Getting Back in the Game

Once upon a time, I used to write short fiction vignettes for  myself as well as anyone I could convince to read them but sometime during Senior year, I kind of just gave up on fiction writing when I decided that I wanted to be a journalist. 

I decided that it was a good enough time as any to pick up where I left off so I proposed a small challenge for myself tonight. 

Thanks to the wonderful tumblr user/all around great friend kodiakoda (Koda), I have in my possession a book called “14,000 Things to be Happy About.” It’s basically a giant stream-of-consciousness list of things that made the author, Barbara Ann Kipfer happy over the course of 20 years.

Seeing as there are 612 pages, I’m going to choose three numbers (either I will do it or have a friend do it) that represent page numbers. I will then pick an item from each of those pages and give myself a 10-minute time limit to try and write those items into a vignette. 

edit: I started this project last night and did two pieces before I fell asleep. This was very much a spur of the moment idea. Anyways, I thought I might share the first piece that I did. The topics were seeing happy parents, vast areas of cattails and river bulrushes, and Colleen Moore's dollhouse at Chicago's Science and Industry Museum (luckily, I have actually been to see that specific dollhouse and it is quite spectacular).

I remember when I was a little girl and my parents took me to see this famous doll house in the city. I thought, or rather, I was convinced that in a previous life, I had been a Fairy Queen that had lived in a castle just like that one. Maybe I ate off of tiny golden plates and gazed out of tiny stained glass windows and that I never had any problems to hide from.

From where I'm standing now, there are plenty of problems to hide from. Currently, there is a set of bright-eyed and busy-tailed parents standing in our Tuscany themed kitchen. Why a family of Irish Catholics though that Tuscany was a great theme for our kitchen, I'll never understand. I also know that there is a pile of optimistically thick college letters in that same kitchen, in a neat stack under the clock where I left them. 

All that I knew for certain was that I had to hide--to run out the back, screen door, down the steps and out to the marsh. Amongst the cattails, I don't have to think about college right this second. Maybe amongst the cattails, I can still be a Fairy Queen.