writing prompt

Selfie

Occasionally, it occurs to me that when my son is older, he’ll look back on millions of photos capturing his life but very few that include me, particularly post-separation. I then try to right this by taking a selfie of us, but I suck at selfies and they often end up being hyper-close-up shots of the two of us in almost identical poses, side-by-side and faces squished to fit the frame with little visual context of place or event being captured. I’d like to get better at this, but in the mean time, it’s probably easier to recruit others to take pics of us like I did on our recent camping trip, with our camp neighbour Ann obliging, and lingering for a chat.

I learnt that Ann, who is in her early 80s, is an intrepid camper. Following her husband’s death 8 years ago, she found a new lease on life when she joined an online, solo-women-only posse of caravan adventurers.

‘It’s better than staring at the four walls of my unit.’ She said.

Ann and her friends, who are either single, widowed or leave their partners at home, make many trips around Australia each year. On the trip where we met, however, Ann was camping with her family.

A photo with a story not only in front of the camera, but also behind the camera — maybe I won’t bother trying to perfect the selfie!

How do you capture and store memories in this age of click and forget?

This little ramble was inspired by my micro story below, which was inspired by Sonya’s photo prompt — Three Line Tales 19 January 2023. If you’d like to read more than three lines of my writing, check out: raptorial.substack.com

Warrior 101

Dark plumes billowed from the funnels of the Ocean Spirit and rose to meet the cranes that stretched in complex asanas above stacks of shipping containers in shades of industrial chic. Josie was pleased with the surreptitious photo opportunity she’d stumbled upon on the tourist trail; she smiled and threw deuces at the device resting on the end of her selfie stick. The ship’s foghorn let out a long blast that cut through clangs of steel and squawks of seagulls seeking dinner as Josie tried a few more angles, stopping only when she lost her footing and noticed that she, and the Ocean Spirit, were gliding away from the dock.

A Return

Hello! It’s been a while! Funny, I had thought that perhaps three line tales was the best way to dip my toes back into blogsville, and when I looked sometime last year, it appeared Sonya’s prompts were no more. I was super surprised and elated to see them in my reader the other day, so here I am!

Believe it or not, despite the tumbleweeds at 10000hoursleft HQ, I have been writing, including a story on my beloved public library that was published in The Big Issue last year, and a bunch of newsletters at my substack, The Raptorial with regular monthly posts over the past 9 months (thanks to my friends from WP who have joined me over there). I have even returned to my novel which I used to go on and on and on about here.

In other news, I am still at uni (very part time), soon to enter my fourth year of a two year Associate Degree in Professional Writing and Editing. I’ve also bought a house (yay me, on 31 Dec 2020), and also in 2020, I started a writing and editing business. Oh, and somehow I succumbed to years of my son asking for a dog, and had to make good on my promise that it would happen once we have our own place … Rocco the Lagotto Romagnolo joined our family in August 2021. He’s now 19 months, very cute and sweet but still in need of training (or maybe it is me that needs to be trained in being the ‘top dog’ *sigh*).

I’m glad to be back and to have found a fun way back in. The community here means a lot to me and is a big part of why I am still writing. Occasional checks of the reader fill my heart with joy when I see bloggers from way back still blogging.

Tell me, what’d I miss? What’s new? I’ll attempt a weekly hello accompanied by a three line story, and watch out, I’ll be reading posts and engaging again. Wooh!

Oooh, and rather than complain about the ‘new’ backend as I did on a previous fleeting return, here, I have embraced it after stumbling on something (what, I do not know) that has allowed me to offset my Three Line Tales story from the rest of the post. Fancy huh?

Thanks for the inspiration, Sonya – Three Line Tales 13 Jan 2023

Saturday night lights

He broke away from the throng that was crossing the intersection of 2nd and Broadway and the stripes that promised safety. His was a lone figure following a lone white line, remaining faithful to its guidance after stepping off its edge like a sailor navigating the doldrums. A yellow cab in his line of sight sounded the alarm with a long beep that turned heads and slowed the procession of revellers entering the seedy bars along Broadway — the night was young.

Photo of a city sreet at dusk, with

V/Line Vignette 11

The driver’s voice crackled over the two-way.

