After the success of my last writing prompt-based post, I have decided to make a serious move into the Writing from Prompts space: Monetary Investment. Specifically, $5.49 spent on a book entitled “303 Writing Prompts: Ideas to Get You Started”, written by Bonnie Neubauer.

Thank you to whomever sold this to Half Price-Books in Olathe, I would like to both state my appreciation and ask what the black gunk that had accumulated on the front cover was. Regardless, I will begin from the start. I think my plan is to go in sequential order, working off of whatever the prompt says until I reach some sort of point of conclusion, at which point I’ll put the thing on the site. I will continue to do this, interspersed with regular updates, until I either think I don’t need this anymore, come to the end of the book, or lose the book. I will not skip prompts, even if what I get out of them is of poor quality.

These prompts, from what I can tell, are borne of several genres. Some of them will prompt fiction, some of them will prompt reflection, and I haven’t read that far ahead to tell if there’s anything like poetry or news writing or songwriting or throat singing or multimedia CD-Rom game-writing prompted, and I don’t intend to spoil the surprise for myself.

We begin from Prompt #1:

Your story begins with two people standing on an oriental carpet.

From there, it asks five questions – Where are they? Why are they there? What are they doing? Who are they? And what happens to them?

I can’t tell if the prompt is just for me to answer those questions or for me to write out the scene. Also, I think it was an interesting move for Neubauer to put the ‘who’ question, traditionally the first of the five Ws, in fourth. I will intentionally work through the exercise that way. I’m also going to write the story, but I’ll put the little brainstorming bit at the bottom of the entry to avoid spoiling the story which follows.

—

Two Freshmen collapsed into hand-me-down recliners amid heavy sighs. Two pairs of shoes – A pair of Pumas, its once cherry-red suede having faded into more of a burgundy, teetering dangerously close to straight-up brown over months of daily driving, and a pair of nearly-pristine Stan Smiths, the white leather of which still seemed to shine in toto save for a fresh brown splotch flanking the of the front-most Adidas stripe on the outside of the right shoe – plodded onto the rug beneath, punctuating both the accompanying sighs and collapses. The index finger of Aidan Grayson, 19 years-old, undeclared major from one of the posher of the Cincinnati suburbs, descended upon the splotch.

“And something got on my shoe, too?” he said, continuing a conversational thread the two had begun in the upstairs living room minutes prior, which had been abandoned somewhere midway down the steps at the sound of the door to the main floor closing, serving itself as a sort of concluding punctuation to confirm that the party the other three housemates had decided to throw that evening, indeed, sucked, and that the only salve for the evening sat in the disc tray of Aidan’s XBOX 360 at the edge of the oriental rug at the center of the basement.

Aidan picked at the spot, finding it mercifully dry and lenient as it crumbled off onto a line splitting fields of cream and maroon on the rug’s surface. His gaze lingered for a moment on the lines twisting into something like a mushroom shape beneath his feet. “This is a weird carpet, Doug. Never really looked at it like this.”

Doug Posts, also 19, also undeclared, but from a decidedly less-posh suburb of Columbus, estimated where Aidan aimed his gaze and tried to match it. “It’s certainly anachronistic, isn’t it?”

Aidan hinged his neck to make eye-contact. “The hell does that, agh–” He had figured asking the question from that pose, his spine hyper-slouched and his head at about a 120-degree tilt, would bring some kind of comedic effect to his question, but a pain started to creep up from a nerve in his back, interrupting him to jackknife back up into a resting position that fit the ergonomics of the twice-handed-me-down Lay-Z-Boy one of the other guys had brought in from an uncle’s house. “Sorry. The hell does anagramistic mean?”

“Anachronistic,” said Doug, with the vocal posturing of somebody who had known the word for years rather than having just read it in a short story for English 101 two mornings prior, “it means, like, ‘out of place.’ This is a Persian rug that my mom got from our old next-door neighbors and it’s in the middle of this very,” he struggled to come up with the right word for the atmosphere surrounding him, having yet to digest the word ‘sophomoric’ or to recontextualize ‘adolescent’ for this purpose, eventually finishing with “non-Persian basement.”

