Prompt #46
A Smattering of Snippets
Hello, hello, hello, hellooooooo!!!!!
A few weeks ago…
…I posted a small handful of prompts that I’d lifted with gratitude from Rebecca Makkai’s substack.
Those prompts were very popular! In fact, they were so popular that I started to wonder if perhaps I am writing too much here each week… It seems that a lot of you can really run with just a snippet of an idea! (I know, I know, you all love me and love my prompts!)
Prompts are interesting that way—sometimes it takes just a word for your brain to suddenly light on fire. I used to get inspired by a book of very short stories on my shelf. Every time I read one of those stories, a story of my own would pop into my brain. So, I had to read that book only when I knew I’d have time to write. Didn’t want to waste any of its magic!
There was a time when I wrote in response to prompts every morning as a writing warmup. I found the prompts inside of a book called A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves. In the book, the author offers up a daily “inspiration” kind of prompt. You know the kind—just a word or two. A sentence. A snippet. I’d set myself in my chair, turn to the book, read the prompt and then WRITE non-stop for at least a page. Those prompts didn’t always lead to a story, per se, but they did always give me a page of writing that I otherwise wouldn’t have had. And a sense of accomplishment.
So, this week, I’m going to give you another small smattering (7, to be exact) of Rebecca’s snippets! (Thank you, Rebecca! All credit to you!) To see more of her amazing list—she will eventually post 731 of them—go HERE.
TODAY’S PROMPT
Okay, Monday People. Let’s see what you can do with these 7 snippets:
Your story needs more marshmallows.
A shoe is on fire. (If you noticed that this is the inspiration for the photo I chose for this week’s prompt, give yourself 50 points!)
That IS a banana in your pocket.
Dave has a new can crusher. Everyone at this party wants to figure out what it can crush besides cans.
This one dude brings his ukulele EVERYWHERE.
A brother and sister show up at your house claiming they grew up there in the '60s. You agree to let them look around. Big mistake.
Put a pinball machine in your story. Make it a noisy one.
ALTERNATE PROMPT:
And THIS prompt is from yours truly:
Write a story called “Rules for ______”
Here are some examples:
Rules for Living
Rules for Playing Basketball with My Dad
Rules for Leaving Your Husband
Rules for Pickleball with that Couple You Can’t Stand
Rules for Thanksgiving
That’s a lot of prompts. Hope you have fun with one or some of these! As always, post 400 words or less in the comments section… you know the drill by now.
A brother and sister show up at your house claiming they grew up there in the '60s. You agree to let them look around. Big mistake.
At first I thought I’ll hide in the kitchen and pretend not to be home. But my curiosity changed that plan. The pitch and timber of their voices on the porch, a woman and a man, clearly, and something out of sorts.
I cracked the door and she, pretty and rail thin, was inside before speaking a word, and heading for the stairs. When I turned to say something, he came in and said in a condescending way I’d painted the front hall one out of a million off-whites.
I’m not keen on this carpet, Ken. What was it when we were here?
Blue.
No it wasn’t, it was green.
Excuse me?
Oh sorry, this used to be our house.
Yeah we grew up here.
Oh really, I grew up here too.
Until….
We’ve both done well since then, moved up the ladder as they say, ha ha. Pretty far up.
Ken here lives in eighty five hundred square feet, actually. I’ve got over six, but in two different places.
Interesting.
It’s plainer than I remember.
And smaller.
When you’re small you remember things big.
Then you see them later and they’re small.
That’s where the theory of relativity comes from.
Ken is in real estate.
Well la de da, I said. This house has been in my family since the nineteen fifties.
That couldn’t be.
Right. We were here then. In the fifties.
Wait.
Yeah, wait a minute. Ken . . .
Silvie.
I’m Daniel, by the way, and you’re in my house.
There are times when the theory of relativity is useful.
Indeed, Daniel, said Silvie, looking between me, and her brother Ken, in such a way she looked to be shaking her head, no, no.
My thoughts exactly.
Susana had sad eyes and she drove slowly, always, taking long sucking drags on her skinny cigarettes and flicking the ashes out the open window.
Susana had sad eyes, whites dull and heavy as marshmallows, and she smoked such skinny cigarettes.
Sad-eyed Susana dreamed of marshmallows more often than she dreamed of anything else, even her late mother, but she ate no sugar, preferring to devote all her vice bandwidth to those long and skinny cigarettes.
Marsha was overweight for most of her childhood and she received so many unfortunate and predictable schoolyard names, but on that very first gas station stop of her first drive out of state, the actual moment of leaving home, she bought her first pack of smokes and gave the leering brown-toothed man behind the counter a fake number, and said her name was Susana. She didn’t realize she would keep both the name and the habit.
Susana had sad eyes, someone might say who had caught only the hound-dog languor of her beauty. She was not actually sad most of the time, just highly uncertain what to do with herself. Usually, when she felt the uncertainty hit its highest, vertiginous pitch, she would raid the shoe-box of emergency cash in the closet, and get a full carton of smokes from the bodega. That and one large bag of X-tra-Fluff marshmallows with the puffed-up lettering in blue, orange and green. Susana would go up on the roof and alternate pleasures until she felt ill, leaving a wide cupful of ash to be emptied, slowly, by the wind.
Susana didn’t expect the diagnosis, as nobody, not even hypochondriacs, really expect it when it comes, but the tall, large-handed doctor mistook her large, sad eyes for a kind of wise-beyond-her-years equanimity, and for the first time in his career he asked a patient out to dinner.
After crab legs and prosecco and spirited fucking, Susana reflected that this man, though a doctor, would not really be able to care for her, at least not in the ways she had expected, while he too partook of a long cigarette beside her. But, he was like her a Midwesterner, and they spoke of ambrosia salad studded with tiny, stiff marshmallows, and of their late mothers, and she reflected that she might just one day grow fat again, with him, and maybe even happy.