Book Week at ThinkingTen - 5 Pieces

This past week has been Book Week at ThinkingTen, a great site that I frequent often. We were provided prompts based on famous novels and had to write a piece within ten minutes (hence the title - but editing can take as long as you need!!) Below are my five pieces, with the prompt underneath each one for reference.
A big thank you to Blake Cooper for the challenge this week - it has been a blast!!


Retreat Or Surrender

They had come for her around midnight.


She had escaped the city just before it was destroyed, retreating to her haven in the mountains. The air, although tainted somewhat by the noxious aftertaste of the bomb, was still a lot healthier than that of the city. For how long, she didn’t know – but she had been happy to have escaped at all.

They had come for her around midnight.

She heard them before she saw them; scrapes of flesh across the veranda, broken fingernails tapping out a message of damnation on her door.

She locked all the doors and barricaded herself inside the living room – the one with the floor-to-ceiling windows. She saw them approaching the house through those windows; torn flesh, rotten teeth, broken limbs; yet on they came, coming for her – and she was trapped within the one place she had thought would be the safest in the world.

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On Location, Monday
A Room With A View



Me Thinks Me Is Sunk

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink – actually, to be more precise, a kitchen sink; not the one that is sitting in the bench-top of my condo down in Miami – no, I would be able to reach the phone from there. Instead, here I am, in the middle of someone’s horse paddock, legs tied (and ass-stuck) to this damn sink – and I am supposed to be writing a suicide note.


Damn this blackmailing crap – a couple of million dollars I was down, they gave me a loan, and now they want it back. They only gave me a really short time to pay it back – ninety days...ninety days? Why do they think I got a loan from ‘em in the first place? I couldn’t pay back the tenner I loaned from my eight-year-old son – and he’s mighty pissed, too, I might add.

So, here I am, knee-deep in seven flavours of shit, trying to write a convincing suicide note – how do you think I am doing? Pretty bad, so far, huh? But that’s okay...at least they had the decency to let me do it in my own time...

Now all I have to do is work out why they poured that sticky-as-shit honey all over my crotch...

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Take It Away, Tuesday (Starter Sentence)
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.



Pelican Decoy

Did I ever tell you I was dyslexic? Probably not – we don’t know each other that well. I would like to tell you all about it, but then, what would be the pinto? It’s not like you will be joining me for a bark fest in the morning.


Anyway, my story is short. I’m dyslexic, and I work for the Collins Pelican Decoy. Pretty strange job for someone with my condo in it, but there you have it.

I was sitting in the lunch room with my boss – his skin was so pale, almost wrath I like - when both our grapes went off luminously east. We made a mad rush for the crap ark, in an effort to get to the big press crone fence; there was to be a huge emu net cannon regarding the future of the English gnu algae.

I still wonder why I was given this ensign mast.

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Words Inc, Wednesday (Use these words in your story)
(1) wrath, and (2) grapes



Never Return


FADE IN...CLICK


A young man lies on a quiet beach, enjoying the sounds of the beach; the rolling waves, crashing and dashing themselves on the rocky cliffs that formed the boundaries of his childhood playground.

FLASH...CLICK

Fast forward a few years to find him walking the beach, hand in hand with his own young children, sharing with them the joys of a beachside existence. He taught them to listen to the ocean, to hear its secrets. They gave him a bright, colourful seashell so he could always hear the waves.

FLASH...CLICK

An old man now, sitting on the porch; a discarded newspaper lay at his feet, the headline proclaiming the sea has taken another victim to its watery depths. Beside it, a broken seashell.

He will never go to the beach again.

CLICK...FADE OUT

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The Plot Thickens, Thursday (Use these elements in your story)
An Old Man (include the sea)



A Boy & His Guitar

Dear Uncle Tom,



I am writing this missive to say thank you – thank you for the two biggest gifts I have ever received; the red Gibson ES 350T is such a beautiful instrument – I hope I get good enough to do it the justice it deserves. The other gift which I am thankful for is the chance to use your cabin down here in Louisiana – I enjoy sitting down by the railroad tracks in the evenings, under the giant evergreens. Sometimes I won’t even take that guitar out of the gunny sack, but just sit and feel the rhythm of the trains rolling past, feeling their power and trying to recreate that sound with my guitar. For all of this, I am thankful.


Anyway, I have to go and do some chores.


Thank you again,


Jonathon Bartholomew Goode


P.S. Mother is funny – she thinks one day I am going to be so successful that I will be in front of a big band and that many people will come from miles around to hear me play. Isn’t she a hoot?

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Member’s Pick, Friday
Uncle Tom (include a cabin)