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Posted: 7/6/2009 4:22:36 PM | 500 words: use MS Word or Open Office to do a word count or there are free word count places online, such as here: http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/countwords.shtml
Subject: The most significant thing that ever happend to you. Not the scariest, not the happiest, not the stupidest, but an event that changed you, an eye-opening experience.
Deadline: Wednesday | |
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Posted: 7/8/2009 7:32:33 PM | | Soooo... is this a thing where the word count has to be 500? More? Less? Exactly? | |
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Posted: 7/8/2009 9:06:02 PM | | 500 words. Exactly. It can be done. Guess I better move the deadline up, huh? I'll come back with an example later. | |
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Posted: 7/8/2009 9:10:26 PM | | Meh. Restrictions are binding. I may take a crack at it though! | |
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Posted: 7/8/2009 9:38:51 PM | Restrictions are part of every day life. Editors restrict word counts. It's good practice.
It was another long night left sitting alone that did it. Melanie didn't know that this single incident was the catalyst, even if she'd known what the word catalyst meant, but it was that last Saturday night that pushed her over the edge.
Funny how 6 years of abuse can go almost unnoticed and then suddenly a simple action can seem like the most significant thing in the world. She felt the shove first in her shoulder; his fingers burned into her skin like hot lava. She felt it in her other shoulder as well, when it hit the wall ... which might as well have been an iceberg, as it sent a cold chill up her back. Or maybe it was the thought that crossed her mind when he touched her roughly, yet again. The thought that she might just kill him.
It would be easy enough ... she could do it while he was in one of his drunken comas. Sneak up on him like a thief in the night and hammer his skull into the pillow until bright sprays of blood dotted the new pink wallpaper. Maybe she could simply slit his throat, and end up needing not new wallpaper, but just new sheets. Easier. Tidier. Less mess, but surely less enjoyment as well.
She longed to beat him the way he beat her. She had fantasies of tying him to a chair—no duct taping him—all that hair on his arms ... maybe yank the tape off and put it back on a few times just for good measure. She would immobilize him and then start with a few sharps slaps, enough to redden the skin on his hateful face. Then she would progress to punches, and keep hitting him until her fingers and his face were black and blue and then maybe employ a few tools ... can't forget the duct tape for his mouth as he was a coward and would surely scream.
He would never understand her silence when he beat her. She refused to cry out, it was her dignity that demanded that she keep her shame quiet. The neighbors must have thought that they were moving furniture every night, judging by the thumps and bangs, they would never guess that it was her body ricocheting around the room.
She'd had that last Saturday night to think, to let it all soak in and to see where her heart was taking her. That shove, that was the event that set her thinking, and it had inspired an epiphany. Six years of abuse and suddenly something rising up inside her, something telling her that it was over. It would never change unless she changed it.
In the end she didn't kill him in his sleep. He approached her, angry, his fist raised. She was ironing. Her retribution was swift and unplanned and more effective than anything she could have done. The hot iron missed his face by inches. In his eyes was a new understanding. | |
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Posted: 7/8/2009 10:13:00 PM | | Ummm... you said in the challenge it was to have happened to you, unless I don't equate screen names with real names properly, you may want to make sure "he" doesn't go missing anytime soon...lol | |
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Posted: 7/9/2009 4:37:09 AM | | My first husband. We safely divorced years ago. You can tell it from the first, second or third person, however you want to do it, as long as the story line works. | |
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Posted: 7/9/2009 2:33:00 PM | | Why 500 words exactly, surely it should be approx | |
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Posted: 7/9/2009 5:00:23 PM | You guys are hard-headed. 
Everything you write, whether it's a column, an article, a novel, it will have either a minimum or maxiumum word requirement. That's part of the exercise, to see if you can get a point across and use just enough but not too many words ... now if you're not up to it the challenge all you have to do is say so ... (grin)
Have you tried it? It's not easy, I'll grant you, but it's also not impossible.
I wrote a weekly column that was published in about 13 different newspapers for almost 3 years. It had to be 800 words. End discussion. It always was. I wrote a rural living column, here's a sample:
PETE RABBIT HUNTS
If you happen to live around seven-mile point and are missing one fuzzy black house shoe, I know where it’s at. I picked it up out of the yard one day last week after Pete carried it home.
Pete is a half-grown pointer mix, and I know he thinks he’s doing us a great service by bringing home everything that is not nailed down, but his seek and find missions are bordering on ridiculous.
