⚡Day 2. Weird discoveries.
Searching for flavor and fun facts.
A great flash essay often comes to life through some element of surprise. This week, we’re focusing on exercises that will help us find unlikely details and fresh new ways of seeing our world. Yesterday focused on getting outside ourselves.
Today, we’re enjoying the spirit of discovery and evoking strangeness, searching for the kinds of flavor and fun facts that can surprise and perhaps even shock readers, as in “Sour Grass” by Victoria Lewis and “In the Dark” by Katherine Frankowski.
PROMPT #2
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever found or learned?
What was the thing, and what made it weird? Was it objectively weird, or was it made weird/unfamiliar by an unexpected context? Where were you, and when was this? Was anyone with you? What happened next?
Try jumping into the scene at the moment before your discovery. Write for 15-20 minutes.
Share: Your first paragraph.
This room beneath the house in Upstate New York has an official title: "The Laundry Room." For two weeks now, ever since I landed here from Ireland, I've heard this title slipped into the chatter. "Oh, I left it in 'the laundry room.'" Or, "Just leave it there. I'll bring it down to 'the laundry' room later." This morning, I'm actually down here in this tiny room with its own door and a perfume-y smell and squat window. Through that window, the backyard snow looks a snow cap on a mountain that I have magically climbed. Today, the woman of the house, AKA, my American hostess, leans across from the left-hand machine--the one with the porthole window in the front--to the next machine. "When you're done, you just load your stuff into the dryer," she says. "But clean out the filter first; my daughter never does." Then she leaves, her bathrobe trailing behind her, because she still has to shower and go to work. Now, it's just me down here, in this silent, subterranean room with its own name and where I can push the buttons and where nobody has mentioned a backyard clothes line.
Manuel beckoned me closer to the plant, a Dieffenbachia like the one I’d been tending in my dining room for more than a decade, only this one was growing wild on the side of a road in the Costa Rican jungle, in a green and yellow grove with its brothers and sisters. He gestured, inviting me to look inside one of its unfurling leaves. I took a quick step forward and bent my head down where he pointed, then sharply straightened and stepped back again with a cry. “What is that - a mouse?” He grinned and shook his head. “It’s a bat.”