“Tick”: Inktober Day #14: 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.
It’s been bad this season; the dog has been covered. One stroll out into the woods and there are five, seven, nine of them embedded. The kids get bundled; even when they’re huffing with sweat I make them keep their skin covered, and even then, there was one climbing up the baby’s face when we came in last night. I got it out before it bit her, but some of them are as small as poppyseeds, smaller even, and how are you supposed to find that on a wiggly 4yo’s scalp?
They say there’s a target that grows, and I’ve seen it; a neighbor once pulled up the leg of one of his shorts to ask if I could look at a hotspot on his leg, and it was clear why they call it a target. But now they say that the disease doesn’t always show a target. Or there are different diseases that don’t ever have them. Both, either. Kids wailing to please take off their sweatshirts, please, they are so sweaty. I hand them their flasks of cold water and try to convince them, coax, cajole. I had no idea how much of motherhood would be spent on such ginger speech, wrapped in vain hope. Eventually, of course, we will all get it.
