She walks through the alleys aimlessly.  Hopefully, she has no idea that I am following her because I know who she is.

Finally she just stops abruptly in her footsteps and turns to me, and then asks, “I know you’ve been following me around. Who are you anyway?”

“Before I answer your question, do you have any idea who you are?” I ask her.

She hesitates and looks down to the ground, “I don’t actually. I don’t even know where I’m going,”

“How can I help you then?”

“You can start by telling me my name and what I’ve done.”

“Well, your name is. . .”

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This week’s 100 Word Challenge is to use this bit of dialogue……..??? asked ‘How can I help you?’…  .  Check out more entries here.

We make the last big turn on the drive home and I say to my second grader, “I need help with my writing.”

She perks up, awake from humming tires and drowsy daydreams.  “What do you need help with?”

“For my challenge ‘…but I turned it off…’  I don’t know what…I need a list of everything that can be turned off.”

“With a switch?  Like a car or cell phone?”

“Yes, but those are boring.”

“An engine?”

“A roller coaster.”

“A boat.”

“A fish finder.”

“A bilge pump.”

“A faucet.”

“A waterfall.”

“A waterfall?”  She laughs.

One hundred and five words later, we are happy.

———

The “Meta” for this…but I turned it off…only negative prompts came to mind.  Not what I wanted to write, so instead my pre-write activity becomes my entry.  She and I should make lists more often on the way home from school.

100 Word Challenge:  Week #24 You have five words that MUST be included in your writing so you can use 105 words only! The words are:  Carefully   Fifty   Spider   White   Pushed

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I sit there silently pushed up against the wall, as the stairs to the cellar creak loudly. Somebody is coming to get me, I think to myself.

Then all of a sudden, I feel tiny legs crawling up my bare arms. I freeze up and look at what is crawling up my arm to find not just one spider but fifty white ones. If I scream the person will know that I’m down here hiding.

I hold in the scream, but carefully change the position of my body so that I am more hidden. But these spiders begin to crawl up to my face; slowly.

Step after step Horse and I stumbled, the horizon changing only with the sun’s shimmering mirage.  Was this way a mistake?

Yes.

A mistake from the moment he sauntered in with dreams of open land drenched in the dappled sun of summer, and the mistaken words slipping from my mouth that his dreams…of course his dreams were my dreams.  Why would I question?

Now he and his dream lay beneath the brittle stones of the wasteland as we pressed, the dryness of the desert creeping, entwining, embalming us in despair.

His dream?  Only steps away from being my last dream.

Walking along, Katie was unaware of the dark storm approaching her from behind.
Katie heard a strange sound behind her so she turned around. Her mouth gaped as she saw a funnel forming in the sky. That’s when the weather changed for the worse!
The funnel hit the ground, twirling angrily as it went towards Katie at an alarming rate. She quickly dived under the bridge that ran over the creek.
The tornado jumped the creek, and started moving off into the distance; destroying trees along its way. Katie ran to her house where her family ushered her into the basement to wait out the storm.

We were all scared. We had our lives full of safety and there wasn’t any danger that would think to harm us. Even though we were near the ocean, there wasn’t really any potential danger. Or so we thought.

Everyone in town woke up to the tsunami warning, this felt different though; it didn’t feel like the usual drills. I looked outside my balcony window and saw the ocean rise. Then the weather changed to the worst.

The wind began to blow hard, taking trees out of the ground, the clouds turning dark, and rain began to shower. We never saw any potential danger until now.