This is a 6 minute rough draft for the photo prompt.
Mandy and Jim traversed the undulating mountainside, the crisp mountain air caressing their faces, offering a refreshing respite from the arduous hike. Their destination, a stone building, was a mystery waiting to be unraveled, beckoning them with its promise of adventure.
Mandy liked hiking more than Jim, but he never made her hike alone. He always accompanied her on every trip. He had to admit that some of the places they had visited were actually interesting to him.
He found he was looking forward to visiting the stone building his best friends had told him about last year. Taking Mandy’s hand, they approached the building from the back. They headed around the side of the building toward a wall that looked like it had a door and windows carved into it. They ran into other tourists and had to wait their turn to approach the rock formation and look inside.
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Tessa–
Advocate for mental health and invisible illnesses
The lunch bell sounds, letting the men know that lunch is over and they are to return to work. They don their protective gear, which covers them from head to toe. They combine the soda ash and sand to make the molton glass and pour it out on a table. They cut it into pieces and begin to run tests on it.
It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you a “teaser” sentence or sentence fragment and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that sentence/fragment. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.
This week’s Story Starter teaser is:
Life wasn’t great at all for Walter. In fact, it wasn’t even mildly good.
If you care to write and post a story built from this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.
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The Smoke Alarm (492 words)
By Tessa Dean May 2024
Life wasn’t great at all for Walter. In fact, it wasn’t even mildly good.
Walter woke up that morning to the piercing wail of his smoke alarm. He didn’t smell smoke, but he knew that didn’t mean anything. With a knot of anxiety in his stomach, he had to get up and check the smoke alarm, just in case.
Stumbling out of bed, he went to the kitchen, where the alarm was screeching out its warning. He smelled smoke there but didn’t see any flames. He entered the laundry room and found the dryer had stopped and the lint filter was on fire. It was a small blaze as it probably had just started. Walter quickly dumped some water in a pan, poured it on the flames, and managed to put it out. He was thankful that it hadn’t spread into the rest of the house, but he had just bought that dryer, so he was surprised to already have a fire in it.
There was pounding on the door and he rushed to the living room to open the door to see the fire department with their hose. They pushed him aside and ran into the kitchen. They saw the damage to the dryer and sprayed the hose on the dryer just in case there were more flames inside the unit.
“What are you doing here? Stop spraying more water on the dryer. The fire is out. It was a small one.” He pushed the hose away, but the fireman kept spraying the hose on the dryer. “Stop it, please. It is out now. You are creating more damage than there needs to be. You can see that it is out. It was a minor fire. And what are you doing here anyhow? I didn’t call you.”
“Sir, your neighbor heard the fire alarm going off continuously and called for the fire department. It was still going off, so we rushed in to see what was happening. Why didn’t you turn it off?”
“I had to put the small fire out first before it became a big fire. Now you have caused major water damage, and this was a brand new dryer. I only had it for a few months. I want to file a report against you for the damages you caused.”
“Sir, did you clean the lint filter after every use?”
“The lint filter? No, I didn’t see that much lint, so I didn’t worry about it yet.”
“It doesn’t take much lint to cause a fire. By not cleaning out the lint filter regularly, you caused the damage to your dryer. We aren’t responsible for trying to make sure the fire was out. Next time, clean your lint filter after every use.”
“Next time? There had better not be a next time.” Walter shook his head. Life was complicated right now. He told the firemen to leave. He just wanted to go back to bed. He would deal with the mess later. The firemen silenced the smoke alarm on the way out.
Tessa–
Advocate for mental health and invisible illnesses
Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.). Today’s word is CREAM.
Tammy, a meticulous event planner, lifted her coffee cup and took a sip. She shuddered. It needed cream and sugar. After adding the cream and sugar to her taste, she returned to the list she had spread out on the outside table and reviewed the plans in her head. It was time to commit them to paper. She opened the cover to the notebook she devoted to her event planning, a notebook filled with her most intricate and detailed plans.
The notebook was starting to fall apart. She would either have to buy a new one or put a book cover on it to protect the cover. She felt a drop of rain, so she grabbed the notebook and raced for shelter. She listened to the thunder and watched the lightning zig-zag across the sky in the growing darkness due to the storm. The rain increased to a downpour. She would have to finish her plans for the next event inside.
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Tessa–
Advocate for mental health and invisible illnesses
“Nice dress. Take it off. I want to see what’s under the outer wrapping,” my boyfriend, Carl, watched me without blinking.
“I bought this dress just for you,” I was blushing at his open admiration as I peeled the dress over my head leaving me in my lacy lingerie, also bought just for him.
Just then, my mother and father walked in the door without knocking. I grabbed the dress and ran for our bedroom. I can’t even seduce my boyfriend in my own house without my parents interrupting.
Tessa
Advocate for mental health and invisible illnesses
Tessa Dean - Author 