Pinny's Prompts

[PinnyDragon]

001. New Beginnings
First person prose
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I could see the package sitting by the door to third floor my apartment as I pulled into my parking space, and, suddenly, my day at work started to melt away. I knew what was waiting for me, I had been obsessively updating the tracking information on my phone for two days, watching it travel all the way across the country from New York. I was so excited that I was half way up the walk before I remembered about my groceries sitting in the back seat.

When I finally got up to my door and had the box under my arm, I kept dropping my keys, and growled in frustration at my door because it just wouldn’t open by itself. I heard a polite cough and saw my next-door neighbor and his dog giving me a strange look from the top of the stairs. I gave small, embarrassed, smile, and finally got the door open and myself inside. The groceries ended up on the floor, the bananas probably bruised and the ice cream melting, but it didn’t matter. I had my first pair of pointe shoes and needed them- in my hands, on my feet, out of that box that was smothering them.

Two years- that’s how long I’d been waiting to get them. Two years of sweat, and blisters, and a stress facture in my second to last left toe. Of missing out on Tuesday night drinks with the girls and not being able to tolerate heels over two inches tall. But as I took the pink paper off the box, I knew it was worth it to see a childhood dream come true even at the age of twenty-five.

The lid was off, the paper out, and all I could see was shiny new pink satin. I didn’t remember taking off my socks and shoes, but I could feel the carpet as I wriggled my toes in anticipation. Oh so gently I took them out, pulled the plastic bag off, and slid them onto my feet. I turned one of my dining chairs around to use the back as barre, and turned out to first position. My arches pushed against the new stiffness, and my toes complained about the lack of give in the box. I knew I should wait for class tomorrow to be on a real studio floor and not the cheap carpet in my apartment, but I just had to try. Plie, and straight, plie, and straight, and up, breathe out and smile.  

[PinnyDragon]

002. Cause/Effect
Essay
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According to a variety of sources (Wikipedia, history books, psychology books, etc- to site a full list of sources would be longer than the writing itself, but just try typing it into google), there appears to be a correlation, a connection, between madness and artistry.

Histroically, you have (in no particular order): Van Gogh, Byron, the Shelleys, Vivian Leigh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Frank Sinatra. More recently there are the like of Emilie Autumn, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Adam Ant, Carrie Fisher, Kurt Cobain. And these two lists are not complete by any means.

Which is the cause and which is the effect? Does the madness cause the person to see the world in such a way that they have no choice but to express their unique position? Did the way their brains form cause them to create, to entertain? Or is it because they are so creative that they are mad? Did the visions in their heads literally drive them to the point of madness?  

[PinnyDragon]

003. Peace of Mind
Third person prose
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Her bedtime routine was always the same. She ate dinner while watching a recorded episode of Supernatural or Once Upon a Time or Battlestar Galactica if nothing else was on; then she took a shower (while wearing flip flops- she never did anything barefoot) and washed starting from the hair on her head and working her way down three times over; she dried herself off the same way. Then, she would dress in her pajamas that had been folded in the proper order (pants, on top of a sports bra, on top of a shirt, on top of her slippers). Afterward she would check that each door to the outside was deadbolted and that the alarm was on, even if she hadn’t gone anywhere that day, and make sure the oven and stove were off and that all the faucets weren’t dripping after getting a glass of water to put on her bedside table. She’d use the restroom one last time, then shut her bedroom door and lock it as well, then climb into bed and settle into the middle, and read seven pages of her book before turning the light off and curling on her side to go to sleep.

If she didn’t follow her routine, even if she only washed herself twice instead of three times, she wouldn’t be able to sleep, and would toss and turn, or have nightmares when she did manage to doze off. Even when she wasn’t in her house- which wasn’t often these days- she’d have her routine as close as she could get it, and even then she never got a good nights sleep. She had gone to her doctor to ask for sleeping pills to help her sleep through the night, and he’d suggested going to therapy for it, called her routine compulsive. She hadn’t been back to the doctor since.

So what if it was compulsive? It allowed her to have a good night’s rest, not hungry, clean, and safe from harm, with a couple of activities that took her mind off of work and everything else she had to do. Now, if she could only find a way to make sure that she was getting her daily allotment of exercise- maybe tomorrow she’d start counting her steps, or how many times she got up out of her chair at the office. That could be a start.  

[PinnyDragon]

004. Childhood Memories
Third person prose
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His mother stood unnoticed in his doorway with a plate of Velveeta cheese and crackers, his favorite snack, watching him as he sat in the middle of the floor surrounded by old pictures albums and shoeboxes full of pictures, taking them out and arranging them in the order of the dates in corners, or written on the backs. The old dog lay against his side, tail thumping against the floor in a slow, but happy rhythm.

“Anything, yet?” She finally asked, making him jump. But he smiled when he saw her, even though he shook his head.

“No…Mom,” the word, her name, seemed so hard for him to get out. “The soonest I remember is a week ago…just after the wreck…” He trailed off, looking back down at the pictures and absent-mindedly scratching the dog on his head.

“Well, I brought you a snack, in case you were hungry.” She handed the plate off to him and backed slowly out of the room, hoping he wouldn’t notice the moisture in her eyes. The doctor had warned her to give him space, to let him remember at his own pace, but it just seemed so unfair. He hadn’t even gone off to college yet, and he’d already, literally, forgotten his parents.

