Writing Exercise Fun II

My writers group, the Ink Slingers Guild, meets roughly every two weeks and we create super fun “blurbs” using a few words and five – eight minutes. We share them every week here: www.InkSlingersGuild.com

A while back I shared some of my favorites and thought it was time to share some more. Below are the words that were chosen for the exercise with the blurb I threw together. I hope you enjoy them!

• Cake
• Cup
• Truly
• Sly

Mauri watched the cake sway in the heavy wind. The dragon, in his excitement for the cow now running through the meadow, took off eagerly. The Cake was dangerously close to toppling and unluckily for the bride, her father was there wobbling back and forth, arms out with a scary look in his eye. Mauri feared that if the cake did go, Sally may lose a bit more than a cake when he lost his sense of humor. He was a truly good wizard, well known actually but never, ever let him mess with food. It was never a pretty sight.

Mauri frowned and took a slurp of her wine. Her lip caught on a splinter in the cup and she licked blood from her lip. Her eyes roved the guests looking for someone to cover the cake to get the food allergy wizard away and also to checkout who might be her after-wedding meal.

The dragon chose that moment to land not far behind her. She could smell the blood from the cow. She rolled her eyes and took another slurp of wine. Glancing at the barn she saw the sly little one who had let the cow out. The farmer probably wouldn’t be very happy but the bride was paying pretty well so maybe he won’t get the magistrate involved. One can never tell these days. Tossing the cup behind her, Mauri strode to the back of the seated guests and took a chair for herself.

Normally she wouldn’t give these things the time of day but it was her great, great, great granddaughters wedding after all.

• Cellophane
• Late
• Terror

Kate threw the cellophane container on the floor. When it merely hit the floor with a soft rap, she lifted a doc marten encased foot, the kind with the metal toe, and brought it down heavily. The container dented slightly. Huffing out curse words she jumped repeatedly on the container until it was broken in half. The cellophane still held tightly on its roll. Shrieking, Kate opened a drawer looking for scissors, anything that would damage the offending item. When she turned back, Jerry stood, mouth ajar, terror lines wrinkling his forehead.

“What the hell is your problem?” he whispered.

“The cellophane. I couldn’t get it off the roll,” she whispered back, instantly feeling the tears filling the corner of her eyes.

Jerry shook his head.

“Come on, leave it. We’ll be late for the buffet if we don’t go right now.”

“But what about the dish? Everyone is expecting magic fish stew.”

“Oh god. Tell them the cat ate it.”

• Dire
• Statue
• Responsive

Katy stared at the man on the ground. He had been dead for over five minutes now, the blood pooling beneath him. He obviously had gotten himself into a dire situation and the response team Katy had called apparently wasn’t very responsive. She had called over an hour ago. She didn’t know how to handle a gaping wound in someone’s gut. She just had to sit with him and let him breathe his weird fishy breath on her until his gills stopped moving. With the exception of the nasty wound in his side, he would make a beautiful statue right now. It was her first time dealing with a Merman and damn. It really was a shame, the whole gaping wound thing. Now she had to stay until the response unit came to keep the friggin water sprites away. They seemed dead set, Katy laughed under her breath, at getting a bite of the dead guy. She frowned wondering if there was some magical benefit to Merman blood or skin or some other fluid. Waving a hand at yet another sprite, she breathed a sigh of relief when she heard running on the dock behind her. Finally!

• Soap
• History
• Key
• Gnome

Eyes squeezed shut, Mira tried to wash the soap from her hair and was failing miserably. Someone had broken her usual bowl and she was having to use a stand-in that she could barely fit her hands in leave alone her heavy mass of hair. Someone knocked on her door, presumably Shelly, her lady-in-waiting.

“Come, in!” she hollered, “I’m drowning in soap!”

She heard the door close and the key twist in the lock. A set of gentle hands lifted her hair, one hand helping to hold her head up, the other pouring water from a pitcher.

“Oh thank you so much,” Mira said, “I had no idea how I would going to get out of that one,”

“Indeed,” the deep voice said. Mira froze but the water on her face was too full of soap for her to dare open her eyes.

