Three.Sentence.Stories.

Blog on hold

noreply@blogger.com (Katie) — Fri, 28 May 2010 16:08:00 +0000

...until early June, for the management of minor events such as weddings, funerals, and various vacations.

Lamentation

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 19 May 2010 22:25:00 +0000

The birds in their cages set up such a racket the second I stepped in that musty old room. Like they knew the old lady was dead. Like they knew as certain as I knew, in my own mind, that it was my fault she was -- my fault for being such a loud, lazy, self-involved twenty-three year old that I swore I'd carry her mail up the one flight to her apartment and in since the second day never, ever did, not once.

Wednesday's Prompt

noreply@blogger.com (The Moderator) — Tue, 18 May 2010 21:23:00 +0000

A simple but elegant word for Wednesday dolor: Lamentation.

Delinquent

noreply@blogger.com (Katie) — Mon, 17 May 2010 04:21:00 +0000

She said, "the jailor told me very solemnly 'there is no time here' before he up and swallowed the rusty key to my door here, and without time, there can't really be punishment, can there? If your sentence is eternity, you can't wonder if you could've done something to get it shorter or worry that bad behavior will get you more time in prison, you just are, you just accept it, I think."

Grinning, she sits down and begins writing her theory in chalk on the floor.

Delinquent

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sat, 15 May 2010 03:10:00 +0000

The letter is beyond late. She's checked the mail, asked around, been forward to the point of awkwardness. Still, she can't understand how the world's best pyramid scheme, the one that had made millionaires, toppled governments, exalted and ruined every one of her friends, had somehow passed her by.

Friday's prompt

noreply@blogger.com (The Moderator) — Fri, 14 May 2010 17:59:00 +0000

Friday's are late to rise! Today's prompt is:

Delinquent

Farthest

noreply@blogger.com (Katie) — Thu, 13 May 2010 22:54:00 +0000

He gets in the security line for the plane and I don't even wait to see him walk through the door, just wave goodbye to his back. It's only when I get back in my car and see his orange college sweatshirt carelessly crumpled on the passenger seat that pain fills my chest and all the anger and hate of the last few months fills the cauldron of his absence and transforms lead into gold, hate into love.

Tantalus has nothing on me.

Farthest

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 13 May 2010 03:08:00 +0000

"No", the man said in a low tone, looking out from the ferry's railing and over the bay, "not there and not beyond there and a hundred or a thousand miles past that." The two small children looked up at him, wide-eyed. "Where I come from," he said, "is oceans and nations from here, on the other side of the world, all my family and friends and the places I know and love and cherish," and while the boy and girl tried to imagine such vastness, a something almost like a tear rose up in the wake of his eye.

Wednesday's Prompt

noreply@blogger.com (The Moderator) — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:30:00 +0000

Keeping with the single word:

Farthest

Flourish!

noreply@blogger.com (Katie) — Tue, 11 May 2010 00:58:00 +0000

He pens his final words in blood because it is all the ink he has, the ivory letter opener his only instrument, and yet so much to say. As he carves his finest calligraphy, he realizes that blood is all he has ever had to write with, really, if one isn't too literal about these things, and he laughs surprised at the thought.

Because it is is important that they know, he signs in a great plume the name of his murderer: himself, only himself, like all writers great and small.

Flourish

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 10 May 2010 20:54:00 +0000

The tenth of May -- that was the day I stumbled across the second set of sales records in the locked back office, along with the letter. That was the day it hit me like a fist to the face that for the entire goddamn ten years, Sid was nothing by a conniving bastard. That was the goddamn glorious day it dawned on me that I was about to be rich -- rich enough, anyway; one little just dessert for all those goddamn years of hard work and suffering and humiliation.

Monday's prompt

noreply@blogger.com (The Moderator) — Fri, 07 May 2010 14:28:00 +0000

In honor of spring, Monday's one-word prompt is:

Flourish

Use it as you will.

Arabesque

noreply@blogger.com (Katie) — Fri, 07 May 2010 03:48:00 +0000

Their matching vine tattoos - glossy green with tiny pink spiral flowers, one twisting up her left arm and one twisting down his right arm - were so beautiful together it was hard to believe that only a month later she'd tried to scour her left arm clean with bleach. Failed, and stumbled through the park after, lost and drunk and stupid and tripping over rocks in the dark, until she saw with wonder a trellis she'd never seen before, vines all up it, the exact shape and color of the design he'd chosen for them -

She held out her left arm and the vines grew towards her, flowers trembling, wrapping at first around her wrists and then up past her locked elbows and shaking shoulders, around and down her neck until they formed a perfect pattern on her body: a pale ancient statue in the moonlight.

