Write-On Prompt: WD 1 - Rob Calls It Quits

 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.