momebie | Entries tagged with writing prompts

[Source.]

They pack the basket. It holds figs and prosciutto and slices of fresh mozzarella and fresh bread, water from the well and red wine from the market, the wire they were missing last time, the glass bulb they need to read the energy. They start across the field holding hands. Any people from the town who happen to see them smile to themselves, because young girls need friendship, and their friendship was so beautiful. Always together. Always safe. Always staring up. In the woods they let go of each other and use their hands to keep the tree branches out of their hair and the moss out of their faces. At the door they can hear him inside. He's whimpering still, just like he had been last night. His throat must be raw with it. Before they go in they kiss each other's cheeks and promise it will work this time. It has to work this time. They're running out of places to put the bodies.

[Source.]

The bed and breakfast was bringing on a wistful nostalgia in David. Rene wished they'd found a hotel, but their search had lead them to a small town that was big on history and short on amenities. This was how things were going to be until they'd finished their research: mid-afternoon light through the curtains, questioning fingers pushing Rene's bangs back and forth across his face while he tried to read, dust motes, sweat spots on sheets, distraction. It's not that Rene wasn't enjoying it, it was just that it wouldn't last. Better be on the open road with the unsureness of place and mental clarity than here in this purgatory knowing exactly where he was and not knowing at all how he was supposed to feel.

[Source.]

The glass is only cool and smooth for half a second under his palm, then it ripples and thrums. It warms, converting the possibility of him into energy. He stands, leaning into it but not falling through it, idly smoking a cigarette and staring at himself. When he's called back, if he's called it, it's the cigarettes he'll miss the most. He stares and stares. He can still only see himself. Smacking his other fist against the glass he causes a cross vibration that rattles across the surface and flings a few droplets of liquid onto his cheek. All he can see is himself, the burning ash between his lips, and the smoke rising between his eyes. They've cut him out, but it won't work for long. He'll push his way through soon. He'll reclaim his talons and his image, blotting out the mercy they think he has.

[No source. GOOD JOB, TUMBLR.]

The crickets are deafening. People always talk about how they go to the country for quiet, but so far she hadn't found any. There are twigs and grass poking her in the face. There is a root near the foot of her sleeping bag that she kept knocking her ankles on. She wants to hate all of it. But above her there is a piece of black, gossamer cloth letting brilliant points of light slip through and if she looks at them for more than a few minutes she forgets to hate. She merely reaches forward. She begins to want.

[Source.]

From up here it's easy to understand why the heroes in those comics are always wearing capes. Standing alone on a rooftop, in the city but not part of it, you start to question whether you're really there. Does it matter if no one can see you? The forty story wind whips around you as if you don't, because there's no resistance in you. You're tiny, insignificant, and young. This wind has carried birds and flying machines and the smell of smoke since a time so far distant that you can't comprehend it, and it doesn't see you.

Yes, capes up put resistance. They're something for the wind to catch. They're a reply to everything ancient and new. I'm here. I'm here. I see you.

[Source.]

He'd wanted a legacy. He wanted it to stand on the spot where he was born, so he obliterated his mother's loving, leaning beach home. Erased the white walls and dancing blue curtains of the three rooms where he'd broken his first bone and had his first kiss, let bonbons melt on his tongue. He wanted something that would last longer than the flesh of his flesh. Something to command the view, so that when no one remembered his face, they would still mark his effect on the landscape with their very breath.

But nature does not care for legacy. It does not pause to wait for men to pass. It aggressively heals its scars, because nature knows what so many of us don't, and that's that if you are not happy you'll never make anyone else happy.

The ocean reclaims a foot a year, but souls, trusts, and hearts are harder won.

<[Source.]

