#inknet

Begin your story with the following sentence: “Sometimes there is a moment when you know things will never be the same.” See where it takes you.

I didn’t really know how to end this? But I wanted to post it since it’s Sunday so here you go.

Sometimes there is a moment when you know things will never be the same. Exiting the terminal, my bag hangs on my shoulder and I drag my only other suitcase behind me. When I see Devin and not my family, not Aly, I know that this is that moment.

I stop in my tracks and we just hold each other’s gazes. His curls are a mess and the heavy bags under his eyes tell me he hasn’t slept in days. My heart breaks. Never have I ever seen him look so utterly ruined.

It’s then that I realize that my best friend has been grieving the loss of Aly, too. 

My tense shoulders wilt and my bags drop to the floor. Crossing the room into each other’s embrace, we’re a mess of limbs, tears, and apologies. His arms curl around my shoulders and I bury my head into the crook of his neck, securing my own arms around his waist.

Everything has changed, but not this; not Devin.

When my hands stop shaking and my cheeks are only tear-stained, I pull away from the hug and wipe at my cheeks. Devin’s own watery eyes meet mine and he says simply, “Lets go home, Rem.”

Home.

In the car, Devin sits quietly for a second. He glances my way like he wants to say something but he turns away and starts the ignition instead. When we pull out from the parking garage, he doesn’t reach for the radio to blast his death metal.

Ten minutes down the road, I can’t take the silence anymore.

“How’s the band?” I ask, nibbling on the inside of my cheek.

Devin’s fingers drum against the steering wheel and he shrugs, a weak motion of the shoulders. “We didn’t want to do anything while you were away.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, urging myself not to snap at him, but my patience is already weak and I’m tired and my eyes hurt. I make myself reply evenly. “I told you to not let me stop you guys anymore.”

Devin shrugs again, oh-so-nonchalant, but I see his fingers tighten around the steering wheel. “I guess some people just don’t like to listen.”

My teeth grind against each other when I catch the underlying meaning. The words are a knife to my chest but I’m so emotionally exhausted that they don’t hurt me. Instead, they make me angry.

Through my teeth, I ask, “Excuse me?”

“Oh, you know,” Devin says, staring straight ahead. His careless tone irritates me and I can feel the tips of my nails pierce my palm as I curl my fingers into a fist.

I think of Brooks uttering the same words when I force out, “What are you trying to say, Devin?”

He heaves a breath, his whole body shaking from it, and he mutters lowly, “I’m saying that you should have listened to me, Remy. You should have stayed.”

I suck in a breath, struggling to get air to my lungs which feel like they’re failing. Gripping the door handle of the car, bits of loose rubber peel beneath my hand. “You have no right.”

He has no right, but I know he’s right; and that makes it all the more painful.

Before he can reply, I add, “If you think I don’t already know that . . . if you think, for one second, that I don’t feel like absolute shit for not staying here with her, you don’t know me at all.”

My lips tremble as I finish my sentence and I pray that my words are comprehensible. If Devin’s slack posture and silence is anything to go by, they are.

His voice is softer than the silent atmosphere calls for when he replies. “I’m so sorry, Remy.”

“Begin your story with the following sentence: “Sometimes there is a moment when you know things will never be the same.” See where it takes you”.

Sometimes there is a moment when you know things will never be the same. It can be anything, really, or anyone… Sometimes you know it happened, sometimes you only realize it days, months, years later. I don’t think I knew that my moment had come until weeks later, when the dust settled and I could see things as they were. And things were like this: Our house had burned down. My parents were separating. My cat was dead. And I was so depressed that none of that seemed to matter to me.

Our dogs were the first ones to recover: they licked their wounds and healed the burns and showed us all how to adapt, I think. Then we rebuilt the house. And then we started to pick up the pieces of our family, our old life, and tried to glue them back together. Some of the pieces fitted, but some didn’t. And we learned to be fine with that, to be fine with the change, with the raw edges that would take time to soften. It took us time to become whole again.

Write about a first (first apartment, first kiss, first time driving a car, first lie, first big success, first roller coaster ride, first love, first breakup, etc.). Include as many details as possible. Try to use as many of the five senses as you can.

~ I’ll likely tie in all the prompts with my WIP to get a good feel of my characters. I loved this prompt! There were so many ways to go with it so, naturally, I took the heartbreaking way. ~

The phone call ended with a single press of my finger to the screen; a process as easy as losing someone who means the world to you. Not so easy, however, when your body is trembling like an earthquake has settled within you.

My phone drops from my hands and I fall to my knees, the earthquake within me shaking my foundation to nothing. I am half-aware of hands around my shoulders and words being spoken into my ear but it’s all meaningless noise to me. My mother’s sobs drown out the world and her words rattle inside my brain. Aly passed away last night. Passed away. Last night.

Aly passed away last night.

Rough hands cup my cheek and pull me from the haunting words. “Remy.”

Brooks is kneeled before me, his brown eyes the perfect place to bury myself in.

