Blogger Smack-Down: Part I

K, listen up, bloggerhood. This is a good, old-fashioned smack-down. Here is the challenge:

1 - Write a short story for the photograph above in 1,500 words or less
2 - Submit it to the Washington Post Valentine's Day Fiction Contest
3 - Post three teaser excerpts over the course of the next three weeks


My first post, from a rough first draft:


Just like yesterday and the day preceding it, today's pattern will be drawn from an interwoven series of forced distractions, each eventually fading as she gravitates again and again to the voice in the message - young, impetuous, and fun. Wending their way into the most vulnerable recesses of her brain, his words will lodge there long enough to spawn perfectly unthinkable thoughts. She'll hang up and stare off into the distance, trying to shake them and suppress the pain she feels in her heart. It is impossible to escape the uneasy feeling that each time she listens to the message, she slips imperceptably further off course - perhaps .055 percent further. Slowly, she is drifting away from order, stability and security, toward something unsure and unpredictable, in a way that she finds at once exhilarating and quietly horrifying. It all seems so irreversible, as though an unstoppable internal timepiece, whose silent advancement reverberates clearer and louder than any alarm clock ever has, plots an impending arrival time down to the nanosecond.

She replaces the handset, switches off the alarm and retreats with a sigh into the disheveled silence on her side of the bed. "Brian, get up."