Daily Writing Exercises

THE STORIES you are about to encounter are limited to 420 characters, which include letters, spaces, and punctuation. They provide daily exercise in fiction writing for the author, Lou Beach.

SHOT BY A MONKEY, Elsa leaned against the banyan, held a bandage to the wound. They'd entered camp just before dawn, made off with a pistol, some candy bars and a Desmond Morris book. We counted as six shots rang out, one of them finding poor Elsa's arm. Relieved that the simian was out of ammunition we packed up. On the way out of camp we noticed a monkey on the river bank, hammering at a snake with the gun.

I LOOKED down at the spots on the pavement, where kids waiting for the bus had dropped wads of gum for years. The sun had seared them black, fried them flat. This concrete constellation held a secret that I knew could be unlocked. I went home and returned with a jar of paint and brush, connected the dots. A pattern emerged. I will share it with you. Be on the #12 bus at midnight, corner of Wrigley & HubbaBubba.

HOGTIE put his feet up on the cooler, pushed his hat off his white forehead. 'You know this clownin’ is gettin’ old, ain’t no dignity in it.' Wallop scratched at something under his cap. 'Au contraire, Hog. Clowning is an integral element of the safety procedures incumbent upon rodeo management to provide to secure the well being of the riders.' Hogtie pursed his lips. 'Yeah, guess you’re right. Hand me my nose.'

I RISE at three a.m. to walk my bladder to the bathroom, then return to bed and wait for my face and pillow to come to an agreement. I lie on my right, my left, my stomach, my back, as if attempting an even tan, until I find the Goldilocks spot. The only sound is the hum of the planet, and the whistling and chirping of the little birds who live in my nostrils.

SHE TRUSTED grins, they were shot directly from the heart. Whereas smiles, oh smiles could trick, be untrue, do you harm. Mendacious, twisted with bad intentions, like her father's, his mouth turned up at one corner like a beckoning finger, pulling his eye down into a squint.

'IT TAKES the village idiot to make a village feel smart,' she said as she applied a cold compress to my head after my humiliation in the town square. 'What are you saying?' I asked, looking into her big cow eyes and not reading anything. Her words were like peeled wallpaper - crazed patterns and frayed edges. My eyes burned. I knocked over a lamp as I ran out the door to confront the crowd.

HE WAITED all his life for a splashy catharsis, irrefutable evidence that a profound change had transformed him. It took him many years to realize that he had been altered each day by the sun's rising and the moon's movement, by the unfurling of his daughter's tiny hand to grasp his thumb, by the cat on his chest, by the glass of water his wife brought him before bedtime, by the questions his son asked.