As you may have noticed, we’ve reinstated our yearly workshop series, Freewriteshop, as of this spring!
Our first session took place this April at the site of The Old L.A. Zoo in Griffith Park. If you missed it, check out editor Liska Jacob’s photo recap, and make sure to check back on the FWS Tumblr for a prompt she posts each Wednesday. Stay tuned for some news on a DUM DUM workshop collaboration in the works with 826LA, and in the meantime, here’s a taste of the incredible responses we got from a recent prompt:
Below you’ll find a word and photo. Write a story, free write or doodle. Don’t be shy: share in the comments section below.
NARCOTIC
Maude Standish
We knew the neighborhood was changing when the French DJ collective moved into the house on the corner and placed a golden Buddha-head statute on the lawn. We’d walk our dog past their card-table full of Apple computers and the clothing line with designer men’s’ tank-tops, but we stayed anyways. We were so addicted to our parking spot.
*
Kendra Sheetz
“We basically just sat around all night and listening to ‘Teenage Dirtbag’, ate pickles, and faked our way through AA meetings. And that was the time I let the heroin addict live at my apartment,” I heard myself say through a detached mental state.The liquid’s effect had kicked in after 5 heavy handed cocktails and a shot. Suddenly, the entire room was finally looking tolerable. The idiot next to me had saddled up to the bar 2 drinks ago with the faint hope that I would get drunk enough to give him a shot. But by now, the sheer desperation was wafting off of him.A head rush. The room swirls around me.“Here we go,” I think.“Ya wanna know what the saddest part of all of this is?” I asked the pining prince sitting to my right. He nodded eagerly, hanging on my every word, apparently a glutton for punishment. “The truth is that I’m not going to sleep with you. Ever. Hell, I would even find a way to make sure my vagina snaps shut if you roofied me, I blacked out, and you tried to rape me. I’m using you for drinks and someone to bounce insults off of. You’re purely my entertainment. At the end of tonight, I’m gonna pay my tab, walk home in the snow, use my vibrator to get off and watch an episode of The Daily Show. That’s it.”
He stared at me blankly. Blink. Blink. And then burst out laughing.
“He thinks I’m kidding. They always do.”
I signal the bartender for another as my new idiot suitor mimics my action and takes out his wallet while nodding at my empty tumbler. Just the gesture I was hoping to see.
“What’s your name?” I ask the walking wallet. “Never mind. I don’t care. It’s probably some generic guy name like Josh. Fuck that. I’m going to call you Raul. You don’t look anything like a Raul but that’s why its funny. Get it? Irony and shit,” I mumble as I roll my eyes.
Now it’s his turn to ask the questions. He feigns interest in my elongated stories about the death of my father, the boy who pledged to help me move all my shit across the country from LA to Chicago but bailed a week beforehand, what it’s like to spend my first winter in nine years in snow again. I talk about going to college at UCLA, having my first blackout from drinking, getting wrongfully accused for a DUI and the trial process that I went through after in attempt to clear my name. After all of that, he asks –
“So how did you like living in LA?”
I sigh, taking my attention off the condensation forming on the sides of my glass and slowly turn my head towards him. I smile sweetly. And then I slam his head down onto the bar. He attempts to react. But I’m swifter, grabbing my tumbler and smashing it into the side of his temple. He falls to the floor in a pathetic heap. I throw a twenty on the bar, step over the unconscious mess I created, and walk out of the bar.
Or at least, that’s what plays out in my head. In reality, I’m still sitting next to some douche nozzle dude looking to get laid, in an overcrowded 4AM bar full of other people looking to get laid, in a city dusted with snow.
I forego the straw and chug the remainder of my drink. That was drink #5? #6? I’ve lost count and it’s somewhat of a relief. I get confused and start to think that perhaps I am only speaking in lines from Bret Easton Ellis novels again.
“This is exactly why you should never have a favorite author,” I accidentally muse out loud.
“Huh?” Raul asks.
I tell him that I think I am going to head home. I have a job interview tomorrow (lie) and I need to get some other productive things done (also a lie). For the first time since we met 2 (3? 4?) drinks ago, the blank and idiotic look on his face is removed. Something much more sinister and calculating has taken its place. His eyebrow raises and I start to panic in expectation of what’s next. The roles have been reversed; somehow, he now has the upper hand.
“You shouldn’t have stayed,” I tell myself. Even my mental voice is slurred from the liquor.
“Wanna get another drink?” he asks. “I’m buying.”
I sit back down on the barstool, defeated.
*
Nelson Aguilar
The name as defiled as the shore from which she camethe Wupper river, once the giver of life—Nerthusproviding to those who survived the reign of blackonce baptized in the clear, immersed for repentancebut from the neue dunkelheit emerged an enemy
strikingly more malevolent than its fated fuhrer
forsaking not only this river—blood red
but that of which runs in us all
my wretched heroine.
*