Second Campainger Challenge

Quite an interesting challenge we have this week! We had five prompts this time, and the ability to use some of them or all of them using various writing guides. Complete info on the challenge can be found on Rachel's blog.

The activities I chose are:

1. Write a pitch/logline for a book based on the prompts (less than 100 words)
2. Write a short story/flash fiction piece of less than 200 words based on the prompts
3. Write a story/poem in five sentences, each sentence based on one of the prompts

And I decided to go with these challenges:

• Complete at least three of the activities and tie them all together with a common theme (feel free to either state the theme in your post or leave us to guess what it might be)
• Write in a genre that is not your own

Here are my pieces, feel free to interpret them how you wish. They are in the order I wrote them: poem, flash fiction, logline.

Silence fell through my Hands and Crashed at my Feet

We sit here together, and the only thing to cover us and keep us safe

is something that’s also on its way to decay.

We’ve become monsters who can only hide in the shadows

while children who can still dream play in the sun.

A long time ago the bubble burst and there was nothing there to catch us

so we shattered into a million shards.

Like forlorn souls, we sift through the wreckage

trying to find pieces of ourselves, but we’ve fallen too far.

I close my eyes as you stroke my hair, but instead of darkness, all I can see is fractured light;

a memory of all the things we let fall through our hands.

*

We used to think running away would solve our problems; that if we ran far enough we could find happiness and forget everything we left behind. But the only thing we’ve found is darkness thicker than what we used to know.

There was another bridge, in another life, where a little boy played for hours and all he knew of nightmares were things that weren’t really lurking under his bed. Does he still play there? Or like me, does he just stare at the water feeling like his heart burst in his chest, and even though he bleeds, he must live on?

I feel like a beggar, leaning on someone who bleeds for me, but who can’t give me light. I ran for him, but I am raked with regrets. Now, whenever I dream, it’s not people or places I see, but explosions of color like fireworks that remind me that when the light fades, the impenetrable night sky remains.

“What are you thinking about?”

“My son.” He holds me closer, but I’m still cold. “Do you think he still plays on the bridge?”

I thought I was suffocating then; now I truly know what it’s like to not breathe.

*

Aura was suffocating in a marriage that broke her in every way; her only joy being her son and a forbidden romance with her childhood friend, Micah, whose poverty put him far below Aura’s class. When Micah convinces Aura to run away with him, her desperation to be with him sends them into a world they soon realize they are not prepared to face. Weighed down by Aura’s regret for leaving her son, and their inability to support themselves, Aura and Micah may soon realize that happiness is what they left behind.