“Bombardier approaching Bridge over Troubled Waters. Repeat, Bombardier approaching Bridge over Troubled Waters, estimated viewing time fourteen hundred hours. Roger that.”

“Yeah yeah…”

Roger was on his 5th ‘tour of duty’ but could still not work out if Vince (the driver) was taking the piss because of his name or really thought it a military operation, though to be fair to Vince, there was manipulation of the masses and a political agenda involved— it was an assault of propaganda and faux-cheer on holiday makers who if the ruse went well, would be future investors, so one might as well call it a war effort and use military parlance.

Once alerted to the train’s approach, Roger checked his watch and did the math. It would be fifteen minutes before the train would glide over Crescent Fields Viaduct which ran parallel to the campsite of settlers 1497a. Like clockwork, he gathered dried dung from his stockpile, placed it on a retro barbecue and carefully positioned sticks on top of its grill. From the vantage of the train riding audience, it would look like sausages or even prawns, if they squinted and used their imagination. It was normally a two-person effort, but due to an incident on the worksite below that was spoken of in hushed tones, this time, Roger was alone. A substitute for the merry scene was Verity, Roger’s AI mannequin and confidant. Roger positioned Verity on a sun lounge, certain of the convincing act of her ready smile and silent complicity while on ‘standby’. Continue reading →

Awakening

Close up photo of a highland cow with cloudy sky background by Jacco Rienks used for sonya's three line tales microfiction prompt.
Photo by Jacco Rienks on Unsplash

Every morning—I assumed it was morning, but couldn’t be sure as the only light came from stark fluorescent tubes that were always lit—my horns were clasped and measured with calipers cinched by gloved hands.

‘Growing too slowly…’

The man in the white coat would mutter to himself each time before shuffling away, almost tripping over his too-long trousers, to top up my trough with a bland oily porridge that was served cold and congealed. It was unappetising but I’d eat it all, nothing escaping, not even the irony of all the meals I once snapped and shared with friends as though they’d mattered (the meals that is); the freedoms I’d taken for granted had never been photo worthy. Continue reading →

Erasure

Image of Andrew McCall's solid light sculpture You and I - Horizontal II (2009) at Australian Centre for the Moving Image
You and I – Horizontal II, Anthony McCall (2009). Photograph by Richard Baxter.

Read Part 1: Missing Person

Read Part 2: Forrest Trail

Read Part 3: The Droste Effect

Read Part 4: The Order of Things

Read Part 5: Rift Valley

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. Edward Lorenz

Every news channel was streaming the very little details of the case that were known, each trying to get a more ‘exclusive’ angle than their competitors.

Channel Z8 was running an interview with a local grocery store owner.

‘I’ll never forget when that girl disappeared. What was it seventeen, eighteen years ago? Whole life ahead of her, and boom, suddenly gone, just like that. I’d been watching the cricket when one of my customers mentioned her remains had been found. What I want to know is- how the hell did she end up in Siberia of all places? Long way from schoolies week on the Gold Coast…’

The journalist probed for as much anecdotal fluff for the news piece as he could get  ‘You say you knew Eckles? Can you describe him Albert? Can I call you Al?’

‘Yeah, call me Al. He was just like everyone else in the neighbourhood- nothing unusual in his purchases, milk, eggs, bread, fruit, knew enough about sport to keep up a conversation. But he did have a strange tendency to disappear for long periods of time…’

Fiona rolled her eyes at the familiar face getting his 15 minutes of fame. He was milking it, and the journalist was relishing this ‘exclusive insight’. Switching the channel, she saw news item after news item on the same rolling coverage of the case that was set to change the world. Continue reading →

Rift Valley

sketch of train tracks winding along a coastal scenery to illustrate a story set on a transiberian train tripRead Part 1: Missing Person

Read Part 2: Forrest Trail

Read Part 3: The Droste Effect

Read Part 4: The Order of Things

My last terrestrial memory is that of zooming plains through the dirt-speckled windows of the cabin we shared. Crossing the mass of land, and multiple time zones, it was my unwitting farewell to life on firm, solid ground, although I didn’t know it at the time.

