Sometimes the desire to simultaneously strangle and have sex with one's mama is just a cigar...

Me Mum smoked cigars, on occasion.

That probably explains ...

...something.

That probaly explains ...

...something.

But can you drabble it, whatever it is?

The Bi-Polarism of Personal History

This is the distinction I never wanted to make.

Here I am, broken but vital; you've gone back to clay. I'm serene in my anger, your anger is now the calm of the grave. You're nice and safe in the middle of nowhere, while I, left behind, try to find the still core of that pretty safety. Instead, I find curving paths, high hedges, eyes that watch, jungle noises. There are monsters here.

Once we were as one, or so I believed: your yang to my yin. Now I hunger in the sunlight, and you? The opposite of light.

Just wondering, how exactly does drabble work? Just...write a short piece on the given topic and post it?

Pretty much. It's supposed to be exactly 100 words, and most of them are, but people sometimes go a bit over or under.

Some editing help, please? I'm stuck on this sentence:

Over that simple feast Anna would forget that she lived in the present and was English on her father’s side to boot, and imagine herself among the clan chieftains and their ladies of ancient days.

The "she lived in the present" part is bugging me, but I can't think of a better way to convey the idea that Anna, already indulging her homesickness by daydreaming of Scotland, is imagining herself not just hundreds of miles but hundreds of years away.

Or maybe I just cut the sentence entirely. It follows this:

At Dunmalcolm Castle the June days were so long that it would still be twilight at midnight. But there the sun was a friend rather than a tormenter, just warm enough that she needn’t wear a pelisse over her dress if she went for an afternoon walk around the loch below the castle. Perhaps Jamie and Will would take her with them in the boat when they went out to fish, and she would dangle her hand over the side into the lovely bracing cold of the water. When evening came Cook would fry the fresh trout to serve with bannocks.

I feel like it needs one more sentence to give closure to the daydream before I interrupt her with a screaming woman and really get the story moving, but maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe I should just say something about the succulence of the fish and leave the rest out of it.

Thoughts?

Deb, that's a strong piece.

Come on in and play, Cornelius!

Susan, I'm always in favor of the succulence of fish.

Susan, there's some pretty language in there, but honestly, I think it's more than is needed. You could easily lose the thing about the sun being a friend; it really isn't needed.

Well, if I cut anything, it won't be the sun, because that's what ties back to the previous paragraph about the searing heat of the actual setting that Anna is trying to ignore.

For now, I just took the sentence that was giving me fits out completely and changed "fresh trout" to "succulent fresh trout." Which saved me enough space to get the woman's scream that pulls Anna back to reality onto Page One, which ought to help with those pesky agents, editors, and contest judges.