Tuesday 16 September 2014

Flash fiction - Sanatorium, 1972

The ladies over at Studio 30+ gave us homework along with the prompts this week. It was to write and then wait. Sit back, read, re-read, let it stew and check it again the next day. I wrote Sanatorium, 1972 yesterday and it was good practice to come back to it today. I made some vocabulary changes. Reading it out loud was great. I don't do it enough, so thanks for that ladies.

The prompts this week come from Opal Reflections and the poem Pre-Dawn Reflections. They were "taught by my example" and/or "echoes". It should be obvious which I used! Thanks for reading.


Sanatorium, 1972


Isabella Snow thought she had them fooled: the memories, the trauma, the extreme mood swings and the night terrors. Famous painter turned poet with the fading white scars up her arms; she who had checked in over a month ago, hours before her deadline, clutching a yellowing photo of her father and a bottle of gin, no shoes. The first therapist, a fan, wanted to talk of her portraits, especially ‘Broken’. She hurled a vase at him. The second asked about her childhood. She spilled over herself, tripping on lost memories that made no sense with what the world actually knew. He gave her more pills, just sugar. The third therapist opened with, “I hated your last anthology.” Isabella smiled inside and cowered in her chair. ‘Echoes’ had been a roaring success, but she knew it was full of rainbows, shredded ropes of hope for the mindless to cling to. Here was what she really needed in order to write again. Pain. “Tell me,” she whispered back and prepared to really break herself open.  

 Read more here. 

6 comments:

  1. Wow. I'm speechless. You take creative block to a whole new level.

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    1. Ha ha, quite. The lengths some artists will go to!

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  2. Using the prompt as the book title was inspired. I also like how she wanted to be critiqued, almost like being edited. Great job.

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  3. OH Laura, this was just exquisite. The way Isabella lent herself to the pain, wanted to be not near but IN the fire. You touched on the human condition with the jagged edge of a blade, the blood at the surface ready to flow.

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    1. Isabella's definitely one for stepping way to close to the edge. But she wants to be burnt, so let her. Thanks for reading, Kir! x

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