He gestured with an open palm to the walls around them, their wood-paneling nearly (but in the eyes of an art-school girlfriend Doug would later meet, uncannily far from) identical in their Oak-brown hue to that of the actual hardwood floors beneath the rug, eclectically adorned with posters – one promoting the 2010 Ohio Bobcats football schedule, with losses and wins marked in black sharpie up through week 11; one promoting Hawthorne Heights’ album If Only You Were Lonely, available at Borders Bookstores on February 28th, 2006; one of Ken Griffey Jr. in a gray sleeveless Cincinnati Reds jersey, his baggy crimson sleeves ruffled from the force of his swing, his eyes trained on the outfield wall; one signed “TO MY BIGEST [sic] FAN!” over the abs of Scott Steiner as he held the TNA Impact title belt aloft, – none of them framed, all fastened to the wall with strips of beige masking tape that crossed diagonally over their corners.

Aidan nodded in pretended comprehension of Doug’s point and picked up their one wireless controller, holding in the chrome “X” button at the controller’s center until his XBOX whirred to life. “Well, I’m glad to be down here anyway. We ought to find the sharpie and mark a big ‘L’ over Kent State on the football schedule. Who’s big idea was it to host a watch party tonight, anyway?”

“Originally Tyler’s,” Doug responded, fumbling for the sharpie at the foot of his chair to mark what was clear to be the result of the evening, even if a full quarter of football remained to be played, “he convinced Jeff first, then got me on board when he claimed it’d be like five or six guys he knows from the saxophone section in the band and one or two guys from the Racquetball club. I mean, he was right, we could’ve won the MAC East tonight.”

“That’s way more than eight people up there right now, though.”

“Yeah, definitely. I think the invite jumped from Tenor saxes only to include Alto saxes, then even broke through to the clarinets, I guess all the reeded woodwinds have like a sort of mutual social bond, then Jeff’s brother, as like a requirement if he was gonna buy a couple cases of Bud, got invited with his girlfriend and his roommates. I think it is just the two Racquetball Club guys, though.”

Aidan shrugged. “However many it is, it’s more than we figured, and only like a third of them even care about the game, and they’re miserable over it. Meanwhile the others just want to hang out, so they’re like over-partying to try to overpower the sadness from the few people that care about the game still. That energy turned real weird up there after halftime.” Aidan hammered on the ‘A’ button to skip through the developer and publisher splash screens, introductory video, and title screen to get through to the “Play Now” menu of FIFA 11.

He thumbed with unambiguous focus through team logos until he came upon the red devil adorning the crest of Manchester United. He immediately started fiddling with the team’s lineup as Doug leant down to pick up their other controller, this one connected by a mossy green wire to a flap on the console’s front. With similar unambiguous intent, but at a deliberately controlled speed, and a developing smirk, he flipped through national flags, down the alphabet, passing over England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain until he found the stars-and-stripes of the USA.

“Oh, don’t pick the fucking Crew again, Doug.”

Doug’s smirk curled into full form as the banana-yellow crest and its three hard-hatted talismans appeared on screen. “I can’t pick my hometown boys?”

Aidan rolled his eyes. “Whatever. I just want a fair match is all.”

“Dude, this is me actually making it a fair match. That one time I picked Fulham, I beat you by like three goals.”

The difference had actually been four goals, but Aidan found no point in correcting him. He tapped the start button, the XBOX groaned as it brought up the game’s loading screen. The game’s audio dropped out, leaving only the muffled staccato bass of the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” to reverberate through the ceiling from a roommate’s Sony XPlode Boombox upstairs.

He bent back down to examine his shoe for remaining residue, finding none. An odd glint off the overhead fluorescent light reflected black at him from the edge of the rug. He dug a finger beneath the carpet and dragged the inciting object out, the pad of his forefingers gripping what turned out to be the glossy surface of a Polaroid photo print. Two strangers, a man and a woman, both a few years older than him from his estimation, grinned back through his fresh fingerprints. They wore matching green shirts emblazoned with “OHIO UNIVERSITY GRADUATION” on the chest and “CLASS OF” followed by a smudge that he couldn’t make out, holding identical red cans of either Coca-Cola or Budweiser.

