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| Image by Michael Podger |
Enjoy these 30- to 75-word creative scenes. Feel free to start here or at the very beginning.
4. Krystals
You discover your wallet is empty, fall into despair, and then find an extra original Krystals burger in a bag on your car’s passenger seat. You smile, and promptly crunch you inner lip before taking the first bite. You taste blood and wait a while for it to go away. Then the burger is stale anyways. It is from a bag you got the day before.
5. Man O' War Boulevard
After seeing Man O’ War Boulevard in Kentucky, you ask if every other Kentucky road you pass is named after a horse too. Star Shoot Parkway sounds likely. Bold Bidder Drive is good too. Teacher Lane does not fit your expectations, but you ask anyways. It becomes a joke, though funny only to you. You think Hazard is probably a city or county, one with no relationship to a horse at all, but now you ask just in case. Much later, you are quite pleased to learn on the Internet that more Kentucky roads are named after horses than in any other state.
6. Web
A spider web attaches to two stalks of high grass beside your bench in the park. You barely hear a gunshot on a sunny afternoon. It belongs to a hunter a half mile away in the mountains. The spider’s legs widen, alert, as the web vibrates with each shot. You keep thinking it’s a coincidence, but it isn’t.
7. Music in the Tunnel
You have never been more determined to sing along with the radio than while you pass through the Brainerd Road Tunnel out of Chattanooga, TN. As it gets dark in the tunnel, the reception is reduced to static. If you don’t keep singing, who will? The radio returns when you get out of the tunnel, and you are pleased to hear that you have kept pace with the present song. A man always stands to the left at the exit with a sign that says, “Jesus is Lord!”
8. Chocolate Mint
You spent two hours cleaning your car today, but you dare not tell anyone. People have been bugging you to clean it for years. They’ve sat on CDs in your back seat and broken them. They can easily tell how often you eat out at Krystals. They know what you read, that you haven’t returned their jumper cables from six months ago, and what the last four numbers of your credit card are from crinkled gas receipts. Then the day finally came when your best friend spilled ice cream all over the seats, so you broke down and did the mother scrubbing deed in private when no one could see. You tried not to do a good job. God forbid, if people find out that this is what it takes to make you tidy up, they’ll soon spill ice cream again.
9. The Direction of Water
You just heard that toilet bowl water doesn’t really swirl backwards in Australia; a toilet is too small to be affected by the Coriolis effect. Instead, Australian manufacturers simply point their country’s toilet water jets in the "wrong" direction. Disappointed, you decide that science will never be cool again. Then you hear that tornadoes generally do spin in opposite directions depending on the hemisphere. You suddenly desire to watch the Weather Channel and go on an adventure.
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Succinct Scenes 2013 (1-3)
Succinct Scenes 2014 (4-9)
Succinct Scenes 2015 (10-14)
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