Thursday, December 13, 2012

The Photo Finals Project...A Short Story

Ajar by Gavin Turk

The Weekly Writing Prompt

It's time for another writing prompt and I had fun with this one. It's kind of wacky and wacky's good, most of the time. This week the photo is posted by Nicole at her website: HERE

Anyone can participate in the weekly writing prompt. The rules are simple. There's a 500 word maximum, the story must be written by next Tuesday night. If you want to have others read your story, just post it to Nicole's site. The short story needs to incorporate the above picture, and it needs to use these five randomly chosen words:

Parking Meter

Stomach

Magazine

Chart

Olive

Last week a friend of mine took me up on the challenge and wrote a wonderful story...her first. Maybe this week you'll give it a shot. Either way, I hope you like this week's story.
 The Photo Finals Project

Jenny had exactly 57 minutes until her class final in her university photography 101 class was due. "Why?" Jenny screamed to the sparse crowd at the Common. "Why do I always wait until the last minute on these things?"

She had planned on doing her final project earlier in the day, and it would have worked, too, but the call from her sister Olive disrupted her world, like only her little sister could. "Okay," Jenny said when Olive called. "I'll come over, but I can't stay long. It's finals week and I'm already behind. Really, Olive? Stomach flu? You have the worst luck of anyone I know." Jenny hung up the phone and spent the next two hours across town comforting her only sibling.

Things didn't improve as she left Olive's apartment. "Crap!" Jenny yelled as she noticed the unmistakable yellow paper attached to her car's windshield. "I mean, come on! I fed the parking meter! I can't believe this!" Jenny ripped the ticket from the windshield and jammed it into the back pocket of her jeans. A quick look at the clock on the dash of her car as she started the engine told her just how late she was.

I've got just under 90 minutes until my project's due, Jenny thought. That means, as long as I take the pictures in the next 30 minutes, I'll have just enough time to download and photoshop them and hand them in. I'll work. She drove following an internal chart in her mind of where she needed to be in order to accomplish her scholarly goal.

After parking the car (this time safely at a student lot to which she had a parking pass...), she headed off across campus. "What the...?" Jenny said out loud as what appeared to be a modern sculpture caught her attention. That might work.

Jenny snapped a few pictures, checked the results in the small digital viewer attached to the back of the camera and was satisfied with the magazine of pictures she captured. The photos made her smile. "I could do this," Jenny said to herself. "Yeah...I could be a professional photographer, unless, of course, they have to keep deadlines."

Word Count: 365

2 comments:

  1. I love this!!! You totally got me involved in this and very quickly too. Ha ha, and I loved her inner dialogue too. And boy could I relate, though, it made me miss college. :)

    Good job! (and clever use of the word 'olive')

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    1. Thanks Nicole! I tried to get that frantic college feel in the story. I'm glad you felt it. And your comment on "Olive" made me smile, because I know I punted on that one...didn't even try. ;)

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