A Feast for the Senses

Warning: Strong Language, Mature Themes.

A writing prompt focusing on the five senses.

Caronia is a feast for the senses. A bangling, rambling, smoking, conniving, gamboling, gesticulating, flatulating, festooning, simmering, careening stewpot of the known world. If you can’t find it in Caronia, it isn’t to be found, and if it can be found, it can be bought, and if it can be bought it can be bedazzled and then sold again at four times the price. I tell the willing rubes that I was born here and know this saucy wench of a city like the back of my own cod, but only the latter is truthfulness. I came here like all the rest with gimbals in my eyes, searching for the city of spangles and thrice-fried dumplings, and found all I was looking for and none of it. Once you shiv yourself in between her bosoms, Caronia both loves you and shits down your throat. She feeds you perfect cherries on lotus blossoms with one hand and crushes your walnuts with the other. But she’s mine and I’m hers like a bubo shaped like the Mother Mary.

Fowl/Foul Peace/Piece: (3 min)

Theme for this session's prompts was horrid homonyms.
A foul moon hung in a sky of bloody clouds. Out of the night a single white goose flew and landed upon the countess’s windowsill. It was Roving, the white fowl of the east, and often it was the herald of peace, but not tonight. This night when the countess retrieved the bird it was sickly and thin. Feathers dropped from its wings like pieces of fine silk and fell to the floor as she placed it in a basket. She had to summon her marshal from the green lands. The peace was broken, war had come.

Yesterday My Forehead Had the Number Nine on It, Today it is Eight

Timed writing prompt.

I am not crazy. I am not crazy. I am not crazy!

My eyes are closed and I’m doing deep breathing exercises and trying to calm my mind. This is not happening. Breathe in. Yesterday was just a bad dream. Breathe out. I open my eyes. The number eight is still drawn on my forehead as if in ash. Yesterday the number was nine. No it wasn’t. I turn on the tap and fill my hands with water and splash it on my face over and over. First it’s cold, but soon it is hotter than I can stand and I have to stop and turn it colder.

I take the nubbin of soap and work up a thick, white lather in my hands then press them to my dripping forehead and scrub and scrub and scrub. Minutes, pass. My face feels raw. I stop and rinse my face again and again and again. Finally, I turn the water off and glance up at the glass. My face stares back at me, the smeary grey number unchanged. I press my palms against my eyes until I see flashes of light in the darkness. When I take my hands away and blink until the afterimages fade, the eight is still there.

Only it’s not. Of course it’s not. It wouldn’t make any sense if it was. It didn’t make sense yesterday and it doesn’t make sense today.

“I am not crazy!” I scream at the mirror.

“I am not crazy!” the mirror screams back.

Design Your Very Own Superhero

Writing prompt (4 minutes).

I am Whisper. I am the shadow in the corner of your eye. I am the flickering of candlelight and the soft tickle of wind in your ear. My voice is breathe carried to the far corners of the earth. I could be struck down by a child, crushed beneath a mound of feathers, yet I am powerful. I am the words in your head. I am the angel on the shoulders of demons. I am the conscience of the night. With small sounds I hold the darkness at bay and tip the souls of humanity towards the light. I am an echo of goodness. I am Whisper..

Chairs and Pears, Pairs of Gears, People Upstairs

One of our weekly writing prompts.

Granny’s house is a strange place. The main floor seems normal. There’s a rocking chair in the living room with an orange and gold afghan draped over the back and a sofa that has ugly flowered upholstery. The kitchen is tiny and there is always a bowl of yellow pears in the middle of the miniature table. Her bedroom is also on the main floor and not too interesting except for the cuckoo clock on the wall that ticks and grinds and makes all sorts of noises, and then on the hour, the little wooden cuckoo explodes through the painted doors and screeches its mechanical coo.

But these are the normal things. It’s the people who live upstairs who are strange. The first thing that’s strange about them is that Granny tells me they aren’t there even though she has pictures of them in frames on the mantel. The second thing that’s strange about them is that they never seem to sleep. When I visit Granny I sleep in a bed upstairs, but even when I wake up in the middle of the night the people are awake and staring. They don’t talk much, the people upstairs. That is the third strange thing about them. When they do speak their lips don’t move. I think that is also strange.

There’s also a cuckoo clock upstairs, but there are two cuckoos in it, one is white and one is black. The white one cuckoos on the hour, but the other only cuckoos when someone dies, like when cousin Emma was sleep walking and fell down the stairs. I only heard it cuckoo then.

