The alien larvae were in efflorescence across the wide basin, but all we could see during that first visit was the beauty of what appeared to be millions of bluebells.
2. an example or result of growth and development.
3. Pathology – a rash or eruption of the skin.
A 10 Minute free write from this week’s timed writing sessions. I really enjoyed this piece because it came to a place of rest, rather then leaving me and any potential readers hanging at the end, I feel like we get a sense of conclusion. Also, unexpected second person POV.
Just keep your hands moving. Don’t think too much about what it is that you’re moving, touching, absorbing through your skin, just keep it moving left to right. The smell is something you’ll also need to ignore. It’s omnipresent and surrounds you like a noxious mist, clings to your hair and will haunt you days after you’ve finished this job, but it’s best not to think about that right now. You’ll take a skin scalding shower latter, once you’ve safely made it back home. You’ll scrub every inch of your body with that pungent orange industrial hand soap, the kind mechanics use on tough grease. And you’ll clip your finger nails back behind the quick, not noticing the sting or blood when you clip too far, because they’re both better than leaving even a miniscule particle of this atrocious job lingering on your hands.
Left to right, you keep it moving, sliding it along, and you’d love to have more light so that you’d feel like you could actually see what you’re doing, but the risk would be too great that more light would mean more chances of someone else spotting what you’re up to back behind the closed down Home Depot. So in the near perfect darkness of an abandoned suburban shopping center, with the fumes suffocating you as you rush to complete the nights work, hand over hand, left to right, you feed the wood chipper. Trying only to remember; just keep your hands moving.
One last blast from the past with the Husbando prompts from 2011.
Prompt: Using between fifty and one hundred words, write a murder mystery and reveal the killer.
The poor dead bunny had been lying in the backyard for several days before I found its body. I’d almost run it over with my brand new lawn mower. I’m not sure how it got there, but I had several suspicions. The neighbor’s big husky dog had left us “trophies” before, and there were foxes who roamed the neighborhood at night. I’d hate to think it might’ve been a person. Kneeling closer however, the cat prints in the mud underneath the grass quickly revealed the killer; Muffin, my wife’s perfect Persian princess. (94 words)
The prompts my Husbando used to cheer me up several years back were much longer than the kind I typically use myself, and often from genres I wouldn’t normally explore on my own. This prompt from Mid-December 2011 was both unusually long and way outside my typical comfort zone.
(The original prompt for the story is in italics.)
There are dark places in this world. Darker places than people want to imagine. Citizens of Bottleton want to imagine their lives as happy and normal, they want to work, sleep in their homes, and not think about the Glass Slipper murders of the last year, and to try to forget the Charming Gangs that have sprung up over the last three months.
The dark places hide in our cities, in our boroughs, and within come peoples souls. Hiding in plain sight at some points, and then flashing into the public eye at others. Nothing over the last year could have prepared the people of Bottleton for what was coming next.
Use the prior paragraphs to begin the first chapter of a book. When you are finished (and only then) come up with the title of your book.
It was wrong for so much sunshine to be pouring from the sky on the day you knew you’d die.
I watched white marshmallow clouds float in a vast wash of brilliant blue and I cried over the crumpled letter clenched in my fist. It said what all the letters in Bottleton had said last summer when a killer had swept through town and ended the lives of eight other girls.
“Beware that love is in the air. My princess sleeps for me; for an eternity.”
The letter and the tiny hand crafted glass slipper had been perched on my bedroom windowsill sometime in the night, and the glass panes of my window had been bathed in the blood of the mangled blue bird left decapitated on the ground below.
I’d called Sheriff Meeker personally the moment I awoke to the grotesque display and soon an army of police and crime scene techs would arrived to gather the letter, the glass slipper, and the dead bird in order to test for evidence. They’d grill me for hours over where I’d been and who I’d seen, but I knew it was all useless. They’d find nothing just like last summer. I was suddenly certain that they couldn’t protect me.
So staring out the ruby tinted window at the startlingly beautiful summer day I realized how awful it was going to be to die after such a bright new morning.
Not Safe For Words 