I had gone along with Liam’s suggestion to take the trip, guided by a strong sense that everything I would be doing was destined to unfold, that I only needed to go with the flow, so to speak. We shared our second-class quarters with a soldier on his way home from a posting in Moscow, and a grieving widow heading to Irkutsk to collect the body of her fisherman husband who’d met his end while navigating the cruel seas. In that confined space, I’d learnt a lot about my Russian cabin mates, with crude sentences pieced together from the weathered Lonely Planet, and the outpouring of human emotion born of rowdy card games and shots of vodka. Liam however, remained a mystery. Continue reading →

Eternity

Photo of a cat walking along a port microfiction prompt sonya's three line tales, flash fiction
Photo by Timothy Meinberg

Slinking with a swagger,

he’d dressed right for every occasion:

dappled patches for climbing trees,

streaks stripping paint from balancing beams,

sunburst polka dots of little girls

who dared come close,

and at home in the hessian tones of the captain’s embrace.

 

Content in all his coats save for the blues of the glistening sea-

he’d failed to shake those drops off when disembarking number nine.

 

Aquatic hues

haunt the patina of his bronzed likeness,

unravelling his immortal coil between the

here

and

there;

he never sleeps- perchance to dream and lose his footing.

 

Inspired by Sonya’s Three Line Tales, Week 70 and after the initial concept, inspired further by a ferret down an online rabbit hole that made me stumble and trip on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I do not claim to have read Hamlet in its entirety but was pleased with how parts of his soliloquy worked with my idea.

Sound Proof

photo by Steven Wei, used to as a wirting prompt for a three line tale. City towers photographed from the ground up, looking to the sky
Photo by Steven Wei

Gravity’s forceful insistence on my descent was greater than my life force’s argument for preservation.

Like a leaf that had relinquished a connection to its tree, I was floating; perhaps gracefully to onlookers in the towering blocks, a speck in the vast air, screams unheard through glass and concrete.

There was no replay of life in my mind’s eye, neither unpleasant memories nor nostalgic recollections, so I turned to change my view and watched life receding from the sky.

 

Well, one thing led to another and here I am posting in response to Sonya’s Three Line Tales, Week Thirty Two.

Splitting Heirs

Frayed oraange rope, writing prompt for flash fiction
Photo by Wynand van Poortvliet

She always said family is strengthened by sticking together through life’s twists and turns.

As the matriarch, she’d kept us close with her stories, recipes that could not be recreated by anyone else, and hugs that spoke volumes where words failed to capture the nuances of shared joys, sorrows, or more often, everyday moments that would have otherwise gone forgotten if not infused with her love.

Now her home spun twine is unraveling, edges frayed from the tug-o-war over everything she’s left behind.

a life quest of love

ties woven in her heart’s loom

pulse of the bloodline

cardiac arrests the rein

a legacy unravels

 

Prose inspired by Sonya’s Three Line Tales, Week 17, tanka inspired by RonovanWrites’ Weekly Haiku Poetry Prompt Challenge #98 (quest, rein).

After coming up with the title, I looked it up to see if one of the other 7billion people on the planet had thought up that combination. Yes, apparently not much original thought remains (I’m kidding), there is a film of the same name that has received an 8% rating on rotten tomatoes, ouch! Have you seen it?  Would that rating stop you from watching it, or would you happily put aside 1 hour and 27 minutes of your life for a little Rick Moranis?

Letter X

photo of a wrought iron mail box with a motif featuring a rider on horse back prompting a flash fiction story
Photo by Kirsty TG

It was a lovely quirk of fate that living at number 24, my mailbox held the promise of his kisses, scrawled on a receipt, or a postcard he’d bought on a whim in his travels, or a torn out page from a book of poetry, with the familiar ‘xxx’ in his swirling longhand.

We had a game where he’d send me a message with a separate envelope for words beginning with the same letter of the alphabet, like a jumbled whole word version of alphabet soup, and I’d have to make out his intended sentences and sentiments.

The fun was in the stealth operation of checking the mail boxes in my street, from houses 1 through to 23, then 25 and 26, never knowing which letters would feature, hoping the occupants didn’t catch me in the act, or worse still, check their mail before me.

 

Prompt courtesy of Sonya’s Three Line Tales, Week 16, although for me this is week 3 of participating. If you’d like to give it a go, follow the link for details. Okay, so perhaps very long sentences to fit into 3 lines. I hope you took a breath if reading aloud.