He used to sit in classrooms, grading papers for professors and proctoring tests taken by dimly lit children who didn't know how to end up anywhere but that classroom and then the life waiting for them beyond. Higher education was a pause, he wanted a full stop. He had dug his heels in, not wanting to move forward, but not knowing how to move back. He thought about track jumping. About and article he'd read in the New Yorker about dissatisfied youths who rode the rails with nothing, looking for work as if they lived during the Great Depression. "They didn't have a choice," one young man had said, grinning for the photographer, looking through haystack hair and licking dry lips. "We wanted to give ourselves the same ultimatum. See who we could really be." He'd sipped his latte and closed his eyes and wished for the strength to break away.

Turned out it wasn't strength you needed. It was breath, and good sturdy boots, and three days without sleep. The rest would have to figure itself out at the next stop.

I'm going to tie today's picture to something that forced its way out last night. In which Rene and David are possibly something more than I've made them out to be. This is why you can't leave characters alone with me.

[Source.]

The revolution will not be choreographed.

Rene left the car door open with the key in the ignition because he needed something to keep time. The winds were too fickle. The stars were too slow. The steady, man-made reminder of a machine bleeding out battery life, however, had the effect of straightening out the jagged pieces of him. It spoke steadily as if that tenor bong was heart of it. Ebb—-ebb—-ebb—. Rene could relate.

He stepped into the spotlight formed by his headlamps and the small mountain overlook became his stage. Behind him, the city of Denver lay low, reclining in the evening as its lights clawed at the black-blue sky. He rolled his shoulders forward, as if draping himself with a shawl knit from its iridescence. A costume, after all, was integral to the suspension of disbelief that any true performance required.

The ratty red Converse were terrible for pointe work, but he did what he could, scraping out a rhythmic tattoo in the concrete and gravel. Toe heel ball. Right. Toe heel ball. Left. Toe heel ball right. Right. Right. Left. He swayed low twice and then leaped into the air.

David was sitting on the hood of the car, an obscured figure caught between the high beams. His eyes followed Rene. They lifted and pinned him and there was a little burst of disappointment in Rene every time his shoes connected with the earth again. David’s gaze had held him in many places over the course of their trip, so why not now? Why not hold him up?

He finished on one knee, bent forward, palms flat on the ground making frames out of his arms and being pimpled by the gravel pushing into his skin. David pushed away from the car and slowly moved toward Rene, baptizing him with his shadow.

"I didn’t know a body could move like that." He cupped Rene’s cheek in his hand and used his thumb to gently stroke the skin below his eye.

Rene reached up and grasped David’s hand, holding it in place. “A body who has died many times can move however it likes.”

"Between the worlds," David said. "Neither here nor there. Tethered and ensnared and pulling at your bonds. What if I cut your strings?"

"You would send me hurtling into the noose instead. I’m of no use to you free."

"Not yet." David pulled Rene to his feet. "But one day we’ll be at rest and I’ll sever you in a fit of boredom. It will be my last act as I render the world wiped of grace."

"You would deprive even yourself of that power?"

"I don’t need power," David said. "I’ll have you."

By the time the car’s heart stopped Rene didn’t need it anymore. Flush with David, their shadow’s fought for the right to take the stage.

[Source.]

It's a word that sat on shriveled tongues and was spat from cruel, thin lips. To them, everything about her was frivolous. No one needed plump, red cheeks and calves that gracefully flowed into delicate ankles and hair that collected the warmth of the sun and arms that were strong because they spent all of their time reaching for books and parasols and the men who covet all of the frivolous things about her. Maybe one of those things, two if God was feeling really generous, but not all of them. Why would God waste his time on such a creature? Her arrival in their little town had entirely tilted their world view, and she loved it.

Because what they didn't know is that her heart was shaped like a question mark. With every new accusation spat at her, with every new unkind admonition, it was slowly being forged into an exclamation point.

$momebie: \ (Ivor Wink)$

[Source.]

You wake up in a mask. Not your clothes, not your mask, not your body. But it is your sense of possibility that supplies your adrenaline and an upswell of urgency. It's a nice, comfortable bed and you sit cross-legged in the middle of it assessing your options. It's important to place your feet down on the right side, after all, and to be going in the right direction at the beginning of every journey. No one wants to go on someone else's adventure. And you've decided, regardless of who you look like, that it will be your adventure.

