4-19-12\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The prompt:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Hard room, soft colors. Soft squishy bodies.\u00a0Berber carpet, nubbly.\u00a0 Describe textures.<\/p>\n
30-minute writing, fiction<\/p>\n
He was a hard man in a soft town.\u00a0 Why the hell did he get off that bus?\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing here for him, but everyone needs to be someplace.\u00a0 The lady in front of him had stepped down just a bit too slow, and he pushed past her, in a rush to get away from the crowd behind him.\u00a0 He stumbled onto the Common, and breathed in the soft air.\u00a0 Slumped to the ground.\u00a0 After three hours of a corduroy seat on a bus that still smelled of cigars and cigarettes decades after the ban,\u00a0\u00a0 the grass caressed and cooled him.\u00a0 Earth beneath his fingers, cool and damp.<\/p>\n
He looked around, trying to maintain situational awareness.\u00a0 Students sunning themselves and smoking.\u00a0 The smell wafting over him.\u00a0 He stood and moved upwind, finding a tree for shade.\u00a0 The sun was becoming brutal, drying and shrinking his skin.\u00a0 Shade helped.\u00a0 Another scan of the area, noting the placement of paths, cars sliding by, a police car sitting parked, the cop goldbricking.\u00a0 No worries there.<\/p>\n
He shifted again, the leather of the holster digging into his back.\u00a0 He had to move, before people started to wonder why he was wearing a jacket on such a warm day.\u00a0 Time to drift through the town, get familiar with it, and locate another target.<\/p>\n
Donovan had slipped out of the last town a full day before the body was found.\u00a0 It was a lot more run-down than this place.\u00a0 An old mill town, sliding down into depression and grayness as only lost hope can produce.\u00a0 Cinders in the streets, a sluggish river pulling dead branches through and away.\u00a0\u00a0 The target was tough, but not hard.\u00a0 You need life to be hard.\u00a0 All of the life had been sucked out of those folks years ago.\u00a0 He had probably done the old guy a favor.<\/p>\n
This new place had life.\u00a0 Maybe he could find a bit of a challenge if he could just be patient for a while.\u00a0 Maybe find the library.\u00a0 They are usually air conditioned, so no one would care about the jacket.\u00a0 And the people are so focused on their books that they find it easy to ignore you.\u00a0 He could pick one lucky soul and live a bit of their life parallel to them, then follow them outside.\u00a0 Maybe her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
4-19-12\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The prompt:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Hard room, soft colors. Soft squishy bodies.\u00a0Berber carpet, nubbly.\u00a0 Describe textures. 30-minute writing, fiction He was a hard man in a soft town.\u00a0 Why the hell did he get off that bus?\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing here for him, but everyone needs to be someplace.\u00a0 The lady in front of him had stepped down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-promptedwriting"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mainlyprompts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}