Writing is not exactly like playing professional football, but sometimes it feels like it.

Stretching and warming up.
The tackles and the ice-baths and the bruises.
The snail's pace forward.
That.bossy guy in stripes on the sideline demonstrating –– incorrectly, as it turns out –– how to perform the hokey-pokey.  

But fer reals, like any would-be linebacker, a writer has to practice and run drills. Here's my own little practice session. Omaha! Omaha Seventy-Eight! Set! Hut! 

Story 1
He woke to the familiar cathedral space of the pavilion. He smelled frost in the air and made a careful effort to roll in place on the cardboard, not wanting to let cold air into his sleeping bag. 
     If he waited maybe half an hour, there would be bitter coffee to warm his hands and burn his mouth. But if he waited too long, someone would hustle him along and there would be no coffee at all. Perhaps it was time already. He braced himself and then slid himself from of the cocoon of warmth, keeping his sock feet on the Ollie-Ollie-Oxenfree safety of his little bivouac. He stretched, feeling the crackle of his joints and an unpleasant stretching of his skin.
     He was not old –– no one would call him old –– but life on the road had weathered him. Only a few silver threads showed in matted hair, but chalky patches of callus punctuated his corners, showing like mushrooms at his elbows and knees. 

Story 2
In semiphore, the universe was telling him to cash in his bonds, sell his Persian rugs, set the birds free, and dispense with personal hygiene.
     Things were happening. An electric crackle at the edge of his hearing and the way the flags snapped in syncopation? It was all coming clear. They were directives, acronyms spelled out in flags, commands that he could not ignore. 
     He'd been waiting, he realized now, for his whole life for this. He found himself holding his breath, counting steps, feverishly translating phrases into Latin and then Spanish and then back into English. The sense of impending moment, like a cresting wave arrested briefly by the shutter of a camera, arched above him. The heavy perfume of orange blossom intoxicated him with sweetness.
     He woke to the familiar cathedral space of the pavilion. He smelled frost in the air and made a careful effort to roll in place on the cardboard, not wanting to let cold air into his sleeping bag.

  

So. Much. Happening in this photo.

All to the good: Let it be fodder for the imagination.

Story1
Absenthe, she tended to remind herself, does not make the heart grow fonder.

Her thoughts slid, like the needle finding its vinyl groove, to her long-ago college adventures, already three generations too late to know about the real Absenthe. A young dreamer 80 after the green fairy flitted through fin-de-ciecle Paris. In French, la fée verte, the fairy who inspired and drove artists mad. But maybe that was just the wormwood talking.  

She knew the flavor –– anise, of course, always licorice –– and she knew how the emerald-green liquor clouded into the color of a mint milkshake when mixed with water.  

"Give a chap a drink," they used to call across open space to one another, college kids with a yearning for Hemingway's sort of possibilities.

"Isn't it pretty to think so," was the correct response. A bit of self-conscious whimsy. A pose. Ersatz nostalgia with a wink.   

They usually ended up with beer. It was cheaper and plentiful, and it was only much later that anyone laid hands on the heavy glass bottle that held a genuine green fairy.

But they were just college kids afternoon-drinking then, hoisting glass mugs of yellow beer, waxing gently ironic about their dreams.

She shook her head as she trudged along, and then caught the eye of a young person –– boy? girl? not that it mattered, a slim figure dressed entirely in black who probably thought she was a crazy old bat. Far ridere il polli.

She felt her shoulders rise in an exaggerated shrug and quickly added a neck roll to make herself look less ridiculous.  Wormwood, she had been thinking, artemisia absenthium, a medicinal bitter herb.

Stopping to catch her breath and shift the shopping bag from left to right, she considered the plant. Silvery leaves dried like sage, with the scent –– what else? –– mildly licorice-scented.  If she remembered her Culpeper's Complete Herbal (circa 1653), and she did, "This herb is good for something, for God made nothing in vain."  

She expelled the irony in one sharp exhale: "Or anyway, Isn't it pretty to think so?"

"Years ago," wheezed the oldster, arthritic knuckles whitening on the handle of the deluxe walker. "Years ago, artists had to use rubylith to separate each color for a color print."

Honking into a worn handkerchief, the dusty wheezer raised watery eyes and continued. "Hours I spent over a drafting table, X-Acto blade in hand, separating colors. The eye-hand coordination alone --!"

