Fog Soup

On account of an excellent collection of friends, a broken toilet, and 3 hours in the car, I missed the deadline for submission to 3 Minute Fiction, but behold! 532 words.


Fog soup.

Cold. Then warm. Or maybe numb. The sky beamed down the thick grey of after storm. Joe watched the slow pulse of the waves, foam clinging to his legs as he loosened his tie and let it fall into the blue green Atlantic. Not many people came out this late in the season. The bars had shuttered to wait for next year’s neon crop. Joe felt this ideal for his needs, and an unspoken kinship with the scattered forms across the rocky sand trickled in to help fill the hole in his chest.

An old woman with one leg lets it dangle down off the end of a fishing pier that sees more teenagers with beer than beards in yellow jackets putting food on the table. She’s been around before, though Joe was pretty sure he knew this not for her peculiar silhouette, but the haunting drone that she pumped into the sky from the bellows of a shining red concertina. Memories of the old country made manifest. An air of longing that needed no words in the dim of cloudy noon.

At his back, the road snaked its way up along the thin strip of beach, protected by rows of pike-like tax collectors and too-narrow loitering spots for cars. Joe watched a young couple toss a Frisbee to dog who kept pausing to nip at the sand as it flew up around his leaping paws. Thunder. Not thunder. An engine.

The old woman on the pier looked up and let her note draw out. Somewhere in the hollow spaces of Joseph’s skull it began to mix with the low thumping of the motorcycle’s rush and his teeth started up a clatter, chattering audibly in a way that might give a passerby the illusion of discomfort. He thought it was a Bb, but he had never been very good with music.

The thunder churned down to idle, and Joe looked back over his shoulder. Her eyes met him half way. Danielle sat over the machine from the relative safety of the asphalt and waved that tiny wave. She didn’t bother turning the bike off before she took a small brass goblet out of her saddlebag, perching the urn on a weathered concrete bench and looking up at the sky from under the thin visor of her black helmet.

He envied her her freedom. Come this time tomorrow his feet would be clad in socks and his eyes would soak in the slow burn or overhead fluorescents. He would make generic small talk over bad coffee and pretend that one thing mattered more than the other, when clearly the opposite was true. She had put half the county down just to drop him off, and Joe knew she’d do thrice that before even deciding which way the wind was blowing. He’d need her most when the sun was set, and she’d be 600 miles or more from his bed.

Danielle never wasted any time. The transmission brought a gear to bear on the engine and she was a memory. Just Joe, a little music, a big sky, and the old man on a bench at the beach. Brought a smile to his face.

Three Minute Fiction

A number of us will be participating in this round of NPR's Three Minute Fiction, a regular contest with a 600 word story challenge.

http://www.npr.org/series/105660765/three-minute-fiction

I've listened to this contest for a while now, so I've got a pretty good idea what they're looking for, it's definitely worth going back and listening to the prior winners, some really great work (and some I wasn't such a fan of, isn't art wonderful?).

I was sortof waiting to get struck by inspiration on this one, so I've put it off until the end (deadline is this Sunday), but I thought it would be worth talking about Process a bit as I craft this piece.

The challenge is to write a 600 word story (which can be read in 3 minutes) in which one character comes to town and one character leaves town. Good. I like road stories.

Opening lines are critical, and often the major spark for me (as with Dinner, and Tesla Dance).

"Cold. Then warm. Or maybe numb."

That was my starting point. Sets a nice little scene. But where to go from there? The end?

"Joe looked back over his shoulder, her eyes met him half way. Danielle idled the bike from the relative safety of the asphault and waved that tiny wave before putting the urn down on a weathered concrete bench. She’d come from as far away as two towns over to deliver him, and joe had no idea how many miles she could put down before she felt right enough to return. She would waste no time. The bike roared into the distance, and joe was alone. Just a man with his feet in the water. An urn with a bench. A gull with a sandwich. He smiled. And wept."

This is one of those situations where i had a very simple little scene in my head, wanted it to be completely vague, just a woman dropping off an urn while a man stands in the cold of the ocean. I was really excited to write it, except that when I was done with my first draft... it was only 150 words. Damn my natural copywriter brevity.

So now? Got to thicken it up, spread some wings. And get it done in time to edit the ever loving hell out of it, because I know that shite right up there needs some major work.

Take the challenge!