“Who are you?” she asked timidly. Men were not allowed in her room.

“I was informed that you might need a certain flower for a certain ailment,” the voice said while gentle hands still washed soap from her hair.

Mira pulled away, searching the table for a wash towel.

“I need no such thing! Who would say such a thing?”

“A young gnome was certain you would need such a flower,”

“Well, I don’t know any gnomes, young or old that would ever be so rude,”

“Your history does allude to that fact,” the deep voice whispered as she blotted her face with a towel.

“How dare you!” Mira cried as she pulled the towel away and turned only to find her room empty and her door open, Shelly standing wide-eyed in the hall.

“Did you see him?” Mira demanded.

“See who?” Shelly asked as she bowed her head.

• Saturated
• Snarky
• Crystal

Once the towel was saturated with blood, Chally took the dripping mess and held it over the cauldron. The bubbling brew hissed and popped as the blood hit the surface. Hem stirred it slowly, long gloves covering his hands and elbows. He smiled at Chally.

“Are you going to feed the remains to Sooch again?” he asked with a glance at the freshly gutted body on the floor.

Chally shook her head. “Last time I did that he barfed all over the house. I just don’t trust human blood to sit well with him now.”

Hem made a disappointed noise. “Seems like such a waste,” he commented. “Where’d you find this one?”

“Some snarky bitch at the club. Even the guys wouldn’t hang around her long. Plus I got this cool crystal necklace from her.”

“Bonus,” Hem said as he removed the long metal spoon and whispered the spell for long life.

© 2015 Lisa Barry

Terribleminds Flash Fiction Challenge Part 2 of 5

All right, this is pretty fun! Novelist Chuck Wendig posted a flash fiction challenge (that’s a short and fast written piece). It is a 5 part challenge where many authors add 200 words to a story previously posted. I missed Part I of the challenge but was able to drop in for Part II. I hope you enjoy!

The rules are simple:

Look through the 200-word entries from last week. (They are here.)

Pick one.

Add another 200 words to the story.

This is the entry by Jim Frankin that I chose to add to and you can find on his blog here:

The plunge into the ice-cold water, hit Derry like an avalanche. A fading knowledge of the film ‘Predator‘ had informed him to lower his body temperature so that the alien won’t see him. Though, he hadn’t realised how cold the water would be, how the flow of the water would drag him away from the bank or how his thick woolen coat and boots would become the rocks that pulled him down.

It’s worth noting at this point that in Predator, the hero was a hardened military veteran with experience in guerrilla-warfare, while Derry worked in the Accounts department for a large national fish exporter, and the most alien thing he had encountered in his life so far was the perpetual lack of sticky notes in his office. Being woefully terrible at making quick decisions, preferring an hour or two to mull over every eventuality also goes some way to explain his poor choice of hiding place.

His limbs stiff, his breathing now wheezy-gulps, and his head now spent more time underwater as his legs struggled to move. Derry panicked, with a thought that he didn’t have hours to mull over…. he was going to die.

And my added two cents:

Finding himself now at the bottom of the river, Derry couldn’t move a single limb in struggle against the pull of death. He strained to see something, anything in the water that would pull him from this nightmare. He felt the slow pound of his heart within his chest as the last bubbles of air left his mouth.

 Unexpected warmth flooded in from his ears and spread to his extremities. Excitement coursed through his veins. Life! He knew he had been pulled from the abyss, someone had saved him from hell. Derry’s eyes shot open only to blink in surprise. The water was clear, he breathed. He lifted his hands, pulling off a glove to view his webbed fingers. A glance up and he could see the rush of the river ahead though he stood on the bottom as if he was on land.

Derry was sure then that he had died. No amount of calculations would save him from the truth. A salmon swam by and nipped at the glove still clutched in his hand. Derry reached out and felt the cool scales pass beneath his skin. His heart skipped a beat and he put a hand over it, oddly comfortable with its off-beat. He took in a deep breath preparing to choke only to find that the air did not arrive in his lungs through nose or mouth but from gills.