Category Archives: Prompts

Write About Acceptable Losses

By lytspeed Posted in Prompts, Signs o' the Times, Writing Leave a reply

$4,500,000,000 per month. That’s roughly how much the United States is spending on the Iraq war. $54,000,000,000 per year. Going the other direction, that’s $1,125,000,000 per week. $150,000,000 per day. $6,250,000 per hour. $104,167 every minute. $1,736 every second.

Body counts are a little harder to come up with. Even conservative estimates indicate that more than 50,000 Iraqis have died since the beginning of the Iraq war, and over 3,000 U.S. military personnel have died. Ironically, December 25, 2006 marked the day when U.S. military deaths eclipsed the number of innocent people killed in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Of course, if you’re George W. Bush, these are evidently acceptable losses. And with Bush intending to increase troops by more than 20,000 in the near future, we can expect the body counts in both categories above to rise.

I find it ironic that President Bush evidently found it unacceptable in March 2005 to lose Terri Schiavo, even though she was in a persistent vegitative state. He took time out from his vacation to fly to Washington specifically to sign into law a bill (the so-called “Palm Sunday Compromise”) transferring the Schiavo case jurisdiction into Federal custody in an attempt to prevent Schiavo’s feeding tube from being removed.

After her autopsy, Terri Schiavo’s brain weighed only half what it should have weighed had it been healthy. Clearly, her neurological damage was so great that her brain was literally withering away. And yet, losing her was unacceptable.

Evidently, in George Bush’s mind, the lives of thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis are worth less than the life of one brain-dead Catholic.

Write about a ceremony

By lytspeed Posted in Prompts, Writing Leave a reply

He’s an old man now, and the 8 mm home movies are almost as old as his children. Some of them are older, in fact.

She’s an old woman, and it’s been ten years since their second child died. The movies have aged a decade in the dark tins since they were last watched. They couldn’t bear to see the innocent face of the child who they now knew would pass before them.

It’s been ten years, and they figure it’s time. Time to acknowledge and celebrate his memory. He would be fifty this year. So the old man carefully unpacks the antique projector, blowing the dust off the bulb and lubricating the reel axles. Next comes the round tins of celluloid, labeled with faded pencil on masking tape: “White Sands, April 1959”, “Silver City, Summer 1962”, “Yellowstone, 1965.”

He opens one at random, gently dropping the 8 inch reel into his left hand. He unrolls a few frames from the tape, pulling gingerly in case the film has stuck together over the years. It’s not stuck, but it is brittle, and the gentle tug causes a tear in the film’s leader. Drawing a sharp breath in and pulling his lips back to expose smoke-stained dentures, the old man concentrates on threading the film through the projector, making sure to keep even pressure on the narrow celluloid. He threads it successfully, and hooks the end of the film through the slot in the take-up reel.

“Ready, hon?” he says to the old woman.

“Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess,” she replies, a hint of an Oklahoma accent in her tone.

He stands, turns out the light, and steps back to the projector, stooping to pull a flashlight out of its charger on the way. With the flashlight on, he turns a knob and the room fills with the chattering sound of a Super 8 mm projector. He clicks the flashlight off.

After a few seconds, an image of two children, a boy and a girl, appears on the wall, yellowed with age, a long scratch stuttering down the right side of the frame. The kids wave and move their mouths; there is no sound. The old woman starts to cry.

“I think I’m glad that the camera couldn’t pick up sound,” she says. “I don’t think I could take it if I heard his voice.”

“I wish we could hear him. I think I’ve forgotten what he sounded like when he was that age.” The old man puts his arm around the old woman, rubbing his fingers into her shoulder. “I still say that it’s not right. A parent shouldn’t have to bury his child, no matter how old the child is. It’s backwards!”

The old woman reaches up with a tissue, wiping at the tear track on the old man’s face. “I know, darlin’, I know.” Settling into each other’s arms, they know they have found a new yearly ritual.

On the home movie, the young boy runs around in a cowboy outfit, guns blazing silently.

It’s what I do in the middle of the night

By lytspeed Posted in Prompts, Writing Leave a reply

This prompt is not doing a lot for me right now. I’m trying to think of some way to make the prompt the end of the story, and there are probably dozens of ways — hundreds, probably — to write a short piece that would end with that line, but no ideas are coming to me.