He held the picture up to Doug. “What the hell is this?”

“Looks like a Polaroid,” said Doug. The game screen shifted over to a virtual re-creation of Old Trafford stadium, loaded to the brim with polygonal red-clad fans, alongside an unrealistically sizeable chunk of Crew supporters, who Doug figured would not have actually made the trip across the Atlantic for a mere friendly.

“Well, yeah, I know that. How’d it get under your rug, though? Do you recognize those people?”

Doug shook his head and efforted a pensive frown while mumbling, “No, can’t say I do. Are you gonna kick off?” Aidan’s Cristiano Ronaldo avatar stood with a foot on the ball in the midfield circle.

“In a sec, man. I can’t believe you’re not as confused by this as I am. Maybe it got stuck to the bottom of the rug when you were moving it?” Aidan brought his hand down to the edge of the rug and rolled it up in search of adhesive residue, finding none. The floor beneath revealed a trove of photo prints, maybe seven or eight just under the corner he’d lifted up. There were more polaroids, some 3×5 prints, a few 4×6 prints, and one of those little ones that you’re supposed to keep in a fold in your wallet. Again, he recognized none of the subjects printed on the glossy paper in front of him.

There were more serendipitous shots of happy college-aged couples, plus solo senior photos, school picture day portraits, a group shot from within a bowling alley, a trio of teenagers in caps and gloves at Jacobs Field, a woman wearing a wizard’s hat playing a saxophone, and one family of four with wind-swept hair and hands desperately grasping the handles of the Aerosmith ride at Disney World. He looked up to Doug, whose eyes were conspicuously focused on the TV. At some point while Aidan’s eyes were averted, the game automatically kicked off for him, allowing Doug to easily dispossess a vacant, unmoving Wayne Rooney and run Robbie Rogers through the uncontrolled United defenses for an opening goal. The digital Rogers was midway through a celebratory Stanky Leg when Aidan finally looked up.

“Doug!” he said, met by a slow turn of the neck and what looked like a parodic display of astonishment (eyes bugged out, mouth abnormally agape) from his roommate. “First of all, not cool to score on me when I’m not even looking. Second of all, what the hell is all this? The first one, I could understand as a mistake or a coincidence, but this is like a collection of random photographs we got stashed under your rug here!”

Doug’s eyes never quite made it back from bugged-out to natural, though he closed his mouth and hummed out a triplet of notes intended to evoke an “I dunno,” accompanied by a shrug so exaggerated that his shoulders touched his earlobes. A drop of sweat fought its way through his hairline and onto his forehead above his left eyebrow.

“Are these yours, Doug?” Aidan asked. The basement air, already cold and a little dank, seemed to thicken. Their shared silence took up residence in-between the auditory ambience of the room, elbowing through the unspecific singing of the virtual crowd from the TV and the percussive bassline underlying Will.I.Am’s verses from upstairs to shiver the two of them. Doug had taken too long to respond for a denial to be believed, and even if he hadn’t, the amount of eye-white he showed would’ve given him away just as well. His mouth had run dry, too; he would stammer and stumble over whichever words, truths or otherwise, were to follow.

He finally got out a feeble “y-yeah,” which barely registered above a whisper.

“Do you know these people? Are these, like, family photos?”

“Um,” Doug started to respond, trying to construct a family tree in his mind to point to, the task made more difficult by the conspicuous placement of the photos and the complexions of many of the subjects in the photos, which differed far enough from Doug’s own that it made the idea of their connection to his Anglo-Saxon familial heritage too far of a leap of logic even for a (by Doug’s estimation) fairly gullible person like Aidan to believe. He could almost physically sense the span of believability pass this time. “No. They are not.”

“Friends?”

“No.” Doug decided to drop the recursive impotence of trying and failing to come up with alibis. The initial sweat drop had fallen down over his eyebrow, around his eye socket, and onto the tip of his nose. Many more had colonized his forehead.

“So you have a collection of photos of strangers stashed under your rug here.”

Doug articulated his neck about the minimum amount possible for a nod ‘yes’ to register. The voice of Ian Darke admonished the two teams still engaged in the match for their inactivity. Sweat had begun to coalesce at the neckline of Doug’s t-shirt, darkening it from heather to charcoal gray.

