Here is the list of words that you collectively recorded as the most important words in Giovanni’s Room: boyish, belonging, room, drunk, sardonic, volatile, lost, dark, body, touch, dirty, trapped, desperate, frightened, forget. Here’s a space for sharing the in-class flash fictions you wrote using these words. If you would like to spin a “happy” flash fiction (given that most of the pieces shared in class were not “happy”), feel free to take on that challenge.
3 thoughts on “Flash Fictions After Baldwin”
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Here’s mine from class (still working on a happy one):
They were not lost, but they were hoping to be found. It was as though falling and running were the same action; their quickened pace through dark streets, lamps long ago extinguished, did not deify them, but sunk them deeper into the dirty concrete. Desperation bubbled under their feet, in their burning thighs and calves and hamstrings. Their emotions belonged nowhere, not to them, not to the city. Their bodies fluid, their minds empty and full, forgotten and filled of vivid dreams. Their erratic motions, like animals trapped in a maze, seemed to have a higher purpose, a way out, transcending their boyish youth, their innocent, complicit tough. This was not drunkenness. They were not frightened but determined, hard set on their goals. Their paths did not meander but cut across lots, fields, deeper into the night, away from their rooms, their lovers, their fears and griefs and lust that was not lust, towards their sardonic salvation. It was never really there for them, or for anyone, and somewhere under their feet, above their head, this knowledge would not divert their course.
SO GOOD SO BEAUTIFUL
I know I read this is class but here’s mine:
Nani could smell desperation when she walked into the apartment. It was a Sunday; one of those lost Sundays when people rise after the preachers have gone home, rise after the families drunk with routine stumble into their cars and drive back to their dogs and televisions. It was a dirty Sunday.
The room roared with clutter, as if it had forgotten to close its mouth. Nani lost her body in the paintings scattered across the floor, the newspaper trapped underneath discarded clothes and plates scraped clean. she didn’t belong here, in this volatile place. The frightened domesticity of it all screamed at her, reminding her of all those other Sundays when she longed for touch and forgot who she was.
“Hello?” came the voice; Nani was trapped, again.