I liked this prompt from Writers Write, but I didn’t make much of it.
Title: Discard
WC: 500
- Odds and ends of yarn. Partial skeins, for sure, but true odds and ends, barely as long as my palm. They conspire to form a hundred tangled, snarling beasts lurking the bottom of bags and the back of drawers. They swallow stitch markers and cable needles and barrel counters whole. Waste yarn they whisper. For when you need it. Bits and pieces for one of those de-stash projects people do when they’re organized, when they’re good at this, when they deserve nice things.
- The row of chipped and broken things on window sill over the sink.
- A skull candle holder. I knocked it over and broke the arc off the brim of its green hat.
- A calavera lady mug with a triangular chip right out of the rim. The chip sits there in the bottom of the mug. She sits there, far from her mustachioed companion. I never drink from him, because it makes me sad to think of the home I’ve broken.
- My pretty, delicate blue and white coffee cup. It looks fancy and grown up, but the blue pattern is sea monsters and mythological beasts. I broke the handle off, somehow. Those pieces are in the bottom of the cup, too.
- One million scrawled notes on one million songwriting lead sheets.
- Most are mine.
- Some belong to others, and I’ve scratched some indecipherable message to myself.
- I tell myself I’m going to compile them one day. I’m going to annotate and create a record.
- (I am never, ever going to do this.)
- Opera programs going back to 2001. Somehow, the record is incomplete. I don’t know how this can be.
- I once made a special trip to the office to retrieve a copy of one I’d left in the bathroom at the Tasting Room. That was the night Mike wound up in the hospital for the first time.
- Probably several decayed in the back of my car along with the copy of The Closing of the American Mind I never once opened.
- Probably, I accidentally threw some away
- So probably this doesn’t count.
- Pens. There is drawer in the mail center so full of them that it can almost never be opened. How many must be dry?
- Pennies. Whenever I am cleaning, they can stop me dead in my tracks.
- Clothing that is objectively too big for my body. (This is a trick item. There is no clothing that is too big for my body.)
- Books?
- Swollen books I have dropped in the bathtub a hundred times.
- Books whose covers and spines are distant memories.
- Books with physical boarding passes marking the places where I gave up.
- (I don’t always know who these are different from the books I cast away without a thought.)
- All-but-blank documents. With a line, with two lines, with false starts on things I am going to write someday when I am disciplined, when I know what a writing practice actually is, when I do more than piecemeal box-ticking bullshit.
MTZQ Telecommuniculturates 