“Can I ask why?”

At this moment Doug realized that his impulsive pilfering of photographs of strangers wherever he went was as socially perverse as his gut suspected. He’d hosted several cyclical, drawn-out, self-examinatory dialogues during several solo drives between Columbus and Athens over it; three-way debates between personifications of his gut, his brain, and his spine. His gut, which he imagined as sober and street-smart, recognized the activity as, at the very least, weird, and, at worst, softly sociopathic. His brain, which he imagined as teetering over the line between an ethos-laden lecturing professor and a nervously ranting scofflaw caught red-handed, made overtures towards interpreting it as just a charming quirk and imagined stories posted on r/OhioU years later retelling the legendary exploits of the photo-bandit of Athens and treating him as an eccentric wrinkle that built the atmosphere of an eccentric college town like his.

His spine, which he couldn’t fully personify with the limited vocabulary he’d built by 19, urged him to do it, to quietly slip away at house parties and scan the shelves for frames, to stash the frames in jacket pockets for concealed transport to unpopulated rooms where he’d unscrew the flap on the frame’s back and retrieve the photo, then inconspicuously replace the frame, face-down, on the shelf upon which he found it to make the crime (moreso a prank, his brain would chime) look like a minor accident, the depths of which unidentifiable until the resident cleaned up the next day. It urged him to examine the edges of the corkboard collages of photos donated by regulars at dive bars around town for the easiest targets for a surreptitious snag-and-tear off of the thumbtacks fastening them in their places. It urged him to work in thoughtless frenzies, with bespoken in-moment clarity, and towards a rush that nothing else he’d tried at 19 could match.

He found himself choked again, this time not by an inability to lie under pressure, but by an inability to articulate the truth in a fashion that anyone, let alone Aidan Grayson, could comprehend.

Three heavy thumps from upstairs broke the spell of the muddled ambient sound hanging in their basement. The music from upstairs decrescendoed to silence. Someone shouted something that sent frantic footsteps scattering across the ceiling above them. The knob on the basement door unlatched; it swung open so fast that the hinges barely had time to creak. “Cops!” shouted an unfamiliar voice as the crowd encroached on the space.

A pair of Turquoise Chuck Taylors came into view on the top stair. Aidan dropped the photo in his fingers atop Doug’s sordid pile and dragged the edge of the rug back over into its right place with the heel of his Adidas. He made eye contact with Doug for a moment, then turned to face the oncoming horde of six, status as saxophonist or clarinetist or racquetballer or kin of Jeff unclear to either of them. In the eyes of the first one off the staircase, a girl about their age clad in school-issue green, Aidan saw the same fear he saw in Doug’s a moment prior.

“You guys should’ve taken the back door,” said Doug. “There’s no exit from the basement. All anybody can do down here is hide.”

The whistle sounded for half-time.

—

Well, that was fun! I hadn’t written a short story in a good while. I think this is the third story I’ve written in a row in which the Columbus Crew are referenced. I didn’t even start with that intention here! I just thought the dregs of a sad football watch party at a MAC school in the early 2010s was an interesting setting and it grew from there.

I think many of these are fiction prompts, so I’ll probably have to exercise that part of my mind more as I continue on with the book. What follows is the promised little brainstorming bit:

Where are they? – Basement, huge rental house, college town
Why are they there? – Party going on upstairs, both have retreated to the basement
What are they doing? – Playing FIFA 07
Who are they? – Doug Posts, 19, geology major, rug owner, middle-class upbringing, low-level thief of [something flat that he hides under the rug? Photos he takes off of walls, from frames, of places he visits maybe?] / Aidan Grayson, 18, undeclared, wealthy upbringing, supplier of XBOX, parents (old money in the thumbtack industry) pay for the bulk of the rent on the house
And what happens to them? – Something must happen to them? I was thinking Doug would reveal that he’d been stealing the photos, but maybe like immediate karma hits him somehow. Water starts pouring through the AC vent on the ceiling and douses him.

Oh, no, I never used the thumbtack detail! I’ll bank it for later.