Arabesque

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 05 May 2010 21:56:00 +0000

Madeleine sits at the table by her two year old son. For minutes at a stretch, she is lost in thought, drawing graceful arcs and whorls on the cafe napkin. For a year now, this has been the only way to efface the constant waking dreams of car accidents, kidnapping, earthquakes, acts of terrorism -- of missing Emma so much more than the husband that Emma stole from her.

Wednesday's prompt

noreply@blogger.com (The Moderator) — Wed, 05 May 2010 02:31:00 +0000

Wednesday's prompt keeps to the one-word theme:

Arabesque

Use it as you will.

Solitude

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 03 May 2010 19:42:00 +0000

That last of the musket-shots rang out in the cold morning air. He looked around him; his side, their side -- all fallen, to a one. Later, reflecting back on that moment, he could hardly believe how slow it was to dawn on him that he was alone and free, completely and utterly free.

Monday's prompt

noreply@blogger.com (The Moderator) — Mon, 03 May 2010 02:48:00 +0000

Monday's prompt is a single word:

Solitude

Use it as you will.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since / Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 01:44:00 +0000

"Ow!" Cassie said, and hopped up, dancing in pain, waving her injured hand around in front of her, "what the hell, Leah?" There was no way she could have known that the fight they then had over one pricked finger would end their seventh-grade friendship. She couldn't have known the monstrous enemy she'd create, two years later, bent on making her high school a living hell.

Monday's prompt

noreply@blogger.com (The Moderator) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 04:16:00 +0000

Monday's prompt is taken from one of Donne's more famous -- and modern -- poems:

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?

-- John Donne, The Flea

Traced in the Shadow/An Indecipherable Cause

noreply@blogger.com (Katie) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:10:00 +0000

She didn't want me to see her face after the fire, so we sat silent silhouetted in darkness like on some crime drama: identity changed to protect the victim.

But I knew who she was. And the way she turned her head ever so slightly when I asked how it started - the way she whispered that they thought it must have been an electrical outlet sparking with all the dramatic over-conviction of a soap opera actress reciting lines - I knew with a sickening certainty that she was not the victim here after all.

Traced in the shadow, an indecipherable cause.

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 22:06:00 +0000

I studied the far side of the room from the quiet dark of my chair in the corner. It hardly took a rustle: my gun hand flew up and shot the small form, which fell giggling to the floor. Tommy staggered up, holding the foam bullet to his heart, laughing and moaning at once, "you shot me, I'm hit, I'm hit!"

Wednesday's prompt

noreply@blogger.com (The Moderator) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 03:43:00 +0000

Continuing our observance of National Poetry Month, a small snippet from a poem about blackbirds:

Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Observe the Sky Begin to Blanch

noreply@blogger.com (Katie) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 03:28:00 +0000

I stumble into the desert and keep stumbling forward just to try to escape the darkness that lurks even beyond my own eyelids. It is only hours before my wounds and thirst overtake me and I collapse to my knees, parched as a lover denied, just as the sun reaches its apex and spills pure white light onto the sky, the sand, my own red and blistered flesh.

For one such as I who has always feared the dark, there can be no greater blessing than to die in this way - eyes closed, but still full of light.

Observe the sky begin to blanch

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:56:00 +0000

The months of accreted data, notes, plotted graphs taken from the high, lone telescope in the Andes does not lie: she has proof, certain proof that the white mantle of the Milky Way is spilling from its mold, billowing into space. The world has to know, and her newfound mission takes its toll on her life, beginning with the stressful opprobrium of her peers, then the loss of her grants, her position, her marriage.... And in the end, as more data pours in, it grows painfully clear that she was not quite right and not quite wrong, but had ultimately staked a revolution on hardly an evolutionary footnote, made a waste of her life for the semblance of the shifting shape of the haunting light of distant stars, no more.

Monday's prompt

noreply@blogger.com (The Moderator) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 13:16:00 +0000

The prompt for Monday is a spare line the fictional (and aged) poet in a play:

Observe the sky begin to blanch

Tennessee Williams, Night of the Iguana