Here is a short story by
Guinevere Durado, Matt Harrison, Kelli Williams, Melanie Hilliard, Joanna Thomas White, Geof Nowak and Mike Tucker. Each of them wrote 3 sentences
without having seen anything but the last 5 words of the writing that came
before theirs.
The man’s hair grew long and
sparse and yellow-white like the sinews of a rump-roast. His flannel
shirt could not quite button over the expanse of his torso, which bulged in a
grotesque game of peek-a-boo for the occasional customer. The man
sat behind the liquor counter while his little finger excavated his fuzzy exposed
navel as he watched old NasCar races late into the night. While the
night also races across the earth, chasing the day or being chased depending
upon your preferred point of view, it sits for a moment with a woman at
Denny's, as she breathes fog onto the cool glass and doodles in it with a
finger. The finger doodle is a code.
Across the street, the code is
received.
She blinked her eyes a few
times as she tried to make out the words. A car buzzed by, its window down, its
driver languidly looking over. "I have to get home to crack this. I can't
just stand here on the street," she shoved the code in her pocket and
buttoned her coat. She hurried out the door to a street she no
longer recognized. It was a mish-mashed whirlwind of places she had forgotten –
her grandmother’s Nebraska farmhouse, the SOHO streets from her college days,
the gleaming storefront of the grocery store bursting at the seams. And as time
reared its ugly head against her shadow, she thought to raise her right arm,
and grasped the chord of the silk hot air balloon that had been hovering all
day, and was carried up into the sky.
I found myself face to face
with the birds followed by the highest tops of the tallest trees. I felt the
moisture on my skin as the atmosphere started to change. Just then the wind
started to carry me higher. In the midst of this Belforeium Conundrum, I
could not resist but reminisce about Saaz, the Sherpa with whom I shared a
brief but profound love. He knew the precise angle to cut the
cowlick on my right side. I should have just stayed in that cave
with him forever. And
that dreaded feeling that I won't survive. It's NOT the first time, for me,
it's a rush at this point. All it says to me is "let's GO, I've got
nothing to fear!”
