The whale and I were eye to eye, alone just he and I
He was at home beneath the sea, I was the intruder
He opened his huge mouth, water rushed in and pulled me in with it
Was it just a big yawn because I bored him, or did he think I looked tasty?
Written for Greg’s Four Line Fiction prompt. Photo credit: Rafael Fernandez Caballero / UPY2024.
With a sudden rush of panic, I realized I had no idea where I was. At the risk of sounding trite, it was literally a dark and stormy night punctuated by an icy drizzle. And if that wasn’t enough, nothing looked at all familiar to me. I was in a waking dream in a strange place, and that threw me for a loop.
I saw a light shining in the distance ahead of me, and my first inclination was to walk toward the light, where I might find some answers, not only about where I was but, more importantly, why.
Or should I turn around and head back into the darkness, back from whence I came? Maybe I’ll retrace my steps and recross that threshold that took me from the known to the unknown.
Toward the light or toward the darkness? Which way to go? I looked in front of me and then I looked behind me. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and took my first step.
Was it the right one?
Written for Christine Bialczak’s Simply 6 Minutes prompt. Image credit: unattributed. Also for Fandango’s Story Starter prompt, where the story starter is “With a sudden rush of panic, I realized I had no idea where I was.”
It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you a “teaser” sentence or sentence fragment and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that sentence/fragment. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.
This week’s Story Starter teaser is:
With a sudden rush of panic, I realized I had no idea where I was.
If you care to write and post a story built from this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.
And most of all, have fun.
I am unofficially participating in this year’s A to Z Challenge. My theme this year is girlfriends. I can not believe we’ve reached the end of April and the end of the alphabet already!
When I completed my active duty as an army medic, I continued my military service as a “weekend warrior” in the army reserves. I would spend one weekend a month assigned to a psychiatric ward at the Walter Reed Hospital caring for a lot of soldiers back from Vietnam suffering from PTSD and other psychiatric issues.
In civilian life I grew my hair too long to be able to show up for my monthly reserve duty, so had to make some choices. I could either get a monthly haircut that would pass military hair requirements or I could buy a men’s wig and use bobby pins to hold my long hair in place while I put a short cut men’s wig — not a toupee but a whole head wig — over my hair.
I honestly didn’t know if my wig was fooling anybody, but nobody said anything to me when I reported for duty.
Anyway, there was a cute military nurse named Zoey who worked on the psych ward and she would occasionally be on duty the same weekends that I was pulling my monthly gig. The first time I was on the ward when she was there we chatted a little bit and she was very nice to be around. She wasn’t there the next two monthly reserve weekends I worked, but she was there the following time I pulled duty.
She remembered me, said hi, and then gave me a strange look. “Are you wearing a wig?” she asked. Then she reached up and pushed some long hairs that had apparently escaped the confines of my wig back up underneath the wig. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”
A few hours later she saw me again and ordered me to follow her into a storage room. “Take it off,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Your wig,” she clarified. “Take it off because you have a lot of hair sticking out from under it.” I look off my wig to reveal a head of thick wavy hair beneath it. She took a minute before reacting, but then she started running her fingers through my hair and said, “Oh, this makes me hot,” and she started kissing me. I said she had to stop because I needed to be on the ward, and she gave me one more kiss and then expertly used the bobby pins to secure my real hair tightly to my head and then put the wig back on my head. She then stood back and said, “Much better,” and then patted me on my ass as I was leaving the storage room.
That was Saturday. I was back on Sunday and so was Zoey. This time I had done a better job putting on my wig and I was confident that no long hairs were sticking out from under my wig. Zoey was very friendly again, but we focused on doing our respective jobs.
Until mid-afternoon when Zoey came up to me and asked if I could give her a hand in the storage room. After we were in the storage room she closed and locked the door and literally ripped the wig off of my head and started running her hands through my hair while kissing me passionately on the mouth. Then she stopped, got down on her knees, unhooked my belt, unbuttoned my fly, pulled down my underpants and….
Afterwards she spent a few minutes getting my wig back in place.
For my next two monthly weekends at Walter Reed, Zoey made sure she was working those weekends, too, and our encounters in the storage room had evolved to having sex on both Saturdays and Sundays. And she always made sure my wig looked perfect afterwards.
The next weekend I went to Walter Reed, Zoey was not there. I asked another nurse if she knew if Zoey would be coming in. The nurse gave me a knowing look and said that Zoey had transferred to a U.S. military hospital in Germany. Then she added, “Yes, her husband who was a doctor here at Walter Reed, got transferred to that hospital, and as his wife, she of course, went with him to Germany.” The nurse emphasized the word “wife.”
I had no idea that Zoey was married, much less to an army doctor at Walter Reed!
Previous 2024 A2Z posts: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).
Today’s word is “reprisal.”
Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.
Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, ÿplease manually add your link in the comments.
And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.
This, That, and the Other 