The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains... [style: Literary Fiction]

Writing prompt inspired by the title of a Neil Gaiman short story.

I remember that day better than most of my hot, dry summer childhood days sitting on my Grandfather’s porch. The flies were particularly bad that year despite the draught and they alighted on his liver-spotted knuckles as he dozed in the wicker rocking chair. I made a game of catching them and putting them in a jar like you might do with fireflies. I even pretended they were fireflies until my mother found them and made me let them go out by the barn.

But that day, even the fly catching had lost its appeal in the baking heat, and I’d resigned myself to stretching out on the dusty boards of the covered porch try to somehow get away from myself to stay cool. My grandfather had roused then and began rocking like he’d not stopped while he napped. He took a sip of watered down ice tea, its ice cubes having long since melted, and then gazed down at me and cleared his throat.

“The truth,” he began in deep tones like tractor tires over gravel, “is a cave in the black mountains.”

Somehow, even as a small child, I knew that his words would someday be of great import to me, and I listened, rapt, to the secrets that spilled from his withered lips.

The Consequences of that Demonstration for Good or Ill

Part 3 of 3 of a multipart prompt.

The smart thing to do would’ve been to laugh and give a wink towards the man who had been heckling Katrina earlier, fling the hand backstage, and then immediately pull something else out of the hat to distract the audience. That would’ve been the smart thing. What Katrina actually did was drop the hat and chuck the hand away from her as fast and as hard as she could, right into the audience. The chaos was rapid and complete. The audience was no longer an audience, it was a hysterical mob. Katrina watched in horror as grown men trampled little old ladies in their haste to get just a little bit further from the severed hand. Women screamed, some fainted, their children getting swept away in the tide of patrons trying to exit the theater. Katrina backed up slowly and slipped behind the curtain.

A Demonstration of Good Faith

Warning: Some gore.

Part 2 of a 3 part prompt.

“It’s fine, it’s fine, we just need a few more minutes.” Simon appeared way to calm for the situation.

“What am I supposed to do for a few more minutes?” Katrina threw her arms wide for emphasis.

Simon glanced around and then plucked up the blood spattered top hot. Wiping it off with the cast-offs from the “never-ending handkerchief”, he handed it to Katrina. “Magic.”

Reluctantly, she took the black hat. It was heavy, like it was filled with lead, and immediately she had to put a hand under it to keep the brim from slipping out of her grasp. “What the hell do you mean magic? I’m a stage hand, not a magician!”

A Difficult Explanation to a Suspicious Audience

Warning: Strong Language.

Part 1 of a 3 part prompt.

Simon shoved Katrina out in front of the curtain. The audience murmured in alarm under the house lights. Only a few patrons had noticed her. Fighting the urge to flee, she swallowed hard and made ready her performance voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Let me assure you that it is but a minor technical difficulty that is holding up our performance for you tonight, and that we are doing everything that we can to remedy the issue and continue the performance.”

The crowd quieted some, but not everyone was satisfied.

“That guy lost a hand! I saw it! How’s he going to do the rest of the magic show with one hand!?”

Katrina stiffened, but kept the placating smile on her face. “Sir, please. A minor technical difficulty is what we are dealing with.”

“Minor amputation is more like it!”

“Please, sirs, ladies, take you seats. I assure you that the performance will be continuing in just a few moments. Thank you for your patience.” Katrina ducked back behind the curtain. “Dammit Simon! They’re not buying it.”

The Sensation on My Skin was Unbelievable

Part 4 of 4 of a multipart prompt dealing with the senses.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t know that Yellowstone was dangerous. Hell, just a few weeks ago some guy got eaten by a bear. But what doesn’t make the headlines like the bear attacks are all the people who are horribly burned each year by the thermal features. Even with warning signs, imbeciles still step across barriers and jump over railings and scald their fingers sticking them into boiling pools. I heeded all of the warning signs. There weren’t even supposed to be any thermal features where I was hiking, but I guess I found a new one. Hiking off trail isn’t forbidden in the park, but they do assume that any idiot who does it at least half-way knows what they’re doing, and I did. Bear spray, rig to hang my food, spade to bury my…well you get the picture. Doesn’t matter. If the park has it in for you, you’re going to die. That’s what they tell you anyway, in the park orientation. Everyone scoffs, but it’s true.

I’m walking along, shouting “bear, bear, bear” and then I’m burning, the sensation on my skin was unbelievable, incredible heat, like embracing the sun, and the pain, oh God. It was only later they told me I’d stepped into a thermal pool. Guess the park had it in for me.
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I Had Their Scent, It was Hard to Describe

Warning: Mild grotesque horror

Part 3 of 4 of a multi part prompt dealing with the senses.

I’m not some two bit tracker. I don’t put an ear to the ground and tell you that someone passed this way ‘not but an hour ago’. I’ve been blessed…or cursed. Depends on how you look at it, though today there was only one way to look at it. The creatures we were trailing were about as foul a thing as I had yet encountered. I had their scent to be sure, but it was hard to describe: rotten blood sausage, three day old standing sewage from a dysentery camp, a microwaved Chihuahua? Never before had my sensitive nose had to withstand such ongoing offenses.

“Yeah, they came this way.”

The hunter grunted. “Didn’t really need you to tell me that.”

We were standing over remains, though of what unfortunate animal, there wasn’t enough left intact to say.
“Sure, but I can also say that they stopped here about an hour ago and are heading southeast at approximately 12 miles an hour.”

“How in the crap do you know any of that?”

“Do you really want me to explain it to you or do you want to go kill these things?”

Sounds Became Intense, I Heard Everything

Part 2 of 4 of a multi-part writing prompt dealing with the senses.

Standing in line, waiting to board that infamous ride, all the sounds of the amusement park suddenly sprouted around with a blossoming intensity. I heard everything. I heard a barker at Prize Alley trying to get a young couple to play that game with the squirt guns. I heard the individual scream of a blond on the Gemini as the trains raced over a hill. I heard a child crying for more ice cream at one of the concession stands. But more important, I heard the ride. I heard the creaking of the metal support beams and the chunk of the over-greased gears. I heard a soft whine in the cable that pulled the car up to the top of the tower and the groan of the tower itself as it swayed in the wind. Finally, unmistakably, I heard the bolt shear and go pinging off into the ether as the car plummeted down with no stopping mechanism..

Blindness Set In, I Couldn’t See

First of four writing prompts themed around senses.

Sinking, sinking into the deep. The hardest part is just letting yourself drift down through the water away from the light. At first there are a few fish to catch my attention, but out here, in the middle, that’s all you get. After that, it’s nothing but empty water all around getting darker and darker until…the blindness sets in. I can’t see an inch in front of my face and through I’m in the sub, I can still feel the pressure of the water outside as the pressure gages adjust a fraction too slowly. You would think there’d be all sorts of glowing buttons and dials, but not in this sub. In this sub everything is dark, no automatic lights either inside or out. This sub is “The Hunter” and our prey is shy.

Writing Exercises (Prompts) - Locations: Places with Atmosphere

Some timed writing prompts to get the creative juices flowing. Take the phrase and run with it within the time limit.

Warm Up

• I felt a chill go up my spine. (1m)
• I stubbed my toe on a golem’s foot. (2m)

Main

• The hotel had a history as rich and varied as its former owners. (9m)
• A dreary place full of lost dreams and shattered hopes. (8m)
• Glorious ruins that evoked inspiring emotions and epiphanies. (8m)

Final

• Lime in the Coconut! An Umbrella by the Sea! (4m)

The Person Finally Arrives at Their Destination but is Disappointed or Surprised by What They Find There

Part 3 of 3 of a multi-part prompt in which the heroine attempts to find her own adventure.

I sprinted away from the grinning, stripy, half-cat through the trees, wincing as the pain in my ankle increased exponentially. Finally, unable to run any longer, I stumbled to a stop in a clearing and sat on a felled tree. Elevating my ankle onto the tree, I decided here would be an okay place to rest until I found my adventure. Maybe, my ankle would be better in the morning. A man hiked out of the woods across the clearing from me. He was tall, dark, and handsome. Now this would be okay, I could do with a little prince charming, I thought. He saw me and stopped.

“Oh no, you must get away from here, run!”

“What?”

He doubled over in pain and then fell to the ground. I tiptoed over to him, and heard a growl. It was then that I noticed the large, white full-moon above the trees. And then I noticed sharp teeth.

Writing Exercises (Prompts) - Diverse Personalities

Some timed writing prompts to get the creative juices flowing. Take the phrase and run with it within the time limit.

Warm Up

• I could see the finish line. (1m)
• One sounds, two sounds, three cacophony. (3m)

Main

• A person who is very positive about life. (6m)
• A person who is very negative about life. (6m)
• A person who accepts the grey nature of life. (6m)

Final

• The three meet on a coach that breaks down in the middle of the desert. (6m)

The Person Struggles to Get Back on the Road

Part 2 of 3 of a multi-part writing prompt in which our heroine attempts to find her own adventure.

“Can I get you a cup of tea?” asked the caterpillar.
“Definitely not. I better go before the lawyers come.”
“Suit yourself.”
I struggled back out the door and left the labyrinth behind me. My ankle still stung, but I had to get going or I would never get to my adventure. The woods ahead were dark and deep, but there was a well-kept path between the giant gnarled trunks. A little ways along I even found a good walking stick to help keep the weight off of my ankle. Time wore on and the path wandered until finally giving up the goat and disappearing altogether.
“Uh oh.”
“What’s the matter?”
I looked around but saw no one.
“Who said that?”
“Why, I did.”
I finally spied a pair of eyes and a wide white-toothed smile in the crook of a nearby tree.
“Oh no.”
“What’s the problem?” asked the Cheshire cat becoming more corporeal by the second.
“I’ve lost my way.”
“Impossible. All the ways around here belong-“
“-To the queen of hearts, I know, I know. Crap.”

A Person Sets Out on a Long Journey, but the Journey is Interrupted

Part 1 of 3 of a multi-part writing prompt in which our heroine attempts to find her own adventure.

They say every journey begins with the first step. Well I took that first step, twisted my ankle and fell into a mud puddle. Some adventurer I was. As I sat on a rock rubbing my ankle a brightly colored caterpillar sidled up beside me.
“Good Morning!”
“Don’t know what’s so good about it.”
“Awe, don’t talk like that, Miss. The clouds have gone away and soon the sun will dry that muddy water in your hair right up.”
“Great.”
The caterpillar began whistling a jaunty tune.
“Um, can you not do that,” I said putting a little weight on my ankle to test it and being rewarded with a stabbing pain. “I’m really not in the mood.”
“Fine, fine.”
I began limping away.
“Er, don’t mean to be nosy, but where are you off to?”
“I’m trying to get to the castle beyond the goblin city,” I said.
“Oooh dear.”
“What?”
“Nothing, it’s just that, well, you can’t get there from here.”
I hobbled back over to the caterpillar.
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s copyright infringement.”
I looked around at the setting and the glittery, high stone walls.
“I see your point.”

The Other Person Goes East, Looking for Something They’d Lost

Part 3 of 3 of a multi-part prompt that I made into an homage for Ian Tregillis's latest angelic noir novel Something More Than Night.

I didn’t want to take the sword, but Gabriel isn’t a Seraphim you argue with, so I took it and stowed it before my jitters could unmake a sound principle of physics.

“Where are you off to?”

Gabriel looked beyond me to the rising of a hundred million suns. “I must fortify the essence of religious sanctity, make pure the rivulets of undying devotion, and find my car keys.”

“I thought you said that this wasn’t a time for jokes, Sir.”

Gabriel turned his gazes back to me. “Who’s joking?”

With that he vanished and took a small child’s wonder with him. Having no intention of actually braving the deeps, I decided to camp out a while in the dark matter on the metaphoric end of the spectral universe.

The First Person Goes South, Taking Something They Shouldn’t Have

Part 2 of 3 of a multi-part prompt that I made an homage to Ian Tregillis's latest angelic noir novel, Something More Than Night.

Gabriel gave me that look he has, you know, the one that begets fusion and melts crusts of planets. I didn’t like that look.

“Sir?”

He put a talon on my shoulder or what would have been my shoulder if I actually had shoulders. His mere touch buzzed through me like lightning cutting through atoms to make ozone.

“We need you to infiltrate the Deeps, Thuriel. We must have the first strike.”

I’m not much of a hard hitter by way of angelic beings, I’m more of a weaver of mathematical improbabilities, so Gabriel’s words unnerved me. They caused a gaping maw of fear to open in my representation of guts, but I plastered it over with indignation.

“Uh, why me, Boss? I don’t even own a flaming sword.”

Gabriel reached into robes glowing with the light of a thousand dying planets and withdrew a sword swathed in flames brighter than the plasma in the center of a baby star.

“Here, take mine.”
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