[Source.]

At first it's a rictus that comes over them. They're frightened, because of his height and his mask and his dress, and their lips twitch upward even as they try desperately to keep them down. He's a warning. He must be. The unknown stumbles before them, and then he begins to whir. And it's familiar, the spinning, arms out, legs kicking. It's spinning they did as children. It's spinning they watch others do. Spinning is not dangerous. So they laugh and clap and forget. They're smiling for real when they put him on the cross. His cloak catches their laughter. Their rictus does not know enough to fear.

[Source.]

It's like you have a god damned superpower. This ink moves through you, coursing in and out of veins, pushing your hands across keyboards and pads of paper and canvases of concrete. You have desire. You have drive. You have a small, impotent feeling of loneliness when they leave you, so you hold them in. You sit for days at your keyboard, refusing to let them out, afraid that once they leave you you'll be nothing. You'll be alone with the ghost of that desire.

Be wary. Ink is also poison. One way or another, either you or they will seep free.

[Source.]

The sand brings most people up short. It sucks and shifts. THey have to re-learn how to walk to some degree, or they'll stumble. They're lighter on the return trip. If you let the salt eat at away at the heavy parts of you, the rest of you practically springs away.

[Source.]

MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark
all the sweet, green icing flowing down
someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'cause it took so long to bake it
and I'll never have that recipe again.

[Source.]

A hundred years ago today a boy was born in French Algeria. Destiny stamped him, as it stamps all boys, and if you could shuttle back and forth through time you could see him slowly peeling that stamp away. Every one of his tremulous breaths would whisper a tiny amount of the stain gone. It's all rather more dramatic at the end. It's always more dramatic at the end. But that's the funny thing about destiny. It's just as much about consciously becoming anything other than what you should be as it is about rolling over and accepting life. When you're born into the world your end is also born into it, you just have to decide how much responsibility you can take for it.

[Source.]

It will never fit in a teacup. I don't care what they say. They're prone to exaggeration and hyperbole and can't be trusted. A nice tumbler, however, or a highball glass. The recipe is two ice cubes and as much whiskey as you can drink and still see straight. No, tempests don't fit in tea cups, but they fill people.

[Source.]

They only eat red things. At first the ornithologists thought it was because other types of berries were poisonous to them, but after some testing it was determined that extracts of other juices did not affect what the birds ate. It was all about the color. Then there were more tests and it was determined that they only see red color waves. Their vision is white and black and grey and red. Red for berries. Red for other birds. Red for hearts. Red for blood. No one had ever observed them eating live prey before. Feathers awash in blood, they turned on each other.

[Source.]

Ramblings. For the past three days you've made sense to no one, and it's only going to get worse. Strangers who overhear you in line for coffee and friends who call at inopportune times are likely to be concerned. Don't worry about them. They're not important. All that's important is the words, and they will have it out, one way or another.

[Source.]

You know what they say about a perfect storm. You have to. Because I don't know and I need someone to tell me. Still, there's something to be said for momentum, for letting your inner life carry you away. Which part of your story is going to wash you over the edge today?

[In case you missed it, I'm going to spend the month posting picture prompts for those who want them. Feel free to drop responses below. NANO! LET'S DO SOME WRITING AND SHIT.]

[Source.]

Welp, here we are again at the shores of NaNoWriMo. It's very late now. Or possibly very early. Or possibly it's a perfectly fine time. It all depends on your point of view. And mostly your time zone.

Some of you know exactly what you're going to do. Some of you can pinpoint a spot on that far mountain peak. You have a map and some LARA bars and you're on your way. I hate you.

I'm still looking at all the pebbles. They're so pretty. Each one shining with possibility. How do I know if I've picked the right one? How do I know if the blue one won't skip better than the purple? How do I know the orange won't match my eyes.

It's time to make a decision. Grab one. Any one. Grab two. Grab a handful. Take as many as you can carry. Just know. Just know that you will have to carry them.

Good luck.