A Hut, An Unhappy Marriage, French Kiss
prompt work
Flash Fiction and a micro-essay or something like it.
A hut, an unhappy marriage, French kiss.
The one room hut sat on the tundra in the high desert. Outside feral winds lashed the scrub skeletons for miles and howled through rock arches.
The man was fallen back on the only table, bleeding from a knife buried in his heart. He twitched and jerked. His nerve fibers misfired as he fell into an endless dark pit. He coughed and groaned but no one was home. His body heat steamed off him as he left. The woman was hysterical, screaming my husband, my husband, my husband, and pounding his chest, grabbing his shirtcollar in her hands, already cold, now frozen tight.
The killer, a thin man with a hawk nose and pale blue eyes, couldn’t calm her.
Your marriage was bad, so bad, he said. The woman couldn’t hear him. The thin man was her neighbor.
He hit you. She wailed, and cried cold neverhot tears. I watched your unhappy twelve years. The killer pointed at the woman as she crumpled around her abuser’s departing. Her husband’s shirt sopping crimson with hot heart blood. Him fast wet red dying.
He was bad for you, the thin man said. He was bad for everyone.
She wailed, knelt at her dying husband’s side, arms covering as much of his sooncorpse as a bird protecting its nest. She didn’t care about a bad marriage. She grabbed her husband, rolled him side up to her and forced her tongue in his cold limp mouth.
He didn’t kiss back. She rolled her hot live tongue around inside his frigid dead mouth with no pushback, no liveminded tongue to play with. No, a limp tongue, cold thick saliva, the taste of blood there like sucking in a mouthful of cold pennies.
I did you a favor, the thin man says.
French kissing a corpse she says out the side of her mouth, you killed us both. You killed all I knew.
I meant to help. Her face was green healing and plum purple new bruise blooming on her left cheek leaving half her beauty and all her history to be read aloud at a glance. For twelve years of marriage she’d only lost two teeth, but one was a canine.
You keep to your own life and leave mine to me, she hissed, her hand wrapping around the handle of the knife buried in her terrible marriage’s unhappy slackmuscle heart.
END
SO EMIL WHY DO YOU THINK PROMPTWORK IS IMPORTANT?
That’s less than 400 words. I wrote it by hand. It took me less than 15 minutes, because me and
were doing prompts in notebooks at that pace.The way we’d do it, is you’d get your prompts pulled from a hat, and then you have between when you read them and when the timer starts to get an idea. Is it good? I don’t know. What do you think? I think for something I wrote by hand in a notebook on 30 seconds notice, it’s pretty fucking good.
At 15 minutes, pencils DOWN.
This is why I’m so big on Edith’s
prompt workshop (which is free by the way, she puts in a lot of work on that for free, so if you attend, write a prompt). Working with constraints, and I don’t mean just prompts, but any constraints, that you impose on yourself, and sticking to them, is going to force you to git gud or cry trying scrub.I’ve been doing this with her in specific for a decade, and more generally, for over fifteen years.
knew what he was doing when he created rap flash fiction battles. Put yourself on a clock and see what happens. If you write slow, and cry about how you write slow when you see shit like this, I have news for you, this is a skill you build. And you CAN grow it, even if you write S-L-O-W.And he let’s contestants have 3 hours and 500 words.
What’s up there was fifteen minutes, a pilot precise V5, and less than 400 words.
So this week I’m challenging anyone who reads this, pick up a pen, pick three words, and put a clock on for fifteen minutes. Show me what YOU can do.
STILL TAKING CLIENTS!
Short stories especially, rent has to be paid and the hustle is real. For editing inquiries email emilottoman@gmail.com with EDITORIAL INQUIRY in the subject line. For more on me as an editor, link is below.
Last Thursday was the second anniversary of my best friend’s suicide. What better way to deal with all this white hot rage and grief than by turning it into fiction. Bet it makes you cry.
Part 1 coming. Hopefully this week!
MAY I ASK YOU A QUESTION?
Oh, and read these, please
The Rainbow Rat Review is still on the way. But the suicide week is always bad.
I should just warn everyone that I’m not gonna be useful the last week of May.
EXCITING NEWS
Excellent story. Being older than you and British, I was taught ALWAYS to write dialogue with quotation marks and it’s so hard to unlearn.
When I handwrite, I never put them in (to ease the flow of writing. But, things evolve and if I don’t use them when handwriting to ease the flow, why not try omitting them when typing them up? Food for thought.
Prompt work. I used to find restrictive but, with a different mindset and also, thanks to Edith’s SoC workshop, I’ve quickly learned to love them. And even taken part in competitions with prompts as the MO.
The Rainbow Rat will slide his way along the gutter when everyone’s good and ready. There’s nothing that can’t wait while you pay attention to you and yours, which is the most important thing. Grief is grief. There’s no timetable, no rules.
Jesus Fuckels Christ what a flex. Excellent flash, but you know that. Gonna try my hand at these drills that you do.