Along with the shoe are other trophies such as empty soda cans, assorted carcass remains, a length of rope, and whatever else he might find laying along side the road.
We discussed this detestable habit of his at great length, and while he appeared to be listening, he continued to “hunt” and bring home anything that caught his fancy.
“Pete, you can’t just keep bringing stuff home like this, generally speaking hunting involves bringing home something of use. I have no use for one black house shoe that is two sizes too small, and someone somewhere is walking around with one cold foot and cussing you and your mama.”
He****d his head to the side as though thoroughly engrossed in what I was saying, and that afternoon dragged home a dead branch that was twice as long as he was. He goes out in the grove and brings home a rotted orange, or a weather-faded feedbag that the wind deposited there. He goes under the front porch and brings out a mouthful of gravel or a length of firewood and proceeds to spend the day making splinters out of it.
I kept hoping that one day his need to hunt would evolve into something positive, and finally one day, it happened.
I was sitting on the front porch when I saw him come around the bend in the road. He was a good quarter-mile away, but even at that distance I could see that he carried something in his mouth. I was instantly nervous, as I could not tell what it was.
“What have you got there, Pete?” I asked. He didn’t answer, but then his mouth was full. He trotted into the yard and I squinted.
“What is that?” I demanded.
He stopped a few yards away and stared at me with that look he gets when he thinks he’s about to get yelled at. By then I recognized one limp rabbit leg dangling from the bundle he carried in his mouth. It appeared that he had gone out and caught himself a rabbit.
“I'll be,” I said. “You actually hunted.”
He seemed to recognize that I was impressed and began to prance around dangling that rabbit like a blue ribbon, and it dawned on me that he didn't seem to know what to do with it.
“You're supposed to eat it, dummy,” I said, and his tail drooped again. I sat down to watch and see what he was going to do next. He dropped the rabbit and sniffed it and then picked it up again. Then he went over and lay down by the truck, resting the rabbit on the ground in front of him like a sad stuffed animal.
We're a family of five with three dogs, seven puppies, two cats, about fifty hogs, a crazy goat, four calves and a dozen or so chickens. When it comes to eating, you don't mess around because if you snooze you lose. Tinkerbell, the six-month-old little butterscotch kitten that sleeps on the hood of my truck has learned this lesson well. She does not mess around and she will eat anything, so when she got wind of the rabbit that Pete brought home, she wasted no time in taking it away from him.
When she crossed the yard and latched onto that rabbit I held my breath because I expected a fight. Tinkerbell was growling and hissing and carrying on like she was prepared for one as well, but Pete merely sat up and****d his head to the side and watched as the kitten dragged the poor dead rabbit, with two steps backwards and a tug, and two steps backwards and a tug, around the side of the house and into a clump of weeds.
Pete sighed and lay back down, yawning, while the kitten polished off his trophy. We didn't see her again until later that night when she waddled up to the porch and turned her nose up at her cat food.
Catching that rabbit was a big step for Pete. Letting a six-ounce kitten take it away from him, was somewhat of a set back, but there was no detracting from his accomplishment. With a little hope and a lot of luck, maybe my days of finding errant house shoes are over. | |
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Posted: 7/9/2009 8:41:08 PM | | Boy, I have tried and tried to cut mine down to 500 words but I can't cut anymore and get the story across. Guess I'll wait! :) | |
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Posted: 7/10/2009 4:14:43 AM | How about a new story? Pick one event that shaped you. The sudden realization that your dad was human and could make mistakes. Or the bum you gave a dollar to even though you hate bums, and what was it about this one that changed your mind? Life is full of these little moments.
I once saw my dad answer the phone. It was an obscene call, and he played along. It was horrible/enlightening. | |
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Posted: 7/10/2009 5:02:14 AM | One day in 1991, I had a dream about my mother. My brothers and I were sitting on folding chirs in a circle with my mother and father. Mother produced a gun, and shot my older brother in the head dead. She then shot my second oldest brother in the head, then the gun was at point blank range to my forehead, and the shot rang out like a bell. I was thrown backwards out of my body,and so I saw my mother shoot my little brother in the head, too. She then pointed that gun at my father, and pulled the trigger twice. Alas, she pointed the gun towards her own head, and "blam" mom was dead, too.
