note: A weak effort from a weak prompt. I’m not particularly proud of this one, and I am sure I kept writing until the time ran out without a real plan in place. Honestly, if I hadn’t already typed it up months ago so I can just copy and paste it into this blog, I probably wouldn’t have shared it. I do so now more to illustrate they can’t all be winners than any other motivation. If this is the first of these you’re reading, please check out the Fast Fiction category of the blog. It gets a lot better.
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