After a long pause, the lecture continued. "It took years to learn the tricks of the trade. Nowadays, all it takes is a ninety-nine cent app. Putting artists out of business. I don't know how they make a living any more."

Yeah, artists mostly don't make a living.

In honor of all of us antiquities who remember cutting ruby to separate colors, here's a timelapse video of the Rubylith process...

But those 99-cent apps are really fun:

In this highly digitized age, it's nigh on impossible to grasp the amount of work that went into, for instance, the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. This link describes the Technicolor process.

Such an effort to give the viewing public ruby slippers!

He probably needed to warm up before tortoising. Today's writing prompt comes all the way from the Galápagos.

Pranayama

He tried to still his thoughts.

Circular breathing.  He counted in with the breath: one-belly, two-ribs, three-shoulders. He attempted to send his breath into the interstitial area, wherever that was––!  And then out again: shoulders-one, ribs-two, three-belly. And pause.

He was happy to pause. He could out-pause anyone. Not that it was a competition.

The instructor went on, and he decided to keep pausing. He'd hold still, he figured, and then nip back in next time.

Like Arlo Guthrie, he'd just wait for the chorus to come around again. Circular breathing was frustrating and difficult, but the practice was only forty minutes out of a day.

Ah, there it was: Inhale. He did, trying to make the breath open first his belly, then ribs, and finally, shoulders. Or what would be shoulders, had he any. Ribs? His ribs were fused into carapace, and everyone knew a carapace didn't –– shouldn't!–– flex. And what chance did his belly have against the dusty plastron? He lived inside a shell corset, and he might just as soon ask his breath to give him wings.

He recognized the monkey-brain resistance and focused on the air moving through his sinuses. He sipped the air in and ahhed the breath out. His eyes closed. In. Out. In.

The class finished and the day turned into night before he opened his bleary eyes again. The night was absolute, fog blotting out the yellow streetlights and the stars alike. Damn, he thought. How long was I out? I wonder what year it is.

​       I was in charge this year, and I knew what sorts of things I wanted for us on Christmas morning. Since kindergarten, I’d wanted a decorated tree in the house with presents under it. I wanted good things for my sister and me to eat –– no greasy goose, no stringy turnips, no heavy spoon-bread.

​      And I wanted “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and “Jingle Bell Rock” –– the silliest of the Christmas songs –– playing on the radio, loud.

       So as my sister was forever advising, I made a plan. When the two of us got up late and ate cookies for breakfast with the radio playing popular carols full blast, my sister would open first the small, heavy package of batteries, then the leather-bound old book I found for her at a rummage sale and finally she’d tear the wrapping off the big, rattling box of Operation by Milton Bradley. I’d taken the trip to the Sears store in Watertown with one of my baby-sitting families, so I was sure she’d be completely surprised.

       After presents, we’d eat more cookies and play Operation until we were ready to eat the cold sliced ham and mashed sweet-potatoes and pumpkin pie I’d made for dinner.

       I was happy that night. On Christmas eve, with the wind whispering around the corner of the house, I did not feel lonesome. I made Christmas cookies and refilled the tea-kettle. I brought in extra loads of firewood to save having to go outside the next morning. I snipped paper snowflakes to hang in all the windows and considered the many advantages of my sister’s and my solo state. When Viv came home, I was happier yet. She kept her pea-coat buttoned when she came in and she dashed upstairs with her hands in her pockets, clutching something lumpy under her coat. From upstairs, she shouted, “Will you start me a pot of tea? Peppermint?”

       I made the tea slowly, with a lot of extra scrapings and clankings so that if Viv were making any noise, she’d know I wouldn’t be able to hear her. When she came downstairs, she dunked cookies into her tea and admired the tree and the decorations.

       I think it snowed a little overnight that Christmas. Or anyway, it felt like it had snowed for that first Christmas: a light, beautiful blanket of white covering everything outside the windows. Perhaps I’m making the memory prettier than it was, but I remember the field being as picturesque as a Grandma Moses scene.

        On Christmas morning we slept in a little and when we made our way downstairs, we each had gifts tucked under our arms. My sister –– contrary to every Paris-edition-Vogue-influenced particle of taste –– produced an extravagantly wrapped package of pastel day-of-the-week underpants for me. In the autumn, when I told her about how all the girls in my gym-class had day-of-the-week panties, she said it was the tackiest thing she had ever heard. Her scorn hadn’t really changed my wanting them, but I hadn’t mentioned it again.