Within minutes of this dream, I was shaken awake by my baby brother. He was crying and saying to me "Mommy's dead!" Well, I got up, and went to the bathroom, and slapped myself awake. Too bad I really was awake, and my mother really was dead.
She had fought the good fight against a silent vicious meat eating killer. Cancer is a demon that sometimes wins the battle. She had lost that battle in the wee hours of the morning in a hospice 20 miles away from home.
She had told me six to eight weeks before she died that her time was drawing near. Like any 11 year old, I had asked her to hold on a little more. When she told me of all the pain she was going through, I decided that my pain was insignificant to her own pain. I had to be an adult about this situation because I had no power to cure her, and death truly was a blessing for her. I said "okay mom, I know." She kissed me on the forehead, and I fell asleep for a few minutes beside her while crying.
Finally, I looked up to her, and asked her for a gift, a promise from the grave. I asked her to break something after she died. Break something that cannot be broken within a week or two of her passing, and that would let me know she went to Heaven. If nothing broke, she went to Hell.
My mother promised me she would try, and I accepted that asher last promise to me.
The day after she died, I stayed home from school in mourning. I went to the kitchen, and grabbed one of those purple plastic tumblers. I placed it on the middle of the table,and turned around to get the milk out of the fridge. I went to pour the milk into the plastic cup on the middle of the table when it did a backflip. It backflipped off the middle of the table, hit the floor, and shattered. I looked around, and out the kitchen window with a smile from ear to ear. Mother had kept her promise to me, and the next day I was ready for school. | |
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| Challenge-True Ghost Story
Posted: 7/10/2009 10:15:21 PM | | This covers it all, something that impacted you and it was the right word count. Excellent. I knew somebody could do it! | |
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| Challenge-Facing The Tanks
Posted: 7/14/2009 6:19:47 AM | The Civil Rights movement was hot in the 60’s, reaching the upper east coast. Hundreds picketed businesses, and I was confused when my grandmother wouldn’t allow me get a soda or hotdog at the Woolworth’s on Jamaica Ave. Why not? What did those folks down there have to do with us up here? I was seven years old, and her explanations perplexed me. What were civil rights? Who was this Dr. King? Why was it our concern? Soon, I knew.
In 1960, construction was halted at Rochedale Village, the largest housing co-op in the world, with high-rises covering over 170 acres on the old Jamaica Race Track.
The “White Elephant” had 5,860 apartments for 25,000 residents, and was walking distance of our home. I did not see what all the hype was about. Why was it on the news every night? Why was my family attending meetings? What did it have to do with us? Before ground was even broken, Rochedale had created enormous racial tension in Queens when the contractor refused to hire Black workers.
One night my grandfather took a call from someone at the local NAACP. William Booth, a local judge, civil rights leader and friend, had been arrested along with 24 protesters at the construction site. My grandmother advised I wouldn’t attend school the next day, and we’d visit Judge Booth at Rochedale. What awaited us that morning was a sight I’ll never forget. Hundreds gathered at the track, with signs and pamphlets. Nana, a forceful woman with strong presence, pushed me to the front of the group, handing me a sign. I was now a full-fledged protester of issues beyond my comprehension. We walked, sang and shouted.
Down the block were several bulldozers, cranes and dump trucks. They reminded me of war tanks. Judge Booth urged our group to press on, keep walking, singing and chanting. I went along with it, since Nana was still held her ground, and I had no other choice. But things changed drastically. Nana pushed me to the ground. What the hell was going on? I lay there with everyone else. Within moments, my mood had gone from upbeat to one of utter terror. The “tanks” were rumbling and roaring, edging for the crowd now prone on the street. To this day, I can still smell the fuel, the smoke, the asphalt, the dreaded nervous police dogs inches from my tear drenched face. Booth said to sing, and we did for what seemed like ages. He told us to hold fast, don’t give up or get up. Mesmerized by the sight of a towering crane with its headache ball swinging precariously above, I stared at it and waited for my death.
Suddenly, the tanks retreated. I managed to get Nana up off the ground. No more singing and marching for us! We high-tailed it home, still shaking with excitement when we told everyone of our adventure. In time, the memory faded. But, I never took our freedoms for granted again. | |
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Posted: 7/14/2009 4:55:06 PM | | Very good, it's very hard to cram such an emotional event into 500 words (and you had 505 but that's close enough) and still make an impact. Good job. | |
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Posted: 7/14/2009 5:05:37 PM | I thought I might of posted this once before in the forums, but I can't find it, so maybe I didn't. Anyway, 500 words, including the title:
The Hat
I was seventeen years old when I found the red baseball cap in a box of grandfather's things. I thought it looked good on me so it got to be a habit, wearing that hat.
