![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
More fiction re-posting.
Aug. 11th, 2009 01:06 pmNot science fiction or fantasy, for a change.
----
The debris of memories and connections is strewn across the room. The only thing that isn't there is the cell phone, an initial casualty, flung out the window. This is a fifth-story apartment, and the kitchen window looks out over an alleyway. The phone is gone.
The next victim was the photo album. It is perhaps five years old, and the first several pages in it have been torn out, violently, which is not a simple feat. The transparent foil, or whatever it is that covers each page, is not supposed to rip, but it has, stretched well beyond the breaking point. Out from behind it, many photos have fallen, among them several cutesy sequences of pictures, those strips of quadruplicate shots taken behind the curtains in those little automatic booths.
Most of the second half of the photo album is empty; which only made things worse.
There's a mix CD snapped in half, and there are scuff marks on the walls from someone's shoes. There's a broken vase on the table leaking water while the flowers inside shake their heads in the breeze coming in that open window.
In the bedroom all the dresser drawers are hanging open- the white dresser with flowers, not the unwieldy walnut-stain bureau. Clothes have been flung all about the place. The carpet in the closet is uncrimping from where a suitcase sat neglected for a very long time.
The suitcase, messily stuffed, sits out by the front door, which has more scuff marks on and around it.
Back in the bedrooms, one of the pillowcases is wet with tear-stains, and the covers stir, pulled tighter into a cocoon. The bedroom lights get turned off. A minute later, the kitchen window is closed, a cigarette butt flicked out it just beforehand.
The closet by the bathroom has its door slid open, gently, and it stays that way for a long time, until a decision is made about what it will take to clean this up.
McSweeney's Writing Prompts
1. Write a scene showing a man and a woman arguing over the man's friendship with a former girlfriend. Do not mention the girlfriend, the man, the woman, or the argument.
----
The debris of memories and connections is strewn across the room. The only thing that isn't there is the cell phone, an initial casualty, flung out the window. This is a fifth-story apartment, and the kitchen window looks out over an alleyway. The phone is gone.
The next victim was the photo album. It is perhaps five years old, and the first several pages in it have been torn out, violently, which is not a simple feat. The transparent foil, or whatever it is that covers each page, is not supposed to rip, but it has, stretched well beyond the breaking point. Out from behind it, many photos have fallen, among them several cutesy sequences of pictures, those strips of quadruplicate shots taken behind the curtains in those little automatic booths.
Most of the second half of the photo album is empty; which only made things worse.
There's a mix CD snapped in half, and there are scuff marks on the walls from someone's shoes. There's a broken vase on the table leaking water while the flowers inside shake their heads in the breeze coming in that open window.
In the bedroom all the dresser drawers are hanging open- the white dresser with flowers, not the unwieldy walnut-stain bureau. Clothes have been flung all about the place. The carpet in the closet is uncrimping from where a suitcase sat neglected for a very long time.
The suitcase, messily stuffed, sits out by the front door, which has more scuff marks on and around it.
Back in the bedrooms, one of the pillowcases is wet with tear-stains, and the covers stir, pulled tighter into a cocoon. The bedroom lights get turned off. A minute later, the kitchen window is closed, a cigarette butt flicked out it just beforehand.
The closet by the bathroom has its door slid open, gently, and it stays that way for a long time, until a decision is made about what it will take to clean this up.
McSweeney's Writing Prompts
1. Write a scene showing a man and a woman arguing over the man's friendship with a former girlfriend. Do not mention the girlfriend, the man, the woman, or the argument.