I cover my lips as a sob escapes them and my silence breaks. My voice cracks painfully. “Aly.”

“I’m so sorry, Remy. I’m so sorry,” Brooks’ arms encompass my waist and pull me forward into his lap and I shove my face into the crook of his shoulder, my arms around his neck. The scent of the bonfire from last night still lingers on his jacket and I’m thankful for it; it’s grounding.

His hand drags along my back in soothing motions as I let my heart pour itself down my cheeks. I wasn’t there for her. I wasn’t there with her. I wasn’t there.

“Aly was alone,” I say, biting my lip hard enough that I begin to taste copper. “I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there with her, Brooks. Aly was alone.” I sound like a broken record.

Brooks pulls me away from him and meets my eyes. Ever so lightly, he pushes stray hairs behind my ear and grasps my cheek; never once does his gaze waver. “She was not alone, Remy. Your parents were there with her, always. And you never missed a chance to skype her.”

His words light something in my belly and not in the pleasant way that I’ve come to associate them with. I turn my head away from him, extricating his hand from my face. Skype meant nothing. “But I wasn’t there.”

Brooks tries to catch my eyes but I keep my gaze settled on the unsent postcards sitting on the island counter. They would never be sent. “What do you mean, of course y--”

“No.” My voice is hard. Steel. The earthquake is shaken to its core by the force. “I was here.”

The truth of the words hurt me in an entirely new way and burns its way through me. I turn to meet the gaze of the boy in front of me and see the pain playing across his features. It hurts me, for a split second, to know that I’ve caused harm to Brooks, to know that I’ve hurt him, but I squash the guilt building within me. He is the reason you were not with her.

I pull away from him entirely and stand. My legs shake beneath me but hold. “I was here.” I repeat.

Brooks is silent but he stands, too. He reaches a hand out but drops it with a glance to my face. I watch his fingers curl slightly as he shoves them into his jacket. “What are you trying to say, Remy?”

I cross my arms over my torso half-wishing that, if I wrap my arms around myself hard enough, the pressure within me will disperse. My heart begins to leak again when words tumble out of my mouth. “I’m saying that coming here was a mistake.”

“How can you say that? You came here for Aly. You told me this was all for Aly.” Brooks voice is uneven; shaky, like it was after he told me about his mother and the jacket. My heart breaks a little more.

I shake my head, wiping the tears from my cheek with the back of my hand. “I know what I said. But that was before my little sister died. When this trip was just an opportunity to take pictures across the country and not the worst mistake of my life.”

Brooks opens his mouth, shuts it. Opens it again. He closes his eyes. “I know you’re hurting, Remy, but don’t do this,” his voice cracks.

“No, I’m done listening to you,” my arms squeeze around my waist tighter. “I listened to you last time, the first time I wanted to go home, and look at where that got me.”

Brooks reaches out and this time doesn’t hesitate to grip my shoulders. “Remy, we couldn’t have known . . .”

My voices rises and I push him off me. “I should have known! She’s my sister.” I pause. “Was my sister.”

Was.

I shove past him and cross the kitchen to my bunk. The tour bus is too small and I can feel my nerves shouting at me to get out, get out, get out. My pulse is thumping heavily against my throat and it’s all I can hear as I pull my suitcase from underneath my bunk and begin to throw my stray clothes into it.

“Remy, what are you doing?”

Ignoring him, I pass him again and grab the stack of postcards I will never get the chance to send. I don’t let myself to linger on the thought. On my way back towards my luggage, Brooks’ fingers wrap around my forearm. “Remy, please.”

I stop and give him a cold look. “Let go of me, Brooks.”

He uncurls his fingers from my arm with a look of defeat. All too quiet, he asks,“What are you doing?”

I’ve used a scene from my current WIP since the prompt fit it pretty well. It’s the story of two teens who’ve run away from home, and this is the first time Val says “I love you” -- also the very end of their first real date.

As they left the restaurant, Trenton drove past a park, a sign catching his eye. He didn’t recognize the bands playing, but the concert began in a couple of hours, and it seemed like a better idea for a date than he could’ve thought up on his own. “Want to go?” he asked Valerie.

He knew the answer the moment she looked at the sign, her grimace slight but noticeable. “If you want,” she said. “Tonight’s your night.”

“Our night,” he corrected.

Valerie turned to watch the opportunity disappear behind them. “It’s just that it’s been a long day, Trent.”

“You want to go back to the house?” He hadn’t thought that the end of their date might be the food, but Valerie looked more tired than he’d given her credit for when they left.

She hesitated, and he knew she wouldn’t say yes. Trenton almost didn’t want her to, because he didn’t want to be stuck in the house the rest of the night.

He would never give up the chance for a concert, had he been on his own. And it seemed sometimes that music was the biggest thing they had in common, so it would have been nice to go together.

He could go back just to drop her off.

He quickly dismissed the thought. Valerie said, “We can stay out, if you want. It’s not that I don’t want to spend time together, Trent.”

