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:
For this one I changed two words of the prompt, one intentionally and
one accidentally:
Ma [originally Mother] turns against the church as my [originally her] father and her last surviving brother are lowered into the same grave in gravely unpleasant Southern Cemetery.
I then did something I don’t think I’ve ever done before or since. I didn’t end up using the prompt in the exercise! It’s there in spirit, but I was having too much fun with the scene to go back and work it in.
“They could have given us two plots,” she mutters, tugging at her widows’ weeds.
“We couldn’t afford two plots, Ma,” I reminded her out of the corner of my mouth.
“We tithe! We’ve tithed all our lives, and our parents and grandparents before us! That should count for something! That should count for another three-foot by eight-foot by six-foot hole in the muddy ground!” She hissed.
“That goes to feed starving African children, Ma!” I reminded her quietly, repeating something I heard over the kitchen table all through my childhood.
“Sod the starving Africans! One tenth of every penny my husband and brother ever earned probably went to pay for one half of one papal tiara. Two lifetimes’ wages garnished for half a diamond crown! And don’t you shush me, John Paul! You know it’s true!”
She is making a scene now. The Holy Father can hear her. I know he can. Can he make out the words, though? Does he think it’s just mourning, wailing, gnashing of teeth as the cheerless ground swallows the last of Ma’s friends? I take her by the elbow with one hand and wave apologetically to the priest with the other.
“Ma, if we get through this, I promise I’ll never give the Church another bent copper, and I’ll get my son to piss in the baptismal he was christened in. He’s already going to Hell, Ma. He won’t mind. Just hold it together, Ma!”
She takes a deep breath, grabs up a fistful of muddy soil from the mound by the open grave, and hurls it towards the priest. Her arm is weak; her aim is bad; enough of it falls in the hole to preserve the family dignity.
“That’s good, Ma. Real respectful!”
“I have one hole in the ground for two men who gave their lives to this Church!”
“Ma, they died in a pie eating contest—“
“—With the Anglicans up the road!” She finished my sentence.
She’s come unhinged.
“Ma, if you keep your voice down, I promise I’ll…”
—
Note: As I said up top, I didn’t actually work the prompt in! Still, I had fun. I feel like the son’s name would have been Frank if I hadn’t already identified I kept naming people Frank at the time. I named him Jean Paul as the next most clearly Catholic name that sprang to mind. Meanwhile, when I read this dialogue to myself, I do so in the voice of Joe Regalbuto, who played Frank Fontana in the show Murphy Brown during my childhood. Every time I leaned into ‘Ma’ in this, I heard his fun squeak-growl of exasperated outrage.
Now I did this exercise years ago, but if memory serves I completely lost track of time, and I was given a one-minute warning after, “That’s good, Ma. Real respectful!” At that moment I realized I hadn’t even used the prompt and had no ending in mind, so I decided with what time I had left I should try to get a real chuckle out of my writers’ group. That’s where the death by pie-eating contest misadventure came in. I couldn’t tell you if it worked or not, but that’s definitely where things take that extra step into Theatre of the Absurd that I do sometimes like to dabble in with these things…
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