Want to be seen? Join my writing workshop.
Send your piece to [email protected] with your work in the body of the email—no attachments will be opened.
Here are the prompts:
Write a scene capturing one of the following emotions. Keep it as brief as possible while making us feel it. Max word count: 1500.
- A character’s realization that they are utterly alone.
- The moment just before a character decides to forgive an unforgivable act.
- The quiet anger of watching someone else live a life you once dreamed of.
The catch? Don’t name the emotion. No mention of the feeling itself—think of it as charades with words, but with pain.
If your piece moves me, I’ll update this post with your username and feature your story below.
Update:
SilverFox is out here killing it with this piece! I wasn’t ready for it:
…Late the next morning, Stacy padded out of her bedroom into a stark, silent room. No fire in the stove, no scent of coffee bubbling lazily on the cooktop. No one had pulled back the curtains. Eighty years, and she had never learned to make coffee. Didn’t even know where he kept it. The thought scraped against her—the whole kitchen had been his; it felt foreign, almost forbidden, without him.
She edged closer to the cupboards, then stopped, fingers hovering above the handle. That hinge, the one he could never quite fix…she’d laughed at his frustration. “Impatient old fool,” she’d teased. But now the thought of hearing that hinge—alone—clamped itself around her heart. The air felt sharp, invasive, as if every object added to her grief.
In the silence, her eyes settled on his empty chair. No paper folded beside it; it was still out in the driveway, undisturbed. She could almost feel him there, reading, frowning as he did, and her breath hitched. With a trembling hand, she lowered herself into a chair and finally let herself collapse.
in her pain, she rasped out the only word she had the strength to speak.
“How?”
And the walls, walls that had held all the love and fury and forgiveness of their years together, gave her back only cold unrelenting silence.
Way to go SilverFox! This stung to read. I hope it isn’t a true story!