Her son watched her hasty retreat, and felt bad-he hadn’t meant to make her cry. He would never make his mother cry, or so he hoped. He turned back to the pictures, to the happy boy and awkward early teenager, the high school graduate, and wished he felt some sort of connection to them, that they made sense. He knew little things: which side of the road people drove on, that milk goes in the fridge, that the dog beside him liked to be scratched more behind his left ear than his right, but all the memories, what made him a person, were just…gone, and it frightened him. Would he ever know who he was again?  

[PinnyDragon]

006. Mayhem
First person prose
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The best I could tell you about that night was that there was fur, fur everywhere. But, when some idiot organizes a drug raid on a den of werewolves the night of a full moon, fur is probably the least of anyone’s worries.

From what has been pieced together in the week since, we’ve been able to figure out that a new officer had been put in charge of trailing us as a hazing ritual of sorts. Apparently when he brought our “suspicious activity” to the awareness of the chief, he was flat out ignored and decided to go over the chief’s head, and got a clearance for a full out raid.

Instead of drugs, they found fifteen half-changed werewolves, and, as far as we know, they found their maker as well. You’ll want to find a roster of their names, and make sure about that though, otherwise you’ll have a new, violent werewolf out in the general population come the next full moon.

But, that’s not all I’ve got to say to you in this letter, Mr. Governor, oh no.

You promised us that we were safe, that we had nothing to fear from law enforcement, or anyone else after we came to you with our problem and promised that we would not make our presence public. Instead, because there were officials that didn’t know, twenty humans and five wolves are dead, and our pack has lost its sense of safety.

Now, as the new pack Alpha, I need to know what you are going to do about it.  

[PinnyDragon]

Hooray, I made it through the first week! 51 more to go... biggrin

007. Gilding a Lily
Third person prose
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Seamus took another walk around his new masterpiece- the dancing, clockwork doll commissioned by the Queen, herself. It was wonderful, perfect, and done two days before the prince’s birthday gala, in which it was to debut with a special dance. He had managed to perfect a repertoire of twenty dance so far, which could be changed out on special scrolls (not unlike those in those tiny music boxes) through a discreet door in her back.

His apprentice had been up half the night polishing the silver and brass tutu, while Seamus has been up all night finished coiffing her copper-wire hair, but it was worth it to see the morning sun sending a dazzling spectrum of reflections across the room and the metal seemed to glow from behind the shine. Her limbs were jointed ceramic, and her face was modeled after the prince’s new fiancé, and her gold dancing slippers looked to be made out of a mirror and not hammered metal. He wanted to wind her up and watch her dance again, but one test dance was enough- he didn’t want to risk any damage in the crowded workshop.

He reached out and touched the doll’s face, but his sigh of pleasure turned into one of uncertainty. Was this creation truly fit for the royal family? Sure there was plenty of work, and she was polished and bright, but shouldn’t there be…something more? He frowned, stepping back and reappraising what just a moment ago he considered a “masterpiece.” No, there was one last thing he could do, one last thing…

The apprentice found his tempestuous master asleep on the floor of his workshop later that morning, paintbrush in hand. Upon closer inspection he saw that doll’s left arm had delicate scrollwork painted with pearled paint that was all but invisible unless viewed in the right light. It appeared that Master Seamus had fallen asleep when he sat down on the floor to start the left leg. The apprentice gave an exasperated sigh and slipped the paintbrush from his master’s hand before putting a blanket over the man. He picked up the jar of paint and began to copy the scrollwork in a mirror image on her right arm, and hoped that this would be the end of all the “perfecting” his master was always so wont to do.  

[PinnyDragon]

008. First Romance
Third person prose
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Amy looked at her husband, dead asleep on the couch, and smiled to herself. Their love was old- they’d been high school sweethearts, together for ten years before getting married, and now they were celebrating their youngest’s wedding in three days. She had never loved anyone else. Oh sure, she’d looked, and even after one fight they had in college, went on a date with someone else, but never, ever loved anyone else. He was her first, he was her always.

It had never been the sweet, teenage, honeymoon kind of love. They’d met in freshman English, and felt a connection right off the bat, but it wasn’t until a month later, when he walked two miles after school to bring her her assignments when she was sick, that she acknowledged that she never wanted to be without him in her life, in some way. And that’s how it always was with them- support, giving, and never having to ask for that support.

Her mother had told her to dump him after graduation, that it wouldn’t last through college, probably not even the first semester. But they’d proved her wrong. Now, the only thing she feared was they day one of them would lose the other, for they had never been without each other.  

[PinnyDragon]

Note: Please see the post before this for the reason it is not in the correct numerical position.

005. Speed
Third person prose
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Esther could never get home from school fast enough. It wasn’t like she wanted to get a head start on her homework, or start dinner, or do anything productive, really. But she just wanted to leave her day at County High behind.

After her first ticket she was always much more careful about staying close to the speed limit, and always stopped at the stop signs, but it always felt like it added hours to her trip. Still, it was better than when she had to bike or walk before she had her license.

The reasons behind her haste were many- the girls that mocked her for not being girly enough, the boys that couldn’t seem to see past her chest, the jocks that dismissed her for being in the arts, and the theatre and band students for dismissing her constant sketching for pretension.

So, as she pressed on the gas pedal, her tension and unhappiness seemed to be pressed into the ground with it. By the time she got home, she could say her day was fine, that she ate lunch with real friends and not in the art room anymore. But she still never got home fast enough.