About the same time, I met a girl. She was sixteen and kind of plain.
For money, I worked nights at a service station pumping gas and doing minor repairs. I drove a nice car. The girl liked the car. She liked that I worked after school and had money to spend. We were a couple, the girl and I.
I continued to wear the hat. She didn't mind.
At work, my hands would get greasy, then I'd touch the hat. In time, the hat became greasy, too. I'd washed it, but there is no getting out the grease.
A year later, I was still seeing the girl and wearing the hat--now dirty and threadbare (the hat, not the girl--the girl had blossomed into a beautiful woman).
After high-school, the girl went north to college. I continued on at the gas station. I'd drive up to visit her every Friday. We'd drink and party with her new friends. Her friends seemed to like me, hat and all. Saturday we'd drive south to my place to spend the weekend together. It was nice.
The following summer the girl and I got engaged. It was the weekend of the town's annual clam festival and after I proposed, she drank to much and danced around singing and laughing and showing everyone the ring. “See my ring,” she’d say, shoving her adorned hand into the butter-stained faces of strangers eating steamer clams under a big tent.
We partied, went to the beach, visited friends. We talked about having lots of kids and buying a house with a white picket fence. I continued working at the service station. The girl picked up a summer job waiting tables.
I wore the hat.
She returned to college in the fall. The routine would be the same: I'd drive up on Friday, then off to my place Saturday morning. I'd have her back on campus by Sunday afternoon.
The third weekend into the semester, I went up to visit as usual. The next morning, as we headed for breakfast, the girl asked if I'd take off the hat before going inside. It was an innocent enough request. And yet...she'd never asked before. I laughed. She said nothing more about it.
Later, on the drive to my apartment, something seemed off. Something was suddenly different. I couldn't put my finger on it.
All weekend, I caught her sneaking glances at my hat. When she did, there was a certain sadness in her eyes.
I said nothing, but understood our time together was nearly at an end. It would be our last weekend. Something had changed in her in the previous three weeks. She could no longer see herself spending her life with a man who would wear such a hat. | |
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Posted: 7/14/2009 6:55:21 PM | | Aww, Word said it was 500! Thank you. Actually, it's condensed from an editorial I wrote in April 2008. Cutting out the rest was the hard part, but you're right - it's good practice, and ALL editors are going to crunch those inches when its close to deadline. Now, with newspapers, etc. having such financial trouble; they want to get as much "news" in as possible, and less editorial. Thanks for letting me share. | |
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Posted: 7/15/2009 3:45:03 AM | | No, thanks for contributing. A good editor would weed out the 5 extra words in a heartbeat, no worse for the wear. I'm using Open Office becuase I'm too cheap to buy Word, so there may be some variation there because of that. | |
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Posted: 7/15/2009 3:47:58 AM | Very good Hank, and right on the word count. The hat was to you a symbol of part of who you were (are)
My son has such a hat and I've tried to hide it more times than I can count. I will stop trying now, thanks to you. | |
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Posted: 7/16/2009 12:54:05 AM | Anticipation
We waited nine and a half months for that day.
We waited for her body to give a sign telling us it was ready to give birth. That sign came when her body marched down to the hospital and yelled "GET THIS ****ING THING OUT OF ME!".
Her cervix was too narrow and so a jelly was applied (Cervidil) to induce labor and widen the cervix. Ten hours later she was only 2cm - which meant emergency cesarian section.
My girlfriend and I were nervous. In the middle of our conversation she closed her eyes for what I had presumed was an eyeblink; I was startled as someone took that opportunity to shove a 9-inch long steel implement down her throat. One moment she was awake, an instant later she was so deeply comatose she no longer had a gag reflex.
I kept holding her hand, brushing her hair, and making whatever soothing comments my addled mind could muster. An operating room nurse stood next to me, staring intently at me. Her unblinking gaze would have been disturbing at any other time but at that moment any discomfort was swept away by the excitement of the moment.
It was surprising to me that there was enough spare room in the human body that the doctor could fit his arms inside it. He began to pull. As muscles on the doctor's forearms tensed, the biceps flexed, the cords of tissue in his neck distended, his face reddened and veins visibly bulged from his temples, I found myself quite curious what part of my unborn child's anatomy could withstand such strain. I fought the urge of tossing the curtain aside and stopping the surgeon from killing my baby.
