Week 4!
Welcome to week 4 of CU This Tuesday Writing Group! Monday’s Wordle answer was WHIFF, so that’s what we’re going with as our prompt today. My random number generator came up with the number 2, so here we go: whiff in 2nd person POV!
Last week I was just feeling really out of sorts in life and therefore in everything and hated what I came up with. But I got some encouragement from a subscriber (thank you) and I’ve decided to keep going with this idea I’m developing. It’s all a bit murky, but that’s the fun of doing this. When I write in little half-hour chunks like this, where it doesn’t have to *mean* anything, where it’s not part of an actual novel I’m working on, but seen (in my mind) as “extra,” then I feel freer to explore and do what I want.
Ok, here are some ideas of where you could go with this prompt:
You are the captain of the Olympic hockey team, retelling the story of how/why you whiffed on an important, potentially game-winning shot in the gold-medal game.
An epistolary story—longing love letters written to a past love (the “you”), delineated by all of their different scents, or scents that remind our protagonist of times spent with the past love.
Our protagonist has schizophrenia. The narrator is the voice in their head, dictating their actions (and relaying olfactory hallucinations - the whiffs in question) to them.
Writing prompt: WHIFF in second-person POV
You always loved the whiff of cherry blossoms in the spring. As a girl, you’d stand under a tree, right under its canopy of blossoms, its rain shower of petals, and breathe. Your mother would remark lovingly, whistfully, on your romantic nature.
Now, you slink past the cherries, the plums, home, back to the apartment you share with Astrid, her boyfriend still dripping languidly down your thighs. You will make coffee, as you always do, in last night’s clothes, and lie to her about your shift at Lucky Bar, about the stranger you went home with. You will suture your lips with your teeth to hide your smile when she asks you how he was.
You’ll make up some story you’ve gleaned from Sex and the City about his ineptitude—premature ejaculation, jack-rabbit fucking—and she’ll dismiss you, your life, with a shake of her horse-thick head of hair and tell you how glad she is to have Ryan.
And though you want to crack your secret like an egg and pour it, thick and suffocating over her head, you do not. You keep this secret in your chest, you keep it between your thighs, because your life is as fragile as its shell and Astrid is the one who could break you.
This morning, Astrid doesn’t emerge from her room, groggily rubbing her eyes with darling little fists the way she learned to as a child on the set of Road to Avonlea, the way her every action, her entire life, is an affectation.
Coffee’s on, sunshine, you say. You shuffle down the hall and push a palm into her door. What meets you, through that crack of doorway, is a sad, hiccuping beast with mascara-smudged eyes and a blanketed hunchback. She knows. Obviously, she knows. You feel your deception trickle through you, from throat to loins and you are relieved. Relieved of its weight, of the liar it made of you, of the way it branded you.
I’m sorry, you tell her. You climb onto her bed and hold her, wrap your sticky thighs around the quilted lump of her.
How did you know, she asks. My mother died.
Your secret tightens into a worm that wriggles back up your throat and into the dark corner of your mind where it falls back into a fitful sleep.
Afterthoughts
I like this one. I’m starting to like these characters too. Frenemies, competitive both in their art form and in life, but also with a deep, complicated love for each other. I’m going to continue with this for a bit and see what happens. What did you come up with? I’ll CU next Tuesday!