Hi all!
Another piece of 20 minute writing prompt fiction. I know that’s what you come here for! You can find the prompts below the piece.
Are these getting shorter, Morgan?
The last few stories have been shorter as I’m teaching myself to type properly: I just can’t write as many words in 20 minutes yet. Hopefully they’ll get longer again.
Enjoy!
He got up, bleeding. The prisoners watched.
“Keep moving,” said Dale.
Dale was in for life. Working for Zole.
Dale had shot up a bank in what should have been a simple robbery.
Nobody had died, he would have been out in a few years. But he’d taken to prison life. His sentence getting longer as he sorted things out for Zole.
Zole had ordered the attack. Joe had been one of the prosecutors. If he’d been a cop, he’d be dead already.
Joe sat at the bench. Guys left as he approached, pointless to get mixed up in another man’s fight. He knew better than to go to the guards. They were waiting for the hour to be up. He could go to the infirmary when it was over, not before. Zole ran the prison. The director just rubber-stamped the forms.
At the infirmary the doctor put out his cigarette, snapped on gloves, patched up the wound. Filled Joe with painkillers.
“You need more, come back,” he said.
Joe looked at him, unsure if it was a question or a statement.
Or a riddle:
My dog’s been shivved.
How does he feel?
He doesn’t. He’s on painkillers.
It was the opioid epidemic that had done for Joel. He’d switched to the lucrative side: defending the guilty. This is where he’d ended up, his rightful place.
His cellmate feigned indifference when he got back to his cell. Started humming. An advertising jingle for one of the pharmaceutical companies.
Be strong. He’d be out on good behaviour in no time.
The intercom crackled.
Cell inspection.
The warden went straight to Joe’s bunk and plunged his hand under the mattress. He pulled out a small bag of tablets. Painkillers.
“You can’t stop pushing, can you?” The warden whispered in Joe’s ear. “Zole’s sister woulda been 17 this week, if it wasn’t for the likes of you.”
The topic for this exercise was “justice.” The random words were:
pointless
riddle
glove
rightful
feigned
As with all my writing prompts I’m not allowed to make changes except for typos, punctuation and deletions. Never underestimate the Delete button. As well making the language tighter by removing fluff, it can get you out of more serious problems.
I gave two of the characters names which rhymed. It sounded very silly. Enter the Delete button!
Take a minute, see if you can guess which two characters.
…
Got it?
Well done, you! Originally two characters were named Zole and Joel.
