Tag Archives: Prompt

A Writing Prompt for Point of View

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In a recent Oro Valley Writers’ Forum meeting, we were given a prompt to write for five minutes from the point of view of an object. Prompts are always fun challenges for me, so I put pencil to paper and began. This is my short short story from the POV of an object.

I’m always the last to know what was for dinner. I get the detritus of the meal. I can only surmise how good it tasted or sometimes I am really happy I missed it all altogether. Those goopey gravy-laden things are not my favorites. Hard to choke down. On the other hand, I really don’t appreciate the crusty stuff that I have to scrub, or else I hear Madame complain that she will have to replace me. I do my best. I welcome the well-rinsed pot and plate.

Then there are the glasses – don’t get me started. Young master drinks milk, then lets the glass sit without rinsing, and a hard ring forms at the bottom. How am I supposed to get that out?? I don’t have fingers, you know – nothing that can reach in and rub the ring away. Again, I get grief for my performance because the glass doesn’t sparkle in the sunshine. Oh my, it is a hard life.

I overheard one of Madame’s friends talk about how she has never used her appliance for washing dishes. Her husband has somewhat of a drinking problem, but she enjoys a tipple now and again. Her appliance holds all the liquor in her house, so her husband won’t find it. He would NEVER think of opening the dishwasher.

As it happened, the last thing I did before leaving the house that morning was to turn on our dishwasher. It was the first thing I thought of when given this prompt. Try it yourself. Write a short essay or poem from the point of view of an inanimate object and see what happens.

A Dilly of a Dilemma

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I love to write to prompts. Quick stories, handwritten in a limited amount of time, jump-start the right side of my brain. The windows to my imagination are flung open and words fly freely onto the page. They are untethered to logic, only conforming to the guidelines of the prompt. Often, I am taken by surprise at the words that leave my pencil and show up on the page. Most of the time, they are zany musings, sometimes the beginning of a story to develop later, and sometimes a dark force compels a tragedy. Occasionally, nonsense dribbles out, and I find it hard to follow the labyrinth of thoughts. I am always in awe of the process and its revelations. The following story popped up when given ten minutes to write a scene from three different points of view.

The Scene: A female hitchhiker is dropped off at an emergency room with a problem. Tell the scene from the POV of the nurse, the patient, and a hospital administrator.

Nurse POV:

A young miss came into the ER early this morning with a problem. One I haven’t seen in my twenty-four years of nursing. She had been hitchhiking along Highway I-10 from Mobile on her way to Jacksonville, Florida. Her thumb was the size and color of a pickle, not dill, more like a large sweet. She didn’t appear to be in pain, and the rest of her hand looked quite normal and pink, but she complained that since the weather had turned cold, it had been impossible to put on her gloves. I took her vitals, then sent for Dr. Shambala, who was on call. He came in and examined the majestic, inflated digit with no discernible dismay.

His only question to her was, “Is it easy to get rides with that thing?”

To which she replied, “Actually, it comes in handy.”

“Well then, no surgery,” he said. “I think the answer is to buy larger stretchy gloves. I wouldn’t want to inhibit your travels or your gardening.”

I discreetly took a photo of her thumb. I wanted to show it to Hiram, our hospital admin. We had a meeting just last week about the anomalies of the human body and how to address those issues.

Patient POV:

My thumb had been bothering me for several days. Snow and sleet had become an everyday occurrence, even though I had consciously chosen a southern route for my winter journeys. My gloves just didn’t fit anymore. My thumb was getting larger and was really, really cold. I hitched a ride on a pig wagon to the nearest ER. It was a twenty-mile ride, but the farmer was swell. He asked me about my thumb, and I told him it was the reason I needed to see a doctor.

“Going to have it cut off?” he asked.

“Heavens no,” I replied, “just wonder if it could be made a little smaller for my gloves.”

In the emergency room, the doctor asked the obvious question. “How did it happen?”

It’s not the first time that question has come up. I get tired of the same old answer, “I was born this way”, so I told him I was picking crops in Mexico and got a cut, and the juice from the pickles I was picking dripped in, and lo and behold, I woke up with a pickle-sized green thumb.

The nurse at the ER looked a little disconcerted, but kept her cool, and the doctor suggested I get larger gloves for my travels.

