Notes on Closure: Practice Prompts
WEEK 1
Prompt: Death
Character Prompt: Write about the end of something important to your character. How do they react?
Word Count: 584/400
Nolan's lease was up on Sunday, but he left on Friday afternoon. Rory stayed in the apartment long after he was gone, sitting on the cold tiles of his kitchen floor until the grout had left angry red imprints on the back of her thighs.
It doesn't feel fair that a whole life can just be packed away in boxes with the books and mugs. Nolan had lived in this same sardine tin of an apartment for over twelve years. He'd spent his early 20's in it, late nights, hand to mouth, with nothing but a mattress on the bedroom floor and futon from the Goodwill in the entryway. Rory had spent a thousand nights on that futon eating cheap convenience store pizza and mooching off of the neighbor's wifi.
When Shelly got pregnant, she'd moved in too, and Nolan grew a marriage and two daughters out of the cracks in the floorboards. Getting that first job at one of the many manufacturing plants in town had felt like a Godsend, an end to the fruitless string of minimum wage jobs and gig economy hell. Manufacturing had, for decades, made up the bulk of Jacob's Ladder's economy, and almost everyone had worked at one at some point or another. Things were good for awhile, too, with Nolan and Shelly starting to save for a bigger place, and a second daughter suddenly on the way. Rory had barely spent any time in her own apartment, and instead had spent all her free time here, helping with dinner and watching over her nieces so Nolan and Shelly could catch at least a few more minutes of sleep.
But then her oldest niece, Ellie, had gotten sick. Suddenly the stability that had seemed so within reach had come crashing down, traded for double shifts at the plant and stolen hours of sleep in the plastic chair next to his daughter's hospital bed. Cancer doesn't care how equipped you are to deal with it.
Neither, unfortunately, does the never-ending march of industry, as the plant Nolan worked at finally shut it's doors. As did the next one, and the one after that. Ellie was in remission by the time she was four, but the medical bills would last long, long after that. Ellie had lived, for which all of them would be forever grateful, but the town was dying, with no recovery in sight.
So Rory couldn't blame them really, for packing up and moving on. For leaving her behind. The Hawcett-Doone plant, where Nolan had worked for the past year and a half, hadn't closed yet, but it was only a matter of time. Nolan had to get his family out while he still could, and this had been an opportunity that he couldn't afford to pass up. Rory wished she could have made herself go with him.
Her town was dying around her, the last of her family was gone, and she couldn't make herself leave. She should sell the salon and go, start a new life for herself with Nolan in Kentucky and try her luck in a place less lucky to suck the marrow from her bones for just a few more minutes of life.
Instead, she stayed sat in the same room on the same floor that she'd lived and loved in for her whole adult life, counting down the minutes she had left with it as desperately wished that for once in her life she could figure out how to let go.
Notes on Closure: Practice Prompts
WEEK 2
Prompt: The Sun
Character Prompt: Write about your character doing something that they love or winning a competition. Why do they enjoy it so much?
Word Count: 855/400
Oh whoops, this was not at all the character I intended to write about for this. How did I get here. This was supposed to be Rory cutting hair.When Iris had dreamed of working in a library one day, as she often had in her youth, she'd usually imagined something far bigger. In her fantasies, she was always working at some colossal, well-funded library in a vibrant city somewhere far, far away from the broken town that had raised her. She would run book clubs and summer reading programs, diversify the YA section, and welcome local authors into their stacks. In her dreams, she was bigger too.
No one tells you though, when you're a wide-eyed child hiding books and a flashlight under your covers, just how competitive the job market is Information Sciences graduates, especially for those whose interests lie in working in a physical, patron-facing library position. Iris had searched for a permanent position in a library for almost three years after obtaining her Master's, working two jobs as a waitress and a barista to make ends meet in the meantime, before finally taking a realistic look at where she was at and where she was going before making the tough call to move back home again.
While she held little love in her heart for this town, it had one thing that the big cities she longed for didn't: an open librarian position that they were actually willing to hire her for.
So she'd gotten half of what she wanted. Maybe she shouldn't complain. She loved the library, and all the routine menial tasks within it. She loved sorting the books, and resorting them again after the after-school group had come through. She loved helping people find research materials, and arranging for hard to find books to be shipped over from other libraries. But Jacob's Ladder was a dying town, and it was taking it's local library down with it.
Their funding was abysmal, with only two full-time librarians on staff: Iris herself, and the head librarian who had hired her, Anise, who was well into her 60's and had been a staple here for as long as Iris could remember. Their one part-timer came in on Fridays and Saturdays, allowing them to keep their doors open for a little bit on the weekends. All of them were overworked and underpaid, and you could see it in the library itself. Gone were the weekends that Iris had spent growing up, curled up with a book in the library's children's room. They were able to stay open on Saturdays from noon to 4, but no later. Coupled with their meager buying budget, the new arrivals shelf was dismally sparse nine weeks out of ten.
The dynamics of childhood had changed, and Iris wasn't ignorant about this. Kids simply spent less time outside in their communities than they used to. But there was also significantly less kids in town than there used to be. Her own graduating class had been a good third of the size bigger than Poppy's was now, a whole decade later. Families were leaving, and the library could no longer cater to the ones that remained.
Iris loved the library, but she wasn't happy. She was trying to be, but she hadn't quite figured out how yet. She felt like a trapped bird who'd flung herself fruitlessly at the bars for so long that she'd finally given up and contented herself with building the most beautiful nest she could out of her own blood and feathers. If love was a choice you made, maybe happiness could be too. Or maybe she could find it stuck to the bottom of the book drop-off box, or hidden in the margins of an old high school yearbook.
After parking her car on the curb, Iris made her way up to unlock the doors, coffee in hand. Her morning routine was a simple one. She'd come in at 8 A.M and get ready to open their doors for the day, checking dropped off books for damage before updating the inventory system and physically re-sorting the books back onto their proper shelves. She'd answer emails and check items off her to-do list before finally, if she moved quick and got lucky, she could indulge in the most beloved, if bittersweet, part of her morning routine. She would make her way to the children's room and find that same spot that she had loved so dearly as a child, carpet dirty and faded from time and use. She'd bring her coffee and whatever book she was reading at the moment and sit in the same spot that she'd sat in every week from ages six to thirteen, trying to remember what it was that made this building feel holy to her, what had made it feel like her heart was buried bloody and beating beneath the floor boards.
Maybe it was still there, and if she dug it up she'd feel whole again.
Once she opened the doors for the day, the same retired folks who came every morning would begin to filter in, but until then, this sacred space was hers and hers alone. For a few faded, sepia-tinged minutes, she could allow herself one simple pleasure as she sat alone and read.