Misguided Story Prompt (and story model)
Read this wonderful little micro. The Age of Dinosaurs by Leonora Desar
The existential quality of this piece carries me somewhere new every time I read it.
Leonora Desar’s work is funny, sad, and wonderfully subversive. She accomplishes such magic in a tiny space with finely wrought, emotionally interesting sensory details such as “He smelled like my grandpa—like vitamins and split pea soup” and with odd, memorable physical observations (that often have no bearing on what is conventionally “true”). I consider this story to be a surreal microfiction gem. In many ways, this story reminds me of Aimee Bender’s wonderful “The Rememberer”.
There is a fascinating, childlike quality to the narrator in this story, as if she is half-willingly out-of-control of what she is doing. It may be a dream she is describing, but it hardly matters. The way her lover ages makes intuitive sense. In the end, he disappears. Notice how purposefully any sense of conventionality and morality is joyfully missing from the story.
Everytime I read a Leonora Desar story, I think “how in the world did she make me care about this character in under 200 words?”
Prompt: write your own 150-word (or less) “misguided story” in the first person POV in which a flawed narrator does something that involves breaking many rules. Paid subscribers feel free to post your stories in the comments section. I can’t wait to read them!
Optional prompt words: velvety, shout, constellation, naked, pretence, finger bones, night, binoculars, eggplant, cigarette, coax, silky
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul
Cousin Paul asked for a loan and I coaxed my husband to agree. Naked in our bed, binoculars at his eyes, he’d been watching the constellation in the window fall from the night, and I was thinking about the cousin’s silky gratitude, how his finger bones around our cash would look sincere. He staged a pretense of panic two weeks later, and I bailed him out again. This time I didn’t tell Peter. I didn’t want unpleasantness when we met at family funerals. Paul’s need for green intensified. I sold things for him, slowly squeezing the house dry. Once he had my engagement ring in his sights, I realized my husband had been wrong to trust me. I divorced him rather than admit I’d pawned the ring. And today I find out my cousin Paul was adopted, that we have no common blood. He’ll never pay me back a cent.
Transactions
First, it was pens, slipped into our pockets, slick as eels. Then we took hats, walked off with them right on our heads. Cars were more difficult, but not as hard as buses, which none of us knew how to drive. Gloria took her ex-husband’s new house, but there was that new wife to deal with. We ate the steaks Carrie had stuffed under her coat at the grocery store and waited for dark. Then we made a circle around the new wife. We placed fingers under her body, closed our eyes and willed her to levitate, but she woke up and called the cops. The others got away, but I fell and found myself handcuffed to a cot in the emergency room, cop by my side. Things were looking bad, so I stole that cop’s heart, pulled a pen from my pocket, and he signed me on out.