I love a good writing prompt. Every 2 weeks I give myself the challenge to grab a writing prompt online that sparks an idea and try to write a piece of fiction from the prompt in and around 500 words.

Here’s my latest attempt! Enjoy 🙂

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WRITING PROMPT

Write about a person who is arrested for committing a crime, but they can’t remember anything about the night the crime occurred. What is the crime, why can’t they remember and what happens next?

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A Face From Two Places
Written by Jess Knaus

This isn’t right. It can’t be right.

What’s the last thing I remember? Think!

Picket fence. I remember the white picket fence, the gate closing with a ‘click’. But after that it goes grey, clouded and finally, black.

Bricks, bricks under my fingers. The pathway. Damp, sand and soil. I brushed my hands together to shake off the dirt. I’d hastily looked over the fence toward the street. Marg was on her driveway, watering her front garden peering in my direction. But her face seemed different – she was staring at me, mouth open and eyes wide. The hose in her hand was slowly dropping. Something behind me.

The police were pulling up, lights spinning.

Then the fence, gate, blackness. End of my memory log.

I had been inside the house. Inside. Inside the kitchen, blue curtains. Timber chair. Floral tablecloth. Gun tucked into the back of my pants.

The gun!

Black revolver. Right hand.

Shots echoing. Loud ringing in my ears. My right ear. Remembering the trenches. Mud. Men in mud.

Captain. Captain Frank Richards. Yes, sir. Will deliver the message, sir.

Back to the bricks. Reverse my steps down the brick path. Revolver at my side. Back up into the shade of the front porch. Step over something, what was that something? A mound lying.

Kitchen. Kitchen in the abandoned apartment in Normandy. Older French lady, headscarf. Crying. Distraught.

Blue curtains and floral tablecloth. Face. Face of a man I know. A face from two places. I see him twice in my mind. Once in uniform, the second time in my kitchen with the floral tablecloth. How can he be in both places?

He looks young there, but he is old here. How can that be?

He is talking to me. Talking to me twice – once as a young man about captains orders, once as an older man but his words are muffled. I cannot make them out.

He’s in the Normandy apartment kitchen watching that same woman cry. He’s in my kitchen talking to me indecipherably.

His language is reversed – a record withdrawing it’s tune. I watch and listen with anticipation.

He begins walking, out of the kitchen toward the hallway, while I follow behind. His back to my face. He is just steps away from the front door. He steps through, turns to face me. He is smiling. Sharing a memory he knows I know.

His face is smotheringly close in my mind now now, but metres away in reality. His speech slows until I hear a phrase: “over the top lads!”

In a glimpse my hand reaches inside the back of my jacket to reveal the revolver. One shot.

George, my fellow soldier, the old man, is dead.

He falls.

I remember everything.

I walk over him, across the porch and down to the brick path. To the fence with the gate. My eyes begin to cloud over. Blackness. ‘Click’.