Skip to main content

Into the Valley

Image
By
This little story grew out of a Twitter conversation with Roger__Jackson (@jabe842) and Dee Lancaster (@dee_lancaster). Both folks are, by the way, brilliant contributors to my very favouritest micro-fiction word prompt game, Friday Phrases, now being run by the fabulous Lara Meone Savine @larameone. 

The Twitter convo, initially about commutes and commuting, veered (not very surprisingly) into a story prompt idea in the spirit of those offered by the excellent @storybandit. 

Create a 99-word story using the following words:
Cauliflower soup, golf, boot camp, the weather, reify. 

The inclusion of "reify" was in the spirit of the prompts from @storybandit, whose word choices often have me scurrying to the dictionary. It was my flippant inclusion of a 'difficult' word in addition to the eavesdropped ones. (It was a difficult word in the sense that I know what it means, kinda, but still usually have to visit the dictionary to double-check my meaning!)

My instinct was to run screaming in the opposite direction rather than trying to string that combination of words into something resembling a coherent story. But when @jabe842 said he was willing to have a go, well, then I decided I would also have to face that combo of words head on! I think this was around the time I regretted throwing in "reify"! :)

But I came up with something, and I got out again in one piece too! @jabe842's droll and superbly creepy offering is here.


Into the Valley

I stare at the valley and see only blank, thick fog - resembling congealed cauliflower soup. It's rotten weather, made more miserable by the sight of boot-camp fitness freaks lurching along in the distance. All horribly uninspiring. 

My companion sneers, jeers and mocks me; mocking my decision to come to the Mountains and write. 

I clench my fists, my fingers finding, folding around a branch. I throw the best golf swing of my life. My constant fears sail into the soupy abyss. Into nothingness. 

"That's the last time I reify my insecurities!" I smile. 

The ideas begin to flow. 



Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sun and the Moon

By
The following little story came to me while driving home one night on a dark road lit up in silver by a half-moon.  I suddenly had a fanciful little image of a car smilingly gobbling up a crescent-shaped sliver of moon-flake which helped its headlights shine brighter.  Such an image wouldn't normally find a home outside my head, but
7 comments
Read more

Making Mauritius-Style Banana Cakes (Gateaux Bananes)

By
I mis-managed my bananas. I got my timing all wrong and they were suddenly too ripe and too spotted and dotted to eat, and were sitting there looking at me with accusatory and reproachful looks. Banana cake was the obvious solution. But why go the way of regular banana cake, when there's the distant call of Mauritius-style gateaux bananes (you guessed it: banana cakes). 
4 comments
Read more

I saw a UFO

By
In September 2024, while I was on the west coast of Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, I saw an unidentified flying object (UFO). My LittleOne and I were on a rooftop balcony. We were staring idly above the tops of the trees to the west, where there was still the faintest leftover pineapple glow in the sky. Then, we shifted our gaze slightly to the same tops of the trees, but in the south-west, where the sky had already darkened to a soft, purpley-crimson.  There were three stars in the sky. One of the stars, just above the tree line was smudged. As though it had a faint mist around it. The other two stars, by contrast, were perfectly clear. In the above photo ( not taken on the UFO evening), if you look closely, you can see two stars. The third, smudged star was to the left of these two stars. I pointed out the smudgy star to LittleOne and wondered out loud 'why was it smudged?' There were no clouds in the sky. As we stared at it, we realised the smudgy star was actuall...
Post a Comment
Read more