Analyzing it from a left-brain standpoint, it makes sense that if the story ended like that, a situation might arise in which two characters were discussing something that one of them does. One character just found out about it, and is confused and bewildered by it, the other character (the one doing the actions in the middle of the night) acts as if the action is perfectly natural.

I’m seeing a father and son in this story; the father has just discovered something that has been happening, is intrigued by it, and just found out that his son is behind it. His son, on the other hand, has done whatever this action is for as long as he can remember, and it’s second nature to him. The father approaches the son about the events occurring in the middle of the night in wonder and disbelief.

But what does the child do? Does he create the stars? Does he not sleep? Does he unknowingly knit the Universe together in the night? Is he some kind of dream filter, who receives all the dreams that people are having, jumbles them together, and doles them back out again, randomly?

That last idea is pretty interesting … I wonder if I will be able to come up with a story format for it.

Once, when no one was looking …

By lytspeed Posted in Prompts, Writing Leave a reply

Once, when no one was looking, Walter was nice.

While riding his bike around the block, he saw a praying mantis on the bumpy sidewalk. His first instinct, of course, was to aim directly for the bug. As luck would have it, he turned too quickly and his front wheel slid up against the three inch lip where the roots of Mrs. Aiden’s oak tree had pushed up the sidewalk. Down went the bike, down went Walter, and he found himself lying belly down on the cold concrete with his legs tangled in the frame of the bike. The offending front wheel spun slowly a few inches above the ground.

The praying mantis hadn’t moved. It stood on its four rear legs, front limbs up, a miniature green centaur. Walter scowled and his face grew red. He kicked at the bicycle, trying to dislodge his legs.

“Stupid bug! You’re gonna get it!” Walter spat. He reached to the edge of the sidewalk and pulled up on the corner, where the tree root had cracked it. Walter knew about that corner; he had dug out underneath it so that he had a place to hide things. Soon, though, it would be a grave for a smashed green bug.

Walter raised the chunk of concrete over his head, a jagged corner protruding from his hand like a primitive dagger. He narrowed his eyes and tensed his arm, ready to slam the concrete down on the mantis, but then a strange thing happened.

The mantis turned and looked at Walter. It cocked its head, just like E.T. from the movies. Little circles of light reflected off the bug’s eyes, as if they were polished. It stared at him.

Walter froze. He could almost hear it asking him not to smash the chunk of concrete down. Intelligence shone from the bug’s eyes; it looked smarter than Walter’s kid sister, which, of course, wasn’t saying much. But it was unexpected. Walter lowered the concrete chunk down slowly and put it back in its place on the edge of the sidewalk.

The praying mantis inclined its head forward slightly when Walter finished placing the broken corner. Walter nodded back, imperceptibly. He stood up, picked up his bike, and started wheeling it home, to the other side of the block.

That night, at dinner, Walter’s parents noticed a scrape on his arm.

“What happened to you, Walter?” his mother asked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, mom. I just wiped out on my bike today.”

“Oh no! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Don’t worry, mom. It happens all the time, especially in front of Mrs. Aiden’s house. There’s a chunk of sidewalk that sticks up there, and I hit it wrong with my bike.”

“Well, you had better slow down, young man! You’re going to wind up really hurting yourself.”

Or someone else, Walter thought.

Write about a day moon

By lytspeed Posted in Prompts, Writing Leave a reply

Father told us that three or fewer moons meant bad luck was coming that day.

There was only one moon the day of the accident.

Mother and Father had taken the truck to the space port to pick up Grandmother. I remember the dust swirling out from beneath the truck, curling up and around the rising crescent of Cambra, obscuring her with a brown film. The other four moons had already set before sunrise, so Cambra would be the only moon in the sky today.

I was never much of a believer in superstitions; most of us kids weren’t.

—- —- —- NOTE: This isn’t working very well, and I’m about to fall asleep. I like the idea here, but I can’t stick with it enough to turn it into a workable story right now. Time for bed. Maybe I will return to this when I’m feeling more focused. —- —- —-