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 almost the first time since I met him, he was completely calm.
The day we caught the man who raped and murdered my friend’s daughter was the end of one long nightmare, and the beginning of another, but on that one day —just that one day— we were happy for the first time in a very long time.
My friend had always been a worrier, a stress-eater, a loud personality who extroverted his emotions so no one was under any illusions how he was feeling from moment to moment.
When the vigilantes dragged the murderer and rapist to my friend’s doorstep at five in the morning, I expected an explosion.
None came.
“What do you want us to do with him?” The angry mob asked, and no one mentioned law enforcement or due process. The guilty man sat in a doze on the front porch of the father of his victim, and his fate was in my friend’s hands.
For almost the first time since I met him, he was completely calm.
He looked at his wristwatch, then looked over to see how high the sun was over the horizon. Less than a finger’s breadth.
Red sky in the morning. Sailors take warning.
The murderer and the rapist was a sailor, if you can call a third mate degenerate gambling rapist murderer a sailor.
He was going to have a bad day today. The whole town was on the same page there.
“Tide’s out,” my friend said. “Let’s take him to the beach.”
So we did.
We buried him up to his neck in the sand. Mark that: We didn’t have him lie down and cover him up like at a seaside picnic.
We picked a spot ten feet down from the high tide mark, dug a hole five feet deep, had him stand in it at gunpoint, and then we all filled the hole in a handful of wet sand at a time.
Then my friend and I and the whole town spent half the day watching the tide come in and go out again.
The courts are still trying to figure out how to prosecute the murder of the man who raped and murdered my friend’s daughter.
I feel for those lawmen. I do.
But I saw justice done when that tide rolled in.
—
Note: So this was a lot darker than I normally go. I have mentioned once or twice in other exercises that there is a member of my writers group who does action and violence and physical drama a lot, and I think this was me trying to flex those muscles a little bit too.
The opening line should get everyone’s attention right from the get-go, sets the stakes, and makes some promises that I did my best to deliver.
One of the members of my writers group was particularly taken with the ‘handful’ and not ‘spadeful’ of sand to fill in in the hole. I was thinking of the classic legal thought problem: If 100 men with a knife all stab the same man, who is responsible for his death? If the whole town puts one handful of sand into the hole, who actually buried the guy?
If I had to pick a thing to criticize about the piece, it’s that the prompt doesn’t really factor into the story much. If that wasn’t the prompt, I wouldn’t have the friend be such a bundle of nerves and energy, and as soon as the prompt is done we never revisit that aspect of his character again. I could have used that time to write something else. Still, on the whole I am happy with the piece, and so why nitpick?
Having said the prompt did not inform the story much, I guess it’s worth saying I did not have this thing in my head before starting the exercise. I knew I wanted to experiment with something darker, but the piece was still done spontaneously in the moment.
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