I recently purchased a book called The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction by Brian Kiteley. Today, I completed Exercise #1, “The Reluctant I.” Here’s the core of the prompt:
“Write a first person story in which you use the first person pronoun (I or me or my) only two times–but keep the I somehow important to the narrative you’re constructing. The point of this exercise is to imagine a narrator who is less interested in himself than in what he is observing.”
600 words
The grass and trees and clouds swing gently westward, then back again. Everything drips with a buttery gloss, and she isn’t going to come. The sun’s too low. The sky’s less creamy than it was an hour ago. She probably put her apron back on and grabbed the jar she uses to cut biscuits and said, “Nowhere, Ma. I was just checking on the chickens.”
Eyes shut. Black river of hair falling east and west from the craggy ridge of her spine. A whiff of lemon from her collarbone. The words, “Wednesday at noon.” A pink, tight-collared dress stitched and starched by her mother, a cross embroidered in the left hip of her underwear, a wet whisper of “you are everything” from beneath crisp cotton sheets. Her wooden floors, stained with age-old cat piss and scrubbed with Pine Sol. A hair ribbon painstakingly woven from corn silk, layered with fourteen pressed azaleas and one succulent bluebonnet. I had used the family Bible, slid them in the Psalms.
A tractor seat spring jams hotly into my thigh, and she isn’t coming. The sun cocks its head sinisterly. The truck aches behind the barn, nervously concealing a pillowcase of an extra pair of Levi’s, three shirts, four pairs of underwear, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and eighty-four dollars. It’s enough to make it to Oklahoma.
On the fourth picnic, she said, “No one knowing makes it exciting.” But to be honest, no one would have minded one bit. In the magnolia tree, she said, “An apartment made of glass. With a marble kitchen counter and a bed pushed against the window so that it looks like you’ll tumble to the street any second while you’re sleeping, and a table with a pretty bowl that holds nothing.”
Purple clouds gather slowly in the distance, the mixture thickening from a wedding veil to a glob of mayonnaise. The sun bakes on, unperturbed. A town full of rain is what everyone needs. The possibility of wildfire encircles the region like a flock of buzzards, eternally drifting closer and lifting away.
She started a fire behind her house when she was eight. She found a dead chipmunk and rubbed its supple, firmly swollen belly, then dug up her mother’s box of matches. She wanted to know what death smelled like. The fire engulfed the chipmunk slowly, and she sniffed a seductive sort of rot. The flames moved to some blades of grass, spilling quietly in an asymmetrical circle, and she paced contemplatively, widening her path as the fire spread. It cooked the yard’s corner near the chicken coop before her mother bolted through the screen door with soaked burlap sacks. Thank Jesus it had rained two days before. The only true damage was the black nub of a chicken’s wing, which arrived with screeches from another world. Her mother, livid but relieved, resigned and rolled the chunks of chicken breast in honey-soaked breadcrumbs. She fried them in bacon oil and served them with homemade barbecue sauce. The memory of her mother’s recipes and the particularly tender chicken soak the corners of her mouth. It was the best meal she ever had. You can feel the wetness an inch from your ear.
A crow so black it’s almost indigo lands on the barn and cackles. Its feathers drizzle symmetrically from its back. It nibbles a crumb from its left wing hinge, then freezes, captivated by something tucked in the grass. It swoops, nestles for an instant between yellow stalks, then emerges with a shiny gum wrapper. The bird dives close enough to show its nostrils—two smooth pinpricks carved into flint—then spits the foil and swoops on.