Stagger to Sway [Threesome!]

by Mayumi-H | Jan 19, 2013 | Fearless, Short Stories

It’s a threesome this week (no, not that kind of threesome, silly!), as I attempt to combine prompts from Julia’s 100-Word Challenge for Grown-Ups, Lillie McFerrin’s Five Sentence Fiction, and The Daily Post Writing Challenge!

Julia’s prompt this week (week 73) is “…the notes from the piano…“ Since we are to incorporate said phrase, we’re allowed to go to 105 words instead of the standard 100.
Lillie’s prompt this week is FORGOTTEN, and we’re to construct a story around that theme, in five sentences. We don’t have to use the prompt word itself.
The Daily Post’s prompt this week is Starting Over. There are no constraints on word or sentence count.

Let’s recap: 105 words, five sentences, with themes FORGOTTEN and Starting Over, and including the phrase “…the notes from the piano….”

This is my first time trying to pull together three different prompts around one idea, but I think I did pretty all right….

“Stagger to Sway”

Dance, he’d said, as if she could do; her dumb legs could barely remember how to stand, but for the clanking metal of her Zimmer frame! He’d never let her sit back, though: from grabbing her first wave, to making her step up from her chair.

“Everyone’s staring,” she protested.

Tugging her up, he muttered, “Forget ’em,” and, using his hips and shoulders, he took the place of her Zimmer and helped her lurch, inch by staggering inch, from sofa to open floor.

She cursed such slowness…but, in his arms, as the notes from the piano reached her, they began to sway, and she forgot.

(Yes, I know, I forgot pockets. Just as in real life, though, I got distracted by the bum.)

This vignette derives from an early (scrapped) draft of a scene from Fearless, so the characters and conflict are likely familiar to my beta readers. However, the original scene read as too schmaltzy for that particular part of the story (and, you may think it does so, here, as well), but I’d still rather liked it, at its core.

People say you should never completely scrap what you write, because you never know when it may come in handy. I had to do a fair amount of tweaking, but this stands as one of those lucky moments when I got to go back to something I wished I’d been able to keep in the story proper.

Did you play with any of these prompts this week? What happened with the notes of the piano? What was FORGOTTEN? How did your characters Start Over? Let me know!