Courtesy: visualfunhouse.com |
Today’s
Prompt:
You get to your studio to develop pictures
from the hour you spent in the park. All of the pictures turn out well, except
for a select few. In six photographs, there is a man in the frame. Something seems
slightly off, and rather strange about each picture. Who is he and what is
weird about the photographs?
Courtesy:
writersdigest.com
Link for Day
5: DAY 5: The
Picture Inside the Picture Word Count:
2,102
I
tried to write the man in the picture off as an assassin who, while stalking
some rich dude’s family out on a picnic, is accidentally captured by a
freelance photographer at dubious angles. But I thought hell, I don’t have the
time to draw up a gun fight, not today, phew, into the wastebasket.
Option
two, I thought, what if the man’s alien? There’s a part in my story where two
freelance photographers go for a walk at the beach and end up snapping photos. The
idea was to replace the man with a woman on the beach and make it appear like
there’s more than one of his kind on earth and somehow, these guy’s tools are
the only thing that can see them. Then
I thought, That’s way too much energy. Just
stick to the prompt, will ya? Phew, into
the wastebasket.
Now,
here’s something I actually did do for
a change.
I
used the story to explain the human condition. Sometimes, we encounter circumstances
we can only come to grasps with by admitting our inadequacies as humans. A lot
of stuff happens around us that are beyond our abilities to control or
comprehend and the only way to prevail is by learning to thrive regardless of
it.
The
characters in this story never ID’d the man in the picture. But they carried on
with their lives and lived like they gotta live.
Keep
your pen bleeding.
Akpan
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