Note: Write-On was cancelled on Tuesday night, but I had a prompt from my latest edition of Writer's Digest that I liked, so I held a private session at home. The prompt is actually a series of five prompts that would help create a series of interconnected flash fiction stories. I wrote on the first prompt last night, and I hope to do all five and share them here with you. I will admit I went over 500 words here.
Here is the prompt:
The drive to work: twenty-four minutes or somewhere between
four and seven standard songs shuffled on Rob’s MP3 player. Today the ride
started halfway through Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” An anthem from a band
filled with romantic drama that made millions crafting songs about those
romantic problems. Rob hummed along, wondering if he could function in a band
with an ex-girlfriend. The song ended but his fantasy didn’t, so he missed the
next two songs to the point if a madman pointed a gun at him later that day he
couldn’t have named them with his life very much depending on it.
In his fantasy, his female bandmate had a voice like Stevie
Nicks but looked more like a 1990s version of Gwen Stefani. He liked his girls
punkier rather than mystical. They met at a club when both were seventeen,
sneaking in with fake IDs and bonding over a shared freak out after each
unwittingly took pills that they found out later were ecstasy. Once the
throbbing lights and spinning subsided, they shared their mutual admiration of
late sixties jam bands and items from the dollar the menus at fast food chains.
Rob lost his train of thought as John Fogerty’s voice filled
his Grand Am with “Run Through the Jungle.” Creedence Clearwater Revival -
another band with problems, but between Fogerty and the rest, including his own
brother. Rob rolled through a stop sign at the intersection of one rural road
with another, realizing he was ten minutes from work. No bandmates there. Just
co-workers at Castella Services, a subsidiary of Something-Or-Other
Incorporated, a brand of some Chinese firm. He operated a computer there,
checking emails, transferring requests to the office in Houston and verifying
customer reviews of Castella’s multiple but often vague services. He talked to
three people there on a regular basis. Norman, his middle-aged, angry boss,
Wendall, the janitor who smoked two packs a day near the picnic table at the
back of the building, and Myra, a foul-mouthed grandmother who shared a cubicle
with Rob.
After Fogerty, Blink-182 sped through a catchy tune followed
by Sublime and T-Rex. Rob decided the female would sing, he’d play lead guitar,
and the band’s first album would go double-platinum on the back of a trilogy of
singles Rob wrote about a traveling gunfighter in an apocalyptic version of the
old west. Shortly after Rob would propose to his lady frontwoman only to find
out she’d been stepping out with the bass player.
“Bummer,” Rob actually said parking in front of the
faux-brick façade of his workplace.
“How’s it fucking going, Rob?” Myra greeted him at their
cubicle, the beep of his computer powering on punctuating her sentence.
“Shitty,” Rob said. “She’s screwing the bass player.”
“What?”
The conversation ended there, the only sound being the
sporadic tapping of their fingers on their keyboards. Rob couldn’t get over his
imaginary band’s breakup in a torrent of bitter feelings and backstabbing. He
remembered he had to stop for milk after work and that he wanted to start
binging Game of Thrones that night for the fourth time. He hadn’t been on a
date in eighteen months. Rob wanted to be in a band with messy romantic
entanglements, at least it was something.
Norman peeked his head over the cubicle at 2:30, wondering
about a series of emails that Rob hadn’t read yet.
“I quit, Normy,” Rob said, clicking the power button on his
computer monitor.
“Whew, shit,” Myra said behind him.
