For this week’s blog post, I though I’d change things up a bit. In the newsletters I send out (sign up if you haven’t already), I include fun writing prompts that I come across.
During one of my daily writing sessions, I decided to write something in response to one of my prompts and share it with you all here. It’s not a perfect piece of writing. It hasn’t gone through rounds of edits. However, it’s something I devoted 15 minutes of my time to one sunny morning and it helped keep the wheels in my mind turning.
Like I’ve mentioned before, not everything you write has to be of publishable quality. Not everything you write has to be associated with a project you’re working on. Just, write. Write anything. If you haven’t, write something about the same prompt and share it with me.
Prompt: Write a scene that takes place immediately after a tragedy. Don’t mention the tragedy.
They slowly eased the sheet up over my husband’s grey colored face, my eyes lingering on his lips until the last moment. His face looked so serene, like he was taking a quick nap, like one of the many naps he had started taking often throughout the day recently.
The soft lines on his face were a stark contrast to the strong, hard features I was instantly attracted to when I first met him. It had taken me a while to smooth out his face before the ambulance arrived. His poor face had been contorted in agony, his mouth a silent scream. I had done my best to close his jaw, massage his cheeks, before I called 911.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said frantically to the operator. “He had complained of not feeling well the past few days, but I thought it was just a bug. I came home after running an errand and he was dead.” I hadn’t rehearsed out loud how I was going to sound, but I had watched enough true crime documentaries to know what a phony 911 call sounded like. I pulled off the appearance of the grief stricken wife quite well, at least I thought so.
I watched the ambulance drive off down the street, my husband’s dead body in the back. I knew what the autopsy would show. I knew that it would show the traces of poison I had slowly been slipping into his food over the past several weeks. But it mattered not. I would be long gone by the time they figured all of that out.
I ran my fingers over the fresh bruises on my wrist. Even in his weakened state, he still had a tight grip.