Perfect Prison
Literary Short StoryFebruary 2016, my then current main computer's hard drive crashed, resulting in two weeks without a computer and a much longer time of restoring old files, bookmarks and the like afterward. This is why in 2016, I wrote much less than in 2015. There is also Indies Unlimited switching from written prompts with a picture to pure picture prompts. I am frankly not very good with picture prompts. I will occasionally get a story from an image, but more often than not I skip on them.
June 2016, I finally spun a story from one of their pictures. This was a waterfall, one of those tacky indoor ones. 2016 up until then had also been a learning experience in procrastination, motivation, and time management, among others. So this is a topic growing close to me that year and waterfalls frankly are very distracting in their calming nature.
This prison obviously is procrastination manifested, a subtle horror invented by a psychologist in the story. Probably a story accessible to very few readers.
This is one of two stories I recorded to start my Youtube channel of narrated shorts for the simple reason that this one and Delayed Vengeance were the only stories collected at this point that could be considered contemporary fiction. The kind of ideas I prefer do not generally lend themselves well to contemporary fiction, yet it seems to sport the broadest general appeal.
I was wrong about the appeal of Delayed Vengeance, so maybe I was wrong about Perfect Prison, as well. It does have a Kafkaesque vibe going for it.
There is one unusual trait to this flash not apparent from reading it: I wrote it finish-to-start. The final sentence was the starting point, working my way back from there. No particular reason, it just happened to turn out that way. While it is not unusual for me to know how a story ends before I know how it begins, writing it completely reversed is something unique to Perfect Prison as of the time of this writing in July 2016.
June 2016
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How to Sing Butterflies
