Greetings, South County Writers!
Set your timers for 20 minutes and give these prompts a try:
That’s my worst nightmare…
His loyalty outweighed his reason…
Feel free to submit your responses in the comments section if you’re comfortable taking credit for your response.
Want to submit anonymously?
Email your prompt response to: southcountywriters@gmail.com and we’ll post it under the southcountywriters name with no other identification.
Happy writing!
southcountywriters 
That’s my worst nightmare…
After another perfectly miserable day in junior high school, I sat on the bus on the way home, turned away from the squawking and shrieking peers around me, my eyes on the huge blob of shadow racing alongside us. I imagined that shadow as a razor-sharp blade, slicing just a few inches off the ground like an unforgiving scalpel, clipping down telephone poles that go crashing into houses with a trailing fan of sparks, cleaning out pedestrians and joggers and dog walkers with gory gouts of blood, zipping through fire hydrants and leaving fountains of sparkling water behind.
There was a shout and a great tidal shift across the whole bus, and the wiry kid with the ragged red hair beside me bowled into me, pressing me up against the window, shattering my shadow-blade illusion. It returned me to the world and to my older brother’s voice, declaring to the now rapt audience, “Who’s gonna try it? Which one? You? You?”
I looked around, past that tangle of red hair, the kid shuddering with laughter, and there was my brother Fred, just a year and a half older than me, and he was holding forth a tiny bottle and saying in his commanding voice, a voice much too big for someone so young, “It’s called syrup of ipecac. It says right here on the bottle, cherry-flavored. So you know it’s good going down. Who wants to try it?”
We all stared, exchanged looks, wondering who would step forward. One of the kids, a big guy named Bobby with a great square head, asked, “What’s it supposed to do?”
Fred leveled a superior look at Bobby–it was an expression he wielded like a sniper–and said, “You don’t know?”
“It’s why I asked,” Bobby said. “What is it? Some kind of medicine?”
“Any of you know what this does?” Fred asked the staring crowd, and most of us just shook our heads, nobody wanting to answer. It was likely that somebody, maybe several somebodies, knew what syrup of ipecac did, but nobody was stupid enough to step out onto stage and guess. That was a bridge too far.
“It makes you throw up,” Fred said, turning up the heat on his superior gaze. “It’s for when you get poison in you. And when I say throw up, I mean like a firehose.”
“Why would I want to try that?” Bobby asked. “Why would–”
“I’ll try it,” I said, a little surprised to hear my own voice.
Fred turned his head, and smiled. “Really?”
“Yeah, I’ll try it. But not here.”
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Great creativity and wonderfully descriptive!
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Hi Dana, thank you so much. I have really enjoyed both the writing and the listening. So much talent in this group!
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