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So this is supposed to be a romance story, which is usually a strong point. Maybe if I'd written it longer it might have been? This prompt comes from page 48 of the Create a Story prompt book. For those who don't have it, feel free to guess the prompt or what the words I needed to include were. I've written a bit about my back injury and last week I had a procedure done to help with the pain. Let's just say it placed writing outside what I could do. We'll see if I can catch up. In the meantime, this is more romantic than romance, but romance is hard in a really short form, because you need a Happily Ever After (or at least happy for now) and it's hard to build two true characters and an iron clad romance this short without shortcutting by using fanfic or something similar to shortcut character development. Anyway, hopefully this hits true.  Loneliness in a Pandemic ChatThe loneliness was crushing. The pandemic was isolating for families, yes. For students living six to an apartment really meant for three? Crowded. But for a young adult who aged out of university with a degree and a job, living alone? It meant a reality where every stranger at the grocery store was a feared vector for the viral threat that had terrorized the world, and at the same time a human contact—forbidden, enticing, and kept at the safely prescribed distance. He was supposed to feel lucky. That was the irony. He had an apartment of his own. He didn’t have roommates. Unlike so many of his generation, he didn’t need to. His job was enough to do that. The lens of the camera was his friend. He could look into it and pretend that was eye contact. He was good at that. Making the screen seem like real contact with the clients, with his coworkers and superiors. Keeping up the careful appearance of sanity. But the loneliness was there. It was more of a townhouse than an apartment building. Four people in a shared building. A whole community of modest units, but remote work meant he was unlikely to see any of the others. Loneliness was supposed to save him. Protect him somehow from a government that still half refused to acknowledge what the virus was, what it meant. Keep him from even the temptation to yield to the weakness of touch. Work took most of his time. More than they paid him for, certainly, as much for lack of anything else to do. He should be developing hobbies or working his way through his dad’s collection of eighties video tapes. Instead he worked far too much, slept far too little, and spent the wee hours of the night and morning in chat rooms. He was so practiced with switching screens that he barely noticed the quick clicks of the mouse anymore. One computer application to the next. One game to another. Sometimes he’d find another person’s words to occupy him. They were as lonely as his. As quietly devastated. Haltingly eager to whisper in text. Even in a pandemic, working too many hours, it took missing one of those chats for him to realize what that was. An empty ache. Butterflies. A need to type words he would have been afraid to say. Typing words should be easier, but it wasn’t. How could it be easier when he didn’t have a voice, a face, when the person that held this achingly perfect space in his head was just glowing pixels on a giant screen he’d had bought the second week, before the last stores closed down and everyone waited for them to figure out store pickup. The space was scary and warm at the same time. It was comfort offered. It was kindness. Could he ignore that the teasing had grown closer and more private… personal. This was more. It had to be. Okay, at this point keeping them 500 words is a little artificial, but when you can only sit for a few minutes at a time to write, it makes sense to keep to a limit. I did write a pandemic romance for National Novel Writing Month during the pandemic. Frankly, it was better, but I'd never let anyone read it... it got very dark. We'll see if I can catch up and write a second story this week.
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Unlucky draw on the prompt. This was meant to be action adventure but turned rather contemplative. Perhaps I should rewrite it, but the topic was too close to home for me and I'm just glad to have gotten it done. (prompt is pg 139) Next week might get skipped (or I might write it this weekend so I can just post it when the time comes). I have a medical procedure Tuesday that is going to wipe me out for most of the week.  Judgement in FearHe hated being in the public eye. That wasn’t his place. Jerome Evans preferred quiet contemplation to the world of conspiracy and money that his position on the international criminal court lent itself. That the quiet isolation and invisibility of a man in a business suit reading a newspaper gave him a measure of safety was a false comfort. The list was in his inside jacket pocket. His was not the only name, just the one that made his trust in law and order falter. That he had been assigned the case was premature. Everyone knew it. Everyone wanted something to be done. They wanted an order. They wanted it known and loud. Jerome understood the drive. How could he not? The Americans had burned up their democracy with the same frantic brashness that they’d wielded with such desperate fervor to free themselves when they’d declared themselves independent. Now they were not, and the world bore witness. It was a heartbreaking testimony to witness remotely. More, he was sure for those poor souls trapped there, helpless to do anything against the war machine of the traitor president. The international court didn’t yield to threats. Even the sort of pressure to act that had gotten him assigned to the case was rarely acceded to. The world wanted action in the face of crimes it had seen too often before. More to the point they wanted to bind the country before it withdrew. Only member states were subject to the court. And for all that it was burning, that formal withdrawal hadn’t happened. It was useless of course. The threats had already started. Attempts to stop the process before it was even public. The wiretap on his phone. The list in his pocket. They were just the beginning. They were trying to hold a man to task who knew nothing of grace or forgiveness, and who wallowed in the delivery of revenge. He lived for vendetta and the checks on his power failed, one by one. Already the world feared him. He didn’t have any great skill. His oratory was inconsistent. But there were evil, skilled people behind him. That was the other reason. They wanted it public—the accomplices named. Not just the ones people knew, but the quiet dangerous ones that were always in the background in these cases. Jerome had stood in judgement over depravity before. He’d seen awful abuses before. He’d never thought to see it like this. Not from the Americans. Not from a country that had, in his youth, brought such hope to the world. Now there would be a race. It wouldn’t be a comfortable one. Not for him, however invisibly he tried to live. The assassins would come. For him. For his family. And even if they didn’t and the threat was empty, just the man’s words would set certain elements of terror at work to push him into a life of worry and terror. His verdict could not come soon enough. So another story and another 500 words with the title. Seems I will continue with that trend for a while yet. No graphic this time, maybe I'll come back with one later if I have time, but my back was bothering me this week, so I'm just glad to get the story up.
