Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Writing Prompt January 5th

A loud pounding on the door wakes you in the middle of the night. A police officer tells you that your main antagonist has been taken to jail. What did s/he do? What did you do?


I don't like talking to the police. They give me the willies. Too formal. Too uniformed. Too authoritarian. Police don't understand ambiguity, or concealed motive or artistic license, so when they knocked on my door at 3am this morning to inform me that they had Nick in the slammer, I was not terribly polite. Or coherent. Or circumspect. The overbearing coppers gave me a new set of bracelets and we all took a nice ride downtown. 


Of course, by the time we got there, Nick was gone.  He had dissolved into a cloud of buzzing flies, or turned to mist or simply teleported to remove himself from the premises. The CCTV showed nothing but a blur and an absence. Now the police state expects me to explain his disappearing act, and they are not buying the 'fictional character' aspect of the truth. Nor does their computer recognize the names Beelzebub, Satan, Old Nick or Lucifer.


If they would only give me pen and paper I could write myself out of this fix. I could write Nick back into his cell, I could concoct a plausible defense, I could create a plot twist to save the night. Evidently, a pen is too much of a weapon to be granted a prisoner in a holding cell, and tergiversating prisoners give the police the willies. It is going to be a long night!

2 comments:

ImpsInMyPen said...

tergiversating? That's a new one! I'll have to look that up. Learn something new every day!

Chip Michael said...

I can't believe your command of language... it's not that I'm tergiversating it... I never could grasp it in the first place.