       Still, sometime between then and Christmas, she’d made the trip to Woolworth’s in the face of her own sense of fashion. She also got me a sleek and expensive Koh-I-Noor technical pen, which I knew for a fact I had never mentioned aloud. She must have noticed me silently fingering it at the art-supply store in Watertown and gone back for advice, because the pen came with two bottles of ink and a tin of horrible-smelling cleaning solution.

       ​Viv and I stayed in our pajamas all morning with the woodstove pouring off heat, drinking cup after cup of hot chocolate and eating cookies. We sang along with the radio, making up a silly dance for the various versions of “The Little Drummer Boy” that kept playing.

       ​Viv was unbeatable at Operation, as anyone could have predicted; she took out and replaced the breadbasket piece four times in a row before Sam’s red nose lit up.
​
       Later, when Viv had curled up on the couch and stuck her nose into the dusty old book, I filled the ink reservoir of the technical pen and then applied its unforgiving pinpoint nib to paper. I sketched my sister with her hair messy and her sock-feet drawn up to her butt on the saggy old couch, I sketched the fat little Christmas tree beside her, each needle of the pine tree a tiny, single, scratch of ink.

The oddest images prompt stories.  

My writing friend Kate Raynes has the knack for locating just the right picture to springboard her fiction into the stratosphere. Or maybe it's the knack for writing unsettling stories related to those offbeat images. Go read some of her stories (don't overdose!) and tell me –– chicken or egg? 

I like a photo for warming up or for simple fun. Today the personal-care products seemed to be staging a drama just for me.

Story 1 –– Charged
They were both ambushed by the amorous impulse. It hit them as if their batteries had been given a big zap of power. It was maybe too much juice. They both suspected as much, but what kind of fool turns a back on the chance at big love? 

When they could reach one another, they necked like kids. Their kisses were all the sweeter for the hard job they worked, because who knew when they'd be spent? All their vim washed down the drain. It would be over too soon any way they looked at it, but they would make the most of their time.


Story 2 –– Like Lizards
The electric toothbrushes were at it again, she thought, must be the season. Pairs of lizards would be intertwined on the back patio, and snarls of snakes could be expected under the old apple-tree. The sukebind would be blooming, and the good lord alone knew what would happen after that. 


Story 3 –– Evidence
It wasn't healthful, but she seemed to be unable to stop herself from using the key she'd gotten from him those months ago. She turned the well-oiled bolt, opened the door, and there she would be again, walking through his apartment. It happened more often than she liked to admit to herself. 

It didn't make her feel good. His refrigerator always looked lonesome to her: not enough ingredients for a meal, leftover take-out cartons forming an archeological record of past dinners. The apartment seemed to lack something domestic. He wasn't a dirty housekeeper. He never left laundry piled up; he was as neat as a cat with his clothes. But still. 

Not as if they had lived there together, she sometimes reminded herself. She'd spent a few nights in a row from time to time, especially when they had been working on the Chapparel project, but she'd never gotten, for instance, her own drawer.

The top drawer of his dresser, she noted dully, was still harboring an innocent tumble of silky underthings from his new girlfriend. Or not, she thought with a moment of clarifying spite. Maybe it was him dressing up.

She used a pencil to lift a pair of lacy somethings out of the drawer. No such luck. They'd never fit him.

She had to stop doing this. Imagine getting caught. Caught looking at someone else's underpants. Even knowing he was out of town for at least the week, she felt shame wash over her.  She never took anything, never stole a single hair from his comb for a love-spell, or sniffed the dent in his pillow case for the hint of his unforgotten scent. Or for hers. 

​ 

Story 2 
Blank faces staring skyward.
Reflections skim the glass.
Full-grown dolls and no one loves them.


Story 3
Ad Astra per Aster, that's what she thought of that particular model. Not Atticus Finch's "from the mud to the stars" and not Kansas' "through difficulty to the stars," but "to the stars, by Aster." 

The spun silver hairdo was as glamorous as a movie star's, she thought, and the way those silvery eyes were always gazing into the distant heights ––! It was her favorite of the mannequin heads and her favorite wig. She could stand by the plate glass window all morning just enjoying the vision.

