First Prompts for the April 2021 Year of the Ox Writing Contest. Both 25 and 100 words : )

Okay, Happy Year of the Ox, I hope your burdens are few, your pencils are sharpened, your pens are ink-filled, and your keyboards and mouses are lint free for the lunar new year.

Jim Harstad has suggested this month’s writing contest rules.  Here they are:

  1.  Write a piece that is either exactly 25 or exactly 100 words long.
  2. If you wrote a 25-word piece, you must expand that to exactly 100 words, then publish both those pieces together on the contest site.
  3. If you wrote a 100-word piece, you must edit that down to exactly 25 words, then publish both those pieces together on the contest site

In other words, each time you enter, you will enter two pieces with the same title.  One will be 25 words, the other 100 words.  Please indicate which one you wrote first : )

* * * * *

Here’s the first set of writing prompts for April.  As always you can write about them, or anything they suggest to you, or anything you would like to write about.  Anything goes.

All excerpts are from Bamboo Ridge, The Hawaii Writers’ Quarterly, No. 21, