100-word Microfiction: 2nd round
A few weeks ago I promised you my second-round submission for the 100-word Microfiction Challenge. If you missed my first submission titled “Mycelial Attractions”, you can find it here.
Round 2
Genre: Horror
Action: sealing an envelope
Word: ripple
Title: When the Rooster Crows
Dawn broke with a woman’s shriek. A darkness had been brewing in Amos, unraveling him; Kate’s mother had been the thread before she passed. Thinking back, Amos understood it had not happened all at once. Like water freezing, the darkness occupied the cracks and expanded.
Amos etched his sins on his forearm, flayed it from the muscle, and sealed it within an envelope. The penultimate task was complete.
A ripple emanated from the dock’s edge. Quartered limbs trailed four horses, staining a cardinal rose upon the earth. Both women in Amos’s life were now gone; only one to natural causes.
Unfortunately, this was the end of my 100-word microfiction experience, as I did not make it to the 3rd and finale round. There seemed to be a decent amount of luck regarding the genre assigned to each writer—in my case, the personally difficult genre of horror—but that’s the name of the game.
Following my departure from the challenge, I took advantage and made a list of the other genre/action/word assignments. Every now and then I’ll open the spreadsheet and randomly pick a prompt to practice. After that grim opening story, here’s an untitled tale with a bit of levity to it.
Genre: Historical Fiction
Action: dancing
Word: sore
Abe rose in bed, helping his legs off the side and flinching as his toes pressed against the floor. It never ceased to mystify how sore his calves grew from dance practice. In the moments of flow, hundreds of pirouettes feel welcome and automatic to Abe, and the muscles and tendons in his legs begin to resemble steel cables.
Last evening’s session had been intense; in a matter of seconds his cables turned to rubber bands. This confirmed a truth in Abe’s mind; he wasn’t ready yet. The Gettysburg Recital waits for no man.
Although slightly off topic—yet wholly within the bounds of what I want this newsletter to be—I want to leave you with a poem. In the midst of living in a world which systematically thrusts fear into our perceptions, “A Portable Paradise” by Roger Robinson is a beautiful reminder that we can cultivate our own paradise, an inner sanctum of hope and optimism. I love how the reader of the poem, the softspoken Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, discusses the ethics of reading and putting ourselves in the place and mind of a character:
When have I been the “they”? When have I looked on somebody else and thought, “Oh, I want that,” and I might have denied that I’m stealing it, but I’m stealing it anyway. And so the literary invitation for me is to think about that line and how that line has impacted me, and how I have been the demonstration of the impact of that line.
And I think, other people who haven’t lived under sustained torture and sustained stealing, and people who have lived in systems that have benefited them, rather than bereaved them, I think the invitation here is to pay attention to, when have I been the person who, whether I admit it or not, has been out to steal the paradises that keep people alive?
Just as it’s our responsibility to find and sustain our own portable paradise, this poem hints at the necessary process of questioning how our paradise—even our everyday life—interweaves with and impacts the lives of those both more and less fortunate than ourselves. If you prefer to read poetry rather than listen, you can find a text option of “A Portable Paradise” here.
As always, thanks for reading and have a great Monday! :)
-Kyle