I needed to get out of the house, the loss of Grant overwhelming me when the kids were at school. Sleeping, self medicating, and watching movies, or non stop television shows, was most of my day. I would pull it together in time to do the grocery shopping and pick up the kids. I would clean as they did home-work, folding laundry in our little house. We all could be in different rooms but close enough not to be shut off from each other.

I was feeling like if I didn’t get outside my fog filled box, I would never, so when I got a flyer in my email about a workshop on writing prompts, I signed up, and even sent a check, to secure my spot and one dollar off coupon, as it was going to be at a coffee spot in Healdsburg one 10:00 to noon day.

I went, and the woman heading the couple of hours was sweet, from the South, I think. Her stories were more dark than you would expect. She read a few, and then asked the audience for some words: Amble, protect, wheels, barbwire, mud, pearls, and rooster were the ones that were come up with. We were then to write a story, and I took it literally and used the words. Here is my very first prompted story:

The motion of the wheels under her head did not comfort her, they did not lull her to sleep, in fact they made sleeping impossible, and the heavy breathing of the slumber around her, annoyed Margaret to no end. She had no escape from her self induced insomnia stuck in the family car, so she tried to breathe through the thoughts of brain crushing train wrecks and relax herself to sleep. For tomorrow when the rooster crowed, her life would no longer be her own.
Her mother’s pearls shown in the light, although the neck they were around unseen. At first the glimmer was concerning, unexpected, but as Margaret’s mind realized what that flash was, a sense of protection replaced the initial fear of the unknown, but then Margaret remembered she was angry at her mother, angry at the world that had certainly thrown mud at her, wrapping her in barbwire as the train ambled along, taking her further from once was to someplace unseen.
Her father was dead, and just like that, in a blink of a heart attack, “didn’t know what hit him,” Margaret was now included in the family survival, whipped out of childhood and thrust into adulthood. Part of it excited her, but the guilt of having a pleasurable feeling snuck in and she replaced it with the customary feel of fear of the unknown.

“What’s wrong sweetie?” Her mother surprised her with. Margaret didn’t answer right away. “I know you’re mad, but the silent treatment never works with me.”

“I just didn’t know you were awake that’s all.”

“Can’t sleep, your brother keeps whacking me in the face.”
Margaret laughed, which caused an unseen smile, she could feel come from the dark. The two said nothing more as they both felt the train slowing as it pulled into the next town, the next stop taking them farther away from a once simple life. She finally broke the silence.

“Are your sure this is going to work? Are you positive they’ll take the bait?”

“Nothing is ever certain when it comes to predicting the future. The past is an easy read.”

Oh god, Margaret thought, Mom was about to go into one of her long winded, sort of made sense speeches, that were best if you let her finish without interruption or she’d be here long after the rooster woke the farm.

“Your father left us with nothing but good looking DNA and a criminal past. If we keep our cool and rally together, his passing doesn’t have to end up only tragic.”

The conversation began to rustle through her brother, and her mother quieted down, as neither of them wanted him awake before dawn.

“The train will not crash, silly girl,” her mother ended the conversation with, and settled back to sleep. Her mother did know her and understood the unspoken, even if Margaret sometimes refused to believe.

Writing from prompts saved me from some murky waters. It allowed me to write without thought, for the most part, about subjects I didn’t have to come up with. It was very freeing. I worked with this form for two years, and have three full notebooks of what it was like to be in and where I was, right in the middle of death. The books I read about death were linear tellings of what it was like. That didn’t resonate with me, as my experience was fragmented. I joked with people that I now understood the time warp continuum the Enterprise was always getting in the middle of. It has been 5.5 years since Grant died and I have yet to get back to linear. Death is a trip, here’s mine.