Greetings, South County Writers!
Set your timers for 20 minutes and give these prompts a try:
Belief can be salvation or destruction…
I’m drowning in strangers…
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 
His post reads, “I’m drowning in strangers!”
The post is accompanied by color-saturated photos of a night club in Brazil with selfies and emojis meant to convey that drowning in strangers is the BEST.THING.EVER.–which is the nature of most vacation and travel posts. They’re all designed to inspire a kind of happy envy that someone you know has crossed the rubicon and left behind the usual pictures of food or cats doing silly things.
Beth loves pictures of cats doing silly things. In fact, she follows entire media streams that are of nothing but grumpy or silly or hateful or asshole cats. Silly cat photos are a genuine bright spot in her days. And she doesn’t usually begrudge anyone the posts they choose to share: humble brags and not so humble brags, tidings of joy or woe. But the Brazil post gets under her skin.
“Drowning in strangers,” she says, under her breath. “What’s so great about that?”
And then later, when she’s vigorously scrubbing coffee stains out of her husband’s ceramic mugs that she’s collected from spots all over the house, she thinks, truly, that’s so ridiculous. Aren’t we all drowning in strangers, these days?
She has 376 friends on Facebook, which is the middling number of a media dabbler. Some of her ‘friends’ are family by blood, others former classmates or cubicle sharers. Some followed her after she said something funny, once, perhaps hoping she would do it again.
She knows that Facebook is the land of the dinosaurs-or worse, the petrified swamp bones of an age already gone by. Her daughter reminds her of this daily, while texting in a language so hacked and truncated it barely seems like English. And when Beth dares to ask what something means, she’s treated like a tourist wearing socks with her sandals and a fanny pack around her waist. (20 min)
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