The other cool thing I’ve done lately was meet a Writer in Residence in my local area via the Friend of Coal Creek. I was able to attend a spring-themed writing workshop in Erie, CO, and produced this fun little piece from the prompt:
“Something Unexpected During a Rainstorm”
Thunder crashed outside the house like it always did in spring. The family huddled together, the trailer rocking beneath the gusts of the wind. Jay sat alone in his room, picking at a loose thread on his blanket as the lights flickered on and off. ‘Anywhere but here,’ he thought. Pick. Pick. Pick. The trailer smelled like fish and days-old bread, damp from the moisture. The bathroom hadn’t been cleaned in weeks, the kitchen even longer than that. He hated it here. Hated everything about it. How his mother protected his sister and not him. How his stepdad snored drunk on the sofa, white undershirt riding up over his abnormally rotund belly as if this was just any other night.
He’d thought about leaving so many times, but every time he’d made up his mind, something like this happened. A storm. A world-ending storm, they called it. A storm that could knock over trailers like his, dashing them against the tall rocks of their valley. Yet, that hadn’t happened since Sam had been alive. That never happened. It was only an anecdote the old folks talked about while sitting in their rocking chairs on the rare sunny day of the valley.
Yet with the way the trailer rumbled, his sister always thought it would happen. She wailed from the next room, convinced they were all about to die. They weren’t, he’d tell her, they weren’t. But she never listened.
Thunder clapped again, the rumble making his chest tremor and his teeth chatter. Wind slammed into the side of the trailer, shattering the already cracked glass of his small window. Rain blew in, pelting him like cold needles. The wind whipped his shaggy hair, spraying dirty water in his face. It tasted of salt and sewage. Of the sweat that seeped down the bridge of his nose to land on his lips. Of the distant fields of sodden corn.
“Dammit,” he thought, getting up to push the old shutters closed, only succeeding in smashing himself in the face instead. The power went out, lightning streaking across the sky to show the silhouette of power lines in the distance. At least, that’s what Jay should have seen. Instead, only a gray bank of cloud, like a freight train, came into view, hurtling toward the trailer with the spinning force of a psychotic dervish.
Spinning force.
Shit.
Jay realized what it was before it hit. The biggest tornado he’d ever seen—in fact, the only tornado he’d ever seen. Thoughts of self-preservation crossed through his mind—thoughts of saving his sister, his family—before the shutter slammed against him once more, followed by the entire wall of his room.
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Now I want to hear yours! Take the prompt and run with it. Post in the comments or send them to me. <3
