Another month, another Furious Fiction.
Today’s post is a two-edged sword – one side shares the 500 word story I wrote for February’s AWC Furious Fiction Challenge, and the second (the sharper side and call to action) is to tell you that today, at 5pm, the AWC will unveil their March challenge. You’ll have 55 hours to craft your own tale to meet whatever fiendish criteria they propose – and be in the running to win $500. Come on, it’ll be fun.
Meanwhile, here’s my take on February’s requirements for some sort of guard in the story, inclusion of the words narrow, golden, leathery and glossy, and the first and last sentences each to contain just two words:
RESCUE
Bad day. You make it to the couch. Cue brass band and medal ceremony. Achievement get. Level up.
You make it to the couch and curl around the pain like a whiskered fern frond, or one of those leathery, segmented insects you find under rotting wood. Are they slaters? You can’t remember.
The room hangs sideways. Horizontal verticals of curtains, door frame, bookcase. Improbable uprights on the tilted coffee table. You reach for a bottle of water caught between the sedimentary layers of neglect but you’re too stiff. Fossilised. Curled like an ammonite. Like the glossy, carved scroll on the neck of the violin you haven’t taken out of its case for eight months.
Cue first violin, screeching a glissando from shame to rage, a tremolo of failure.
You read online that some people don’t have an inner monologue and laughed until you couldn’t sit up, until your head was an Easter Island monolith, drenched in salty Pacific rain. For years you absorbed criticism and despair. Now the sullen echoes, a symphony in D-sharp minor, crush you into the couch.
You can just about breathe through it.
Then he’s there, coming in from the kitchen, trailing dirt prints on the carpet and the scent of basil he’s brushed against. A velvet-soft head pushes under your hand and noses your wrist. He’s so warm, like he’s swallowed the sun to bring it inside for you. His tail beats a bass drum tattoo on the couch, thunderous applause speaking joy at your company.
You breathe together.
Your fingers glide over his ears, stretch and repeat – easier than any scale you ever played. He whines softly, a melancholy oboe, just enough to remind you there’s more to the orchestra than the strings. More to the day than the couch. More to you than failure. He licks the inside of your wrist, rasping and real in a way the echo of the first violin can never be.
“That’s right,” you tell him. “You scared it.”
You make it to the front yard. There are five chewed tennis balls tucked into the big blue pot with the golden cane palm. You pick one up and he’s a dervish, ecstatic with anticipation. You throw and he flings himself after it, blurred pursuit through the narrow tangle of green.
“Nice dog,” a voice says from the gate as the ball is returned. It’s a man, kitted and capable, from the building site three doors up. “What sort is he?”
The best sort you know. Bravest and true. The sort that stands between you and despair.
“A guard dog,” you say.
“Really?” He considers the soft ears, short legs, limpid eyes.
“A rescue dog.”
“Oh, cool.” He smiles. “Nice to meet a lifesaver.”
“Yes.” You look down and meet that dark, loving gaze. “Good dog.”
(Banner cropped from an image by Hans Aldenhoven from Pixabay.)