“We wouldn’t want to impede your traveling abilities. It clearly is a significant benefit to your lifestyle.

As I was leaving, a sour-looking gentleman, round as a wine keg, came up and asked that I go with him to his office. I did, thinking he might have a suggestion for my thumb. I found out he was a pervert with a title and a fancy office. He wanted to suck my pickle. I left without “goodbye.”

Hospital Administrator POV:

Nurse Nancy came to my office this morning with a photo she took of one of our ER patients. That’s strictly forbidden, but when I saw the photo, I understood her motivation. The girl had a thumb the size of a juicy green pickle. I had given a mini-seminar to the staff about physical anomalies and injuries they could encounter in a rural hospital; everything from nails in the head or hand, to animal parts embedded in human parts – enough said. The thumb picture triggered something in me, and I had to go down to see it in person. The young lady was just leaving the ER.  I asked her to come up to my office for a chat. She obliged, but when the door closed, a powerful urge overcame me. I just had to taste that thumb. I had been a thumb sucker up to the age of fifteen when the shame heaped upon me by my peers finally inhibited the craving, and I quit cold turkey. The girl was offended by my request to suck her thumb and left in a huff. I wished her well on her journey and hope she has a dilly of a life.

AI generated picture

My Fling with Fabio

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Prompts are a favored way of getting my mind engaged, setting aside whatever “project” I’m working on which may or may not be stalled, and opening myself up to a challenge. I am always surprised by what I write when I sit down to approach a random topic that is presented. This short short story was a prompt from our writers’ group. Sally authored the prompt. I chose to write it as a letter to a former lover. It was silly and fun.

  • The title is “Fling with Fabio”
  • In this story, you must use the words:
  • Churlish
  • Gallantry
  • Lame
  • Senescent
  • $5.00 (or use a five in another creative way)
  • and a quote of your choice from Romeo, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1

Dearest Fabio,

This is the hardest letter I’ve ever written. I know that sounds like a lame cliché. Still, the truth is that most of our relationship has been cliché — from the beauty, the passion, and those glorious mornings sitting on the deck of your condo on San Diego Bay drinking our $5 lattes and watching the sun peek its head above the horizon, sending shivering shards of light across the gentle waves of the Pacific.

You were, are, and will always be my gallant lover, but your senescence has become a problem. I don’t wish to sound churlish, but when you cuddled me and called me Shirley, I knew we were done.  

I would like your remembrance of me (which will be irrevocably short due to your lapses) to remain of our good times, our joy, our gayety, our desire.  As Romeo said,

“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs; being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes; being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears.” Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1.

Forever yours,

Julie

I especially love my reference to the sunrise above the horizon in the West on San Diego Bay, where the sun decidedly sets every day. It was an intentional faux pas that added to the silliness.

Don’t Judge a Book by It’s Cover

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This was written from a prompt for the critique group I’m in. The prompt was to rewrite something from a favorite children’s story, add to the story or change it in some way. At the same time I was considering the prompt, Hurricane Helene struck the East Coast. The two ideas came together as I wrote.

Don’t Judge a Book by It’s Cover.

Alice was snuggled close, her head on my chest. Her hand on my cheek.

“I can’t sleep Grammy,” mumbled the toddler who had been fast asleep for four hours. Slivers of lights from passing cars and trucks flashed through a wedge in heavy curtains at the window of our motel room. The roar of trucks on the highway, a sound that made the room quiver, woke her.  I was amazed she slept as long as she had.  We were on the way to my home in Georgia and stopped for the night to get respite from the very stressful day. Hurricane Gianni had torn through the Florida town where Alice, her Dad, and Mom lived. I had been staying with them for a long weekend. The storm tracker indicated that Gianni was due to hit only the edge of land about one hundred miles south of their town. Suddenly it took a swing northward and inland, a giant locomotive ripping through San Colima. Tyler, my son, and his family live on the edge of town and were not in the direct path but the debris from the leveled town flew into their neighborhood. A grand piano crashed through the roof and landed in the middle of Alice’s bedroom. Fortunately, we were all in the underground hurricane shelter at the high school. We returned to their house to find the devastation. Luckily only two rooms had been seriously affected, Alice’s and the guestroom where I stayed. Wind and water had done more damage through the open roof, but the house was mostly intact.

