The Prompt
Someone finds two dates listed on a piece of paper. The dates are in their own handwriting, but they do not know what the dates mean. They have to find out what the dates signify.
Go deeper with enhanced content, videos, & training from StoryADay’s Julie Duffy
The Author
Anita G. Gorman grew up in Queens and now lives in northeast Ohio. Since 2014 she has had 85 short stories and 20 essays accepted for publication. Her one-act play, Astrid: or, My Swedish Mama, produced at Youngstown Ohio’s Hopewell Theatre in March 2018, starred Anita and her daughter Ingrid.
Anita’s website is anitaggorman.com
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
Leave a comment and let us know how you used the prompt, and how you’re celebrating!
Have been trying to catch up for the last 27 days! Posting my sketches because I basically made it! hehe! Woohoo!
Day 25! https://xenocandela.wordpress.com/2021/05/25/the-dates/
My protagonist is suffering from amnesia and the only thing she possesses for a clue about her identity is a scrap of paper in her pocket. She writes the dates again on another piece of paper and discovers the original is in her own hand writing. Her journey out of the fog in her mind begins and takes her to places she’d rather not be.
Today’s story, AUTOMATIC, is about a weird ritual in the basement of some farm. Lynn wakes up surrounded by her sleeping abductors with a note in her hand. It says the two dates and a short message: REMEMBER. DESTROY. GO. She memorizes the dates, eats the note, and heads out the farmhouse after stocking up on supplies, turning on the kitchen gas, and stealing one of the many cars parked outside. She takes all the other car keys with her. The first date is in two days time…
Phew! Done. At 10:40 PM. The late nights are killing me slowly. Probably. Maybe it’s worth it.
I wrote an introductory “chapter” to a potential longer work. Dunno if I’ll keep going with it, but it was a fun prompt. And I’m no more enlightened than my character at the moment…
Ahh, the creative mind. My character is a man on death row writing a letter in first person, proclaiming his innocence and full of vitriol. The dates in his writing were part of the circumstantial evidence that convicted him. The victims were former lovers who left him and ended up with each other. The story is dark and ugly and not as I usually write.
Yee Haw
I care for my mother who has cognitive issues. She has lived this story! This prompt brings back memories of when I began to discover her illness and I came across scrap after scrap filled with phone numbers and family birthdates to remind her.
With little sleep over the last couple of days today’s writing was all over the place…but I wrote and that is a win!
https://tammysreadinglife.wordpress.com/2021/05/25/day-25-storyadaymay2021/