Image by jamelah via Flickr
“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”The purpose of the #JustWrite prompts is to encourage the writing practice itself. You can write your prompt from the picture or the title. Don’t think. Don’t edit. Just write.
When you respond to someone else’s writing practice, please do so with something nice and encouraging about the writing. If you can, find something specific and concrete to praise, but remember we’re not expecting perfection from this practice. What we’re really praising is the effort.
There are only three rules for #JustWrite:
1) No editing.
2) No criticizing.
3) Have fun.
Please share your #JustWrite responses here,
or respond to someone else’s writing practice here.
If you’re new to #JustWrite, you can find out more here and here.
battered
bruised
stupid writer’s block
kiss this!
That’s funny, Kim
I like how you could take it two ways. Either you’re whooping the Writer’s Block, or it’s whooping you. (Am I right?) Kiss this! is the icing on the cake!
I was digging in the little garden in front of my house when I heard the car pull up. The sun was hot that day. My hands were caked with the rich dark loamy earth from my garden bed. I had just finished planting rosemary on the outside perimeter, flanking my marigolds.
I heard the steps approach behind me. Highly polished dress shoes clacking loudly on the concrete walkway becoming hushed padding on the thick grass. I looked up as a long shadow engulfed my small kneeling frame.
Kim, is this what you were wanting to do with this project?
You got it! Thanks Keith!
Nice. I can picture everything you’re saying very clearly. I especially like the bit about the sound of the shoes becoming “hushed padding on the thick grass.” My senses are engaged
(Kim, is it okay that I’m starting with the comments?)
Beth Overmyer recently posted..Neermore
Absolutely — thank you Beth!
Keith,
I can almost smell the garden and hear the footsteps coming up behind me. Love it!
She pulled the hair across her lips and stared blankly past me. I swallowed, tension pulsing inside my stomach as I waited for her to smash me across the face next.
“Uh, hey,” I said. “Uhm, that dude you just put in the hospital. Can I have his wallet?”
For a moment, I thought she was going to leap at me like a bug, or eat the dude’s neck.
No such luck. She snatched the leather wallet from the back pocket of the dude’s Dockers. His shirt tearing in her grasp, she finally let him fall to the smelly pavement.
The wallet whirled at my face like a bat and I flinched. The psycho devil girl gone when I looked back at where she had stood.
I picked up the wallet.
“Damn it.” She had taken the money and my pool pass.
I like the dark humor going on here
And obviously we both like the word “pulsing,” as we both used it (I swear, I didn’t read yours first.) Great minds think alike 
Also, great verbs *o/*
Beth Overmyer recently posted..Neermore
Ooh my favorite part is the wallet whirling like a bat — I loved that!
Thanks, you two. I didn’t read anyone first, but in the unconscious zone ideas converge all the time. Pulsing might just be one of those crutch words I fall back on automatically. But Hek, weirdness happens!
He was nearly six-feet under when I killed him, bares hands pulsing with red and some entrails. We’ll not go there. The problem? I forget to mention to the cops that this was a writing prompt… or exercise. Take your pick.
If the cuffs fit, don’t wear ‘em.
Beth Overmyer recently posted..Regarding That Last Blog
LOL I love that he was already six feet under and the little aside, “We’ll not go there.” Dark humor indeed!
We’ll not go there? But ’tis an entertaining place ya found
I always enjoy the bending of reality… Particularly where the struggles of writing are concerned 
That she had been in the box was not open to question. For that matter, there was no question that she had tried to get out. Her hands were scabbed, crusted with dirt that had probably come from the crate’s former inhabitants — potatoes, perhaps, or maybe yams.
Beyond that, however, there wasn’t much to go on. She wasn’t talking: although she was happy to partake of a warm shower and a fresh change of clothes, she wouldn’t say a word. In fact, except for meals and the occasional visits to the bathroom, she sat in her bedroom, lights out, staring out the window at a foreign horizon that her interrogators could neither see nor, thankfully, imagine.
Wow. That’s a great piece of flash fiction right there. Made me feel sort of sad
Poor girl. Very well done 
Beth Overmyer recently posted..Neermore
That last line really hit me hard — I love it. The “foreign horizon” did it for me more than anything else.
It is a crossroads: the ending of one story, the beginning of another, and a story in and of itself. A good economy of words that expands when it hits the imagination. Nicely done
Dirt. Scarring. Broken and bloodied skin. And the lips I miss.
Ten years of digging has made the hole too wide, too deep. I cannot leap across to her, and my bridges find no purchase on the other side. It’s what I said– what she said… What she said I said. Our words pocked the landscape, and we each dove into the pocks and made them our foxholes.
That was the last thing we did together.
The fighting, the blaming that followed we each did apart, shooting back and forth, digging ever deeper into our cover, until we couldn’t see each other at all. Lobbing ordnance at the foe we couldn’t see…
I don’t know about she, but too late I found my foe to be me.
My stony heart softened by time, I realised that what I lost was more precious than pride. But I had lost track of her long before it struck me… And even long before I could say it aloud. Ten years on, life has been busy, healing up, moving on… Or trying to. Ten years on, eight past looking, I’ve found her again: back in the garden where first we met. Skin broken and bloodied on the fingers she uses to weed and to sow, she breathes life into the soil with her toil, and the soil breathes it right back into her.
She has a little smile gracing her lips… I don’t think she’s seen me yet. I should walk on, and let the smile remain, but… as Girlyman put it, the truth of letting go is that you never do…
Mike, are you sure you didn’t cheat, and edit this even just a little? It’s absolutely beautiful — I don’t even know where to start. I love the symbolism too, and the poetry of it. “The lips I miss”, “digging has made the hole too wide”, “bridges find no purchase”, “ten years on, eight past looking”, “the truth of letting go is that you never do” — just sheer poetry. I hope you keep coming back for more prompts!!
That “letting go” line really /is/ a borrowed one :-} and thanks to you both. (It was one sitting… So no editing, apart from the internal that I can never quite manage to turn off
Responses now, and I definitely plan on coming back for more of these
WOW! That was pure poetry. Loved it! I like the symbolism you have going on, the he said and she said being their foxholes. Very clever.
Beth Overmyer recently posted..Neermore
I’m late to the game and a bit more of a poet lately then a fiction writer, although telling stories is my passion…I’ve just refound this website, hope to stick around a bit this time.
The battle was fought
she feels she has won
the scars on her hands tell a story…
He told her once
how her hands had a history
that they are the most beautiful part of her…
The war is not over
she fights with her heart
she fears her hands may betray her…
She ages with grace
not many lines on her face
the scars on her hands tell her story…
She told him once
his hands would not hurt her
they were the most terrible part of him…
The war is not over
she still fights with her heart
her hands will win in glory.
I love this juxtaposition here:
She told him once
his hands would not hurt her
they were the most terrible part of him…
And the repetitions — very nice!