“Take Alice and go back to your house Mom, Tyler said. “We’ll stay and help our neighbors then come up to get her when things are sorted out.” We hastily put things in a bag for Alice and I packed up a garbage bag with soggy clothes from my battered suitcase.

There was no electricity or water when we left to drive the three hundred miles to my home in Georgia. After a couple of hours on the road, the trauma of the day caught up with me and I needed to rest and regroup. I stopped at several motels along the highway but they were all full of people fleeing inland from the hurricane. The old Flamingo was the only motel with a room available. It had seen better days but at least it was a refuge for the night.

“This room is at the end of the building close to the road,” the clerk said. “It can get a bit noisy when trucks drive by.”

Beggars can’t be choosers. I was in no shape to continue driving and Alice was cranky even though she had dozed off and on as we traveled toward Georgia. “I’ll take it. I’ll only be here a few hours, then back on the road again.”

It was about 4 am, I had rested but only snoozed a bit as I held Alice close. She began to squirm and whimper. “Grammy, I’m hungry.”

“OK Lambkins, we’ll get back on the road as soon as it’s light and find a place for breakfast. I have an apple and graham crackers for you now. Come snuggle and have a snack until then.”

“Read me a story,” she said.

“What story do you want?”  I knew perfectly well which one she would ask for. We had hurriedly tossed some of her favorite books in her bag along with a couple of stuffed animals and what dry clothes we found under the smashed dresser in her room.

“Alice in Wonderland,” she said. It was the book I read to her at least twice each time I stayed with them or when she came to visit me. In the four years of her life, she must have heard it five or six dozen times either by me or her parents reading. She knew each page and would correct us if we read it wrong or missed a word. Sometimes she would ask for just one scene. “Read the tea party, or read who stole the tarts, or off with their heads.” She would say when told there wasn’t time for the whole story.

“Gotta go potty,” she announced.” I retrieved the book with its colorful cover of Alice and the Cheshire Cat, the Queen, and the White Rabbit, from her bag while she went to the bathroom.

She came back to the bed, stopping to grab her pink and brown giraffe that had been her crib companion since she was born. It went everywhere with her.

“Ok. Where shall we start?”

“All the golden afternoon,

Full leisurely we glide;

For both our oars, with little skill,

By little arms are plied..,” *

My Alice started with the beginning poem as she nibbled on a cracker.

I opened the book and started to read. It had been tossed about in her room. Some of the pages were crumpled and water damaged but the hardback book was mainly intact. Something wasn’t right though. Glancing at the rumpled pages I noticed pictures I didn’t remember being in the book, but I began.

“…when suddenly a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close to her…followed by three little pigs.” I read. And there on the page was a picture of the white rabbit in his tight-fitting plaid jacket and three little pigs dressed in red, blue and yellow jackets following close behind. 

“Grammy, there aren’t three little pigs in this story,” Alice objected.

“Look at this picture.”

She glanced at the page. “Hmmm,” she said and settled back on the pillow.

Then as poor Alice in the book shed a pool of tears because she couldn’t get out of the hall, she heard footsteps running and looked up to see a wolf dressed in a red cape. She peered out from behind the curtain that hid the door to the garden. “What big eyes you have,” said Alice to the wolf. “The better to see you with, my dear,” said the wolf.

“Grammy, that is the wolf from Red Riding Hood. How did he get into Wonderland?” Again, I showed her the illustration and again, she accepted the modification with no comment.

And on and on, the book had characters from Peter Rabbit, the Frog Prince, the giant from Jack’s Beanstalk, Snow White, and the three Billy Goats Gruff. Some attended the tea party with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, some played croquet with the Queen, and some showed up at the King’s court to defend the Knave of Hearts.

Every once in a while, Alice would stop me reading to peer at the pictures – strong evidence that what I was reading was true because the illustrations verified the words.  “Grammy,” she said. “I think the hurricane jumbled my storybooks.” As the story ended, Alice had fallen back to sleep, snoring lightly, clutching her giraffe. I, too, was able to close my eyes and fall asleep. Restoration and renewal for a new day, a new adventure, a new Wonderland.

*Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll