Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“The whirlpool sucked them downwards”

Aeli floated through the air. The parachute held her aloft, descending unnaturally slowly. Around her, the storm spun, and below her the sea roiled. Angry caps of gray water shot up. They came closer and closer, and she had the distinct feeling that they were reaching for her. Far off, she saw the ship descend in flaming glory into the sea. She would never know what had gone wrong. Blue and green lightning flashed all around.

She floated into the ocean, and the chute came down over her, trapping her against the water. She gasped, trying to pull air and the sea boiled around her. The water began to spin, with a strong clockwise motion. The whirlpool sucked her downwards. She contemplated if she did believe in an afterlife. Her sight began to grow dim, and she felt the burning, salty water enter her nose.

Something wrapped tightly around her ankle—something strong and something living. She imagined it like the tentacle of Ursula from that old Disney movie. The purple tentacle wrapped around her ankle, suction-cup strong, and pulled her down. She imagined she heard the fat villain laughing and peering at her ugly hench fish. Then the world didn’t exist anymore.

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Aeli woke, coughing sea water, in a cave of crystal. Soft light filtered in from all around her. She was naked, and she was cold.

Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“What if a disease that causes schitzophrenia became common?”

The man on the far corner screamed at the sky. Little Alicia pointed at him and laughed. “Daddy, that man is funny.” I pull her back from the curb harder than I intend to and she starts to cry. Somebody else will call this one in, probably. I pull Alicia and Tania behind me, against their protests. When they’re older, they’ll understand. I hope, I really hope, that when they’re older, this will just be another terrible chapter in history like the yellow fever of Memphis or the swine flu.

The schitz strikes men more often than women. The latest statistics suggest 5% of adult men have been stricken, and 2.5% of adult women. Nobody really knows why. Only about 10% ever recover. Unlike many more ignorable maladies, the schitz first struck in the wealthier classes. Scientists think it first became widespread through air travel. They say that the sickness doesn’t actually have a gender preference, but that businessmen are more common and thus were more stricken. I’m skeptical. The old disease, schitzophrenia, which this one so strongly resembles, selected for men. I’ve seen many of my old classmates go down to the illness.

I tighten my mask. Alicia’s has slipped down and she is fingering her nose. I swat her hand and pull her mask back up. The kids don’t see it, which is frightening and heartening. Maybe they will make it through these times not much worse for the wear. We walk, rather than take the tram, which is empty, back to the flat on the edge of town.

Sometimes I want to write, but I don’t have a great idea or I’m not in the mood to write something grand and perfect. I just want to write something. When I was working on my novel draft, I was writing 1500 words a day, and afterwards, I felt like a better writer than before. I learned to be in the habit of just sitting down and getting to it and worrying later.

I felt like I could do the same thing with writing prompts. I scoured the web, and a lot of what I found felt more like writing exercises than prompts– I wanted something to run with and retreat into a brief, if perhaps hastily formed, fictional realm.

So I decided I can make up my own writing prompts.

On different days, I can focus on different aspects of writing–beautiful language, or character development, or world-building, or economy of words, or plain weirdness. And I end up with a couple hundred words I can take and mold into something better, or that I can chuck. I do them on a timer, so far of 5-7 minutes, so I can fit them into any day, no matter how hectic.

Unlike fiction I intend to publish, I can share this with others through the blog. I’d love to see what others do with the prompts too. Just link me so I can enjoy it too.

Today’s 7 minute prompt is “The Child yelled at the monkey”. I’ve posted mine below, for your pleasure. I will post these at noon on Thursdays. (Edited only to remove several horrific typos!)

The child yelled at the monkey, and waved his doughy arms about. I looked around for this tiny miscreant’s guardian. About twenty feet away stood a man, thoroughly absorbed by his hand held electronic device. I watched smugly from my bench, safely out of the radius of any potential mayhem, eating a frozen lemon sorbet. The child’s taunts increased, and so too did the monkey’s rage. This culminated finally in the flinging of certain odoriferous weapons. The many-creased child shrieked and fled. The wayward father scolded him. I smiled slightly. Then the monkey looked me sternly in the eye. I didn’t think it could throw this far, but perhaps I ought to go elsewhere.

I wandered on, and again observed the husky child, his bright yellow shirt now tarnished with certain unpleasant organics. This time he leaned over the tiger pit. He waved, like he had at the monkey. The tigers roared and the air seemed to quaver. Maybe the child had a talent for enraging beasts. Again, the father didn’t seem to notice. He was certainly inattentive, but perhaps the rage of animals around his child simply wasn’t abnormal. Curious, I decided to stalk them a little. Every animal seemed incensed by the existence of this child; the polar bears, the penguins, the giraffes, even the turtles. I had read papers proposing ESP, a sort of ability to read emotions and probabilities. Maybe this kid had a sort of Extrasensory Irritation Factor. I had to admit, upon examination, that watching the kid made my blood boil slightly, and watching the animals hate him was exciting. Perhaps his father could only bear his presence by so dedicatedly ignoring him.