The doctor reached inside, pulling out some dark, feces-covered hunks of flesh. I stared eagerly at the opening, waiting for a pink, crying head to emerge. Strangely, the doctor was looking down at something he was holding. In his hands lay a dark hunk of flesh. As he rushed it over to a second, smaller operating table a tiny, gray arm flopped over his cupped fingers. It hadn't occurred to me until then that the gray, lifeless form was my baby. No crying, no pink skin...and no breathing.
After nine and a half months of anticipation I had become the father to a hunk of dark gray, lifeless, meat.
I watched dimly as suctioning devices drew fluids from the nose and throat of the tiny, gray body. The unblinking woman went to work resuscitating the lifeless, unbreathing form. A moment later this little, gray figure took a single breath of her own and her skin changed from the ashen color of a long-dead corpse to a fiery, lively pink. A cry, a piercing shrill that was more beautiful than any sound ever heard before, filled the room...and my heart.
It was precisely that moment that, to me, she was alive. I had the unique opportunity of seeing my little girl come to life. | |
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Posted: 7/16/2009 2:48:44 AM | National Velvet 1989? :-p
You know...I wrote what I had to say, and it was only 297 words (brevity, thy name is me *snicker*). But I've fleshed it out a bit...Word says 500 on the nose (hold the applause) lol
I was 16. She was 6. I was an insecure high school sophomore. She was a neurotic Thoroughbred halfbreed who was terrified of lightning, bought for five hundred dollars on the back roads of south Florida commonly referred to as “the middle of nowhere”. She’d had a destiny, but it wasn’t supposed to be this…just ask anyone who’d watched her grow up. Her breeding dictated she was to grow fat and sassy carting little kids around barrels as they pulled mercilessly at the reins, and bounce them down the dusty country roads until she was no longer fun. No snooty show horse career for her! I was far from the “proper rider”. When I practiced, I rode in shorts or a bikini; no shoes. I drove a tiny Chevy. My horse trailer had no roof, and she liked to ride backwards in it and stick her head over the top. We didn’t belong. We now stood in a show ring with eleven other horse and rider pairs: each rider roughly the same age, each horse registered, and ten to twenty times the cost of my own. Each of us had beaten out one hundred ten other pairs for the honor of standing in this ring. We were the best in the nation, about to count down the top ten. Tenth place was from Florida, but wasn’t us. As was eighth place. They counted down toward One. Sixth place, from somewhere in New England, stood on our right and squealed with delight as she turned to collect her ribbon. “From Florida…”…fifth. Fourth was to our left, from North Carolina, and apparently had a huge contingent in the crowd, if the applause and shouts were any indication. “Representing Florida…”…second. Now there were three of us. Two of us would go home with an honorable mention. Having beaten so many just to get to this point, sadly, the memory of that accomplishment would be all they left with. (It almost didn’t seem fair.) The third would be the national champion. I couldn’t believe we were one of these three. My dad paced on the other side of the arena rail, flicking fingers nervously at me—first one, then two; sending signals I wouldn’t understand until after all was said and done. There was a long pause…at least an hour. Or perhaps it was only 15 seconds while the announcer rechecked the list. “From Florida…” (that could be me) “Number two hundred…” (still in the running) “…sixty..” (that’s part of my number too) “..eight…” (oh. my. god.) I turned my cheap little horse who lived in a field without even a stall for shelter and cantered out of the ring, past the thousands of dollars of horse flesh we’d just beaten. The applause rang in our ears, and my nervous little beast didn’t even flinch. We picked up our snow white blanket that proclaimed us champions above all, and walked to our barn. Oddly enough, we’d never won before. We were never defeated again. | |
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Posted: 7/16/2009 4:15:19 AM | | Whoa! Way to flesh out a tale! Another tense moment as I waited for you to win. Good story. Just out of curiosity, in the middle of nowhere Florida ... where was that? | |
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Posted: 7/16/2009 8:59:21 AM | | In the vast wasteland (*snicker*) between a teeny tiny town named Clewiston (where I went to high School), and the even teenier, tinier town (and county seat) named LaBelle. The only two towns in Hendry County, on the western shore of Lake Okeechobee. A place that to this day doesn't have good cell reception...lol | |
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