“Then what is it?” His hands clenched the steering wheel tighter, but he couldn’t be angry. He knew he had no reason for it.

“I just want to go home!”

Her words shocked him enough that he almost missed the red light in front of them. Valerie grabbed onto the door for support as the car jerked to a stop, but Trenton let himself be tossed around in his seat.

“What was that?” Her voice was shrill. Afraid.

She hadn’t meant home. She’d meant Amy’s house. Trenton had to repeat this a few times in his head before he was convinced it was true.

When the light turned green, he kept driving.

Valerie shifted in her seat. He felt her eyes on him, but he didn’t spare her a glance. He was glad for his car, the way it helped him hide his shaking hands by clutching the steering wheel; his avoidance by focusing on the road.

“Trent, come on.”

This whole day has been terrible and the only thing that’ll make it better is you. The line was too cheesy to say out loud. Or maybe just too true.

Sometimes, he couldn’t tell the difference.

Valerie set a hand on his arm. She said, “I love you.”

He stiffened. The words might have made him feel better, if he felt he could return them, but his own feelings were caught in his throat.

It took him a long moment to find his voice. “Me too.”

Haruki Murakami based his novel Norwegian Wood around the Beatles' song of the same name. This week, pick a song and use it to inspire your writing. You can include the song in your work, write about the song, use the theme or tone of the song, etc.

Have you got colour in your cheeks?

Do you ever get that fear that you can't shift The type that sticks around like something in your teeth?

"Who exactly is she?" He asked. He didn't get it, who was he hunting.

Are there some aces up your sleeve? Have you no idea that you're in deep? I dreamt about you nearly every night this week

"She, is The Devils Daughter," he told him.

How many secrets can you keep? 'Cause there's this tune I found that makes me think of you somehow and I play it on repeat Until I fall asleep Spilling drinks on my settee

"Her?" He asked. There must've been some mistake.

She spun around, taking out an earbud, listening. A mischievous smile was tugging on her lips. She seemed to be looking for something. She put her earbud back in, and started to walk again.

Do I wanna know If this feeling flows both ways? Sad to see you go Was sort of hoping that you'd stay Baby we both know

A loud crash sounded, and her smile grew bigger. Behind her, a car swerved into a tree, smoke was emitting from the engine. And it looked as if the driver was asleep. But he knew better, he's seen more dead bodies than he could count.

That the nights were mainly made for saying things that you can't say tomorrow day...

"Now that just isn't fair," he said, smirking. It seemed she was a step ahead. And she was taunting him.

The rental garage has a distinct metallic smell in the air and I have a strong suspicion it’s to blame for my growing headache. It could also be the loud singing (read: screaming) of my friends.

Digging my index finger into my temple, I let my bass hang at my side. “Can we call it a day, guys?”

An unanimous sigh of relief echoes through the metal building.

“I think I got some really good shots for the video,” Devin grins from his corner, his tripod almost as tall as him. I give him a high five and Daniel steps around from behind his drums.

“Anyone down for some Royal’s?”

Everyone, previously exhausted and quiet, enthusiastically shouts yes. We quickly begin to gather up our crap and toss out empty snack wrappers (read: my Reese’s wrappers, of which litter the concrete floor).

“Have you guys found a replacement yet?” I ask carefully as I untangle the rough guitar strap from my hair and place the instrument into its case.

The band collectively groans and all eyes settle on me. Daniel gives me his look; his Mom Friend look. “Remy, please. There is no way we’re replacing you.”

“You have to. I’m done playing, okay? I need to focus on my portfolio now.”

Ashlyn places a hand on her hip and offers me a tipped eyebrow. Her bangs are swept over her eyes, choppy and purple. “I don’t see why you can’t play and do your photography stuff.”

I walk past the two and ignore Devin’s meaningful glance. We’d had this conversation before and I was starting to regret bringing the subject up again. Pushing my hands beneath the cold metal garage door, I welcome the sudden brightness on my face. “You know why, Ash.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to accept it,” she mumbles, shoving past me to the van.

I sigh, watching her go. Devin stands beside me and I lean into his shoulder. “Why don’t they understand that this isn’t going to last? That we have to move on?”

“Rem, I love you but how can you not see it?” He gives my shoulder a squeeze. “You’re following your passion; all they want to do is follow theirs.”

With a pat against my hair, he joins the two at the van-- the hideous Beast that started it all. The summer before we became eleventh graders, Daniel had gotten a job and worked all summer to buy the ugly thing. Really and truly, the Beast lived up to its nickname; its hulking size alone owned up to the name, but the additional horns added thanks to Daniel’s exquisite taste settled the deal.  

Write about something ugly, whether it be physical or figurative (ie: a personality, a place, war, fear, hatred, cruelty, etc.). Describe it in detail. As you are writing, try to find and highlight the beauty in it.

“Write about something ugly, whether it be physical or figurative (ie: a personality, a place, war, fear, hatred, cruelty, etc.). Describe it in detail. As you are writing, try to find and highlight the beauty in it.”