Friday Forays In Fiction: An Exercise pt. 2

This is a continuation of last week's exercise and is again totally off the cuff and composed directly in Blogger:

Snags in Her Stitches

While spending the next half hour with an icepack held against her left nostril and her head hanging back over the arm of the couch waiting to be sure her nose had stopped bleeding, Jan surrendered to the inevitability. Besides now that there was blood on the thread there was no longer reason to regret slicing it to shreds. As soon as she was sure the sweater was safe from any further precipitation from her nose, she took it up again and bent over it and with the freshly washed seam ripper she began snapping the threads one by one.

She fought the sensation that she was slicing through her own veins, wincing with every sudden parting of a thread. Soon there was a small pile of tiny threads on the table. She lay the ripper down and cupped one hand around the threads, lifting the wastebasket up to the edge of the table but as she began to sweep the threads toward the basket she heard the sound of Barney's distinctive chatter--the one that meant 'I've got my eyes on you little birdy.'

The kitten was on the back of the couch with its head poking through the blinds. Jan set the wastebasket down and brushed the thread into her hand instead. Then headed for the back yard fence from which sprouted three or four bird feeders. She lay her fist full of thread on the roof of the largest. Now she could at least imagine them serving a purpose instead of just rotting in a landfill.

As she turned to head back to the steps she looked up into the tree to try to spot one of the nests just in time to receive a nitrate filled 'thank-you' smack on her sixth chakra.


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I borrowed Jan from this little flash-fiction exercise from 2007. Gave her the same task I'm currently engaged with.