But someone was always coming by and telling her to leave. "Move it along, chubs!" the policeman told her. As if she was hurting anything. As if she didn't have feelings. She wasn't just a thing, after all. She was human, even if she didn't look like those dainty creatures with their perfect hair.

​

Writing teacher Terra Pressler used to assign the task of finding visual miracles. The idea being that stuff is happening all around, if only we'd pay attention.

This one was perched in the tree above the house the other afternoon, hoo-hoo-hooing until the sun set.

Story 1: Low Owl
How? How? How had he managed to be shunned by every member of that most reclusive and singular of all the avian clans who fly by night? 
       Oh, he'd tried to fit in, he'd tried the best he knew how, but to no avail. He shook his head in dismay and preened his feathers. How hard he had tried.  
       And in a nutshell, there it was: the heartbreak of dyslexia. 


Story 2: Learning to Fly
Kurt Vonnegut: "We have to be continually jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
       Humans always had to be doing that, she thought. Always laying claim to stuff they weren't able to handle. Witness land ownership. Witness the use of pesticides and artificial sweeteners which seeped into the water and flavored plants and insects. She'd taken a juicy rodent just the other evening and detected the flat metallic ping of fluoxetine even in its innocent duadenum.
       It was depressing, frankly. 
       Sure, they traveled through the air, noisily as only humans could make a process. But growing their own wings? As if.
        Like any bird, she'd thought about what it would be to trade alulars and primaries for additional phalanges –– with one in opposition. She'd be able to thread an needle or practice calligraphy, but feathers? Feathers win hands down.
      Ask Icarus which he'd choose –– the paternal hands that wrought the wings or the fierce effortful moments near the Aegean sun before the pinions melted and fluttered into the sea. 



Story 3: Exodus 33:20
Marquis was more of a doer, really, than a thinker. Even in a family that twitched and hustled from dawn to dusk, he was the kind of youngster who tended to nap through sermons. 
        He remembered the words from the sermon, however, even at the moment that they proved themselves. He had a moment to reflect, as he was carried unnaturally up and across the evening sky, that indeed –– no one could look upon that face and live.

Storytelling nearly always involves filling in a blank:  Who dunnit? Where did the pirates bury the gold? What did that boy learn? Why did the chicken cross the road? Where did those people come from?

#1
"Halt," the sentry called out. "Who goes there?"
Ground-mist was creeping up from the valley, slow and full of moisture. His canvas gaiters were already soaked.  The sentry adjusted his grip on the worn wooden butt of his carbine, and angled his head toward the darkness.
He'd heard something, he could have sworn he had; even with ears that still rang from percussion after these past weeks' of constant skirmishes, he'd heard movement in the laurel-slick.



#2
Using a delicate stalk of beggar's wheat, she pointed at a hash-mark on the map. "Who goes there? You can't mean to leave that pass unguarded, surely." 
       The other two exchanged a glance. The larger of the two men scuffed the toe of his boot in the dust along the southern edge of the make-shift map.
       "Tell me." 
       The larger man, his voice reluctant, had just begun, "Lady––"  when his companion snapped, "You aren't going to like it. Zhat-zhat and that lot from her village have a plan."
      "But they are children! If it comes to battle ––"
      "Lady, they are no younger than you." Both men looked at her. The one with pity, the other unreadable but impatient.
      The large man cleared his throat before saying, "It will come to battle, and we all must fight. Zhat-Zhat has a good plan." He coughed and added. "It might even work." 



#3
"Who goes there?" Myra said, not listening for the answer. "I mean what kind of person, seeing this––" she waved a curled hand wildly, indicating not just the motorized carbon-fiber chair, but her own foreshortened physique. "Just says whatever bullshit question pops into her head? My lovelife?  Are you kidding me?"

I took this photo in Rome. I don't actually remember why I took it or what I was hoping to memorialize. Nor why I manipulated the color to make it pop like a 1970's postcard. 

But while flicking through the many images from that trip, this one struck me as asking for an explanation. A line of dialogue. Something.

So you tell me. Jot down your story, dialogue, caption, in the comments area below. 

Winning entrant to be determined not quite at random, as this is a contest. But he, she, or they has a darned good chance to win a plasticky prize of uncertain provenance and dubious value.

​Or maybe a pie. 

​Good luck!