This week the randomness gods have given me a cruel task - a science fiction story. Let me know if any of you can guess the prompt! [Updated - note I forgot to put that this prompt is from Create a Story, pg 179]  Sequence of the DoctrineWhen people think of the resistance, no one expected it to be them. There were the expected groups. The leftist, vocal, organic food fanatics. The ones who saw conspiracy in every additive. But when the revolution happens in a laboratory, it was exactly those groups who were watched. Because they made noise. Because to activate their matrix, the doctrine required certain foods in sequence. That was essential. Even with the control noone had known they had, food was precious and there were workers to monitor. For poisons. For toxins. Not to detect what was really being done. But in that search much tampering could be undone. So the people who might avoid the deliberate true nutrient sequence, as required by the doctrine, the organic farmers were tracked. A registry created. Not just those who farmed but those who partook in the foods that might lack a crucial implant. It was impossible to implant everything without being discovered. That was the purpose of the matrix. The purpose of the sequence. Enough common foods. Enough that eventually the sequence must be hit, whether by doctrine or happenstance. Slowly, person by person, potluck by potluck, the sequence was spread and the mind unfurled into the world of that tiny group of masters who had created the doctrine on our behalf. The registry had been made. The enemies tracked. That weakness was easily dealt with. The misfortune of those poor deluded souls whose own search for purity in their foods had killed them was simply an object lesson. A directive. Listen to the doctrine. Follow the sequence. Strengthen the matrix in your mind and in the minds of those who break bread with you. It seems like it should have taken a long time, but the food chain had become too monolithic for it to fail. The masters were happy. Even the smallest pockets of resistance were quickly squashed, either as organic examples of the need for the doctrine, or quiet disappearances. Because the implants created a hive controlled by the nexus of masters, even those who might have resisted were unaware until it was too late. The patterns of behavior of everyone they knew would change, one by one. The last one would end up at a potluck, being fed the crucial implants, one at a time, in the correct sequence, because somehow they had managed to avoid the sequence. Maybe they always ate their cookie first. But they still ate it, and so, in the end, they were still susceptible to the suggestions of their friends at the gathering. It was only a few who ran. Who were quietly lifted from the streets. No one expected it to be them. The adult picky eaters. They weren’t even part of the equation. No one thought about people who only ate fries with signature seasoning that no one even made anymore or thought about how they got it. But they were blissfully immune. And the nexus never saw them coming. Once again just 500 words. Maybe I'll just keep to that? Or maybe I'll get a prompt that demands more... or less. We'll see. Next week then!
The experiment continues. This is week three and I am continuing with random prompts from the Create a Story book. This week’s prompt is from life experience (pg 67), and appropriately draws a little more on my personal experience than I am entirely comfortable with. I’d intended for these to be somewhat random lengths, but it seems they are running fairly consistently at 500 words a piece. Maybe that will continue. Maybe I will hit something that keeps me writing for longer. We will have to see.  Moments of Perfect ClarityIt’s always the small things. Perhaps, had I been looking, I would have seen myself on the verge of this cliff, where it waited, intense and deadly and terrifying all at once. Instead, I felt it, deep in my gut, with half my innards en route to the equator and the other half determined to find the North Pole. And just like my poor ill-used stomach and its proliferation of butterflies, I was balanced on a fence where I’d been unknowing and unseeing and yet influenced, ready to tip over. It should be something big, to derail the force of destiny and reshape the path of a life forever. All the checkpoints of my life would change. It should be big. There was no decision. How could there be any decision? The direction of my life had changed. I had dragged the anchor of normalcy over the boundary and found clarity. And such clarity. Did other people feel this? Did such a small thing affect others as it did me? He was popular. He had dark pretty eyes and long lashes that failed to make him feminine. But it was the drape of the blue shirt, the white tank, the chain falling over that deeply bronzed olive skin along his clavicle. It wasn’t just my stomach. It was my heart and my head and… well, yeah, that too, uncomfortably and too obviously so. Thankfully I was at an age where even that expression of horniness could be handwaved to teenage hormones. And I did. But his neck, that chain, were like the links of bondage tying me to a remorse that would not go away. It was always there. Too many classes together and I ached for each one, hoping to arrive early enough that I could see him come in. Hope his powder-blue shirt would be open and loose or at least unbuttoned enough that I might glimpse that bit of him that never failed to make my heart race. So, I could hold it and store it and keep it in my memory to play over and over again in my head. As if somehow my guilt would be less if I obsessed more. Each time my heart raced my mind couldn’t help but grow closer to an answer. Clarity might be ignored for a time, but not forever, not when the reminder was there, class after class, day after day… dream after terrifying dream. I knew at night when my hand made its inevitable journey that I’d crossed the line. I’d sought pleasure in the offense of my desire as any boy might. As terrible as the guilt could grow, as much as I might some nights wish to end everything, still, I indulged in it. I could not return these feelings to where they grew. They had a life of their own. And Heaven help me, I wanted them. A glimpse of a young man’s perfect neck. It’s always the small things. As I mentioned, 500 words. Checkpoint, if anyone didn’t guess, was the really difficult word to fit in, though there were a few others that probably managed to be awkward. Any guesses? Thoughts on the prompt and what it might have been?
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Ashavan DoyonWriter of the mysterious, fantastic, and the romantic. Sometimes sappy. Often angsty. Always searching for the sexy. Stories about men who love men. Categories
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