Member-only story
“Roof”: Inktober Day #13: Writer Edition
I’m using Inktober prompts to generate daily writing
I’m always jealous of my visual artist friends, especially my sister, when Inktober rolls around. Then this year I realized that even though I don’t draw, I do write, and it might be fun to take the same prompts and see what twenty minutes of writing on the given topic elicits. So I thought I’d just play and see where things take me (knowing that a lot of what I write will be dreck), and maybe you’d like to join too. Here are this year’s prompts.
My father was under specific instructions to wait on the roof. The kitchen, fine. The basement stairs, not ideal, but okay, if he had to. But Dave was coming up for the week, and he could definitely wait until Saturday, and he pledged to me, I know this because I made him take an actual pledge, that he would not even so much as think about stepping on a ladder. Not even, he said, fingers held up, when I dropped him off his mac and cheese casserole, the first step.
But my father is a goddamned liar. Suzy says it’s unfair to be angry at him because the poor thing is in so much pain, and he could have forgotten, but Suzy is the baby and has always forgiven him. That summer he left for three months, and then waltzed back into the kitchen after the leaves had fallen off the maple in the front yard, even Mama had a hard time going back to feeding. But Suzy climbed right back on his lap, as if no time had passed.
And Suzy lives in Florida. So she doesn’t have to deal with the rehab center or the insurance company or even, yes, Daddy, who is glad to complain despite the fact that he is solely responsible for shattering his own hip. That’s the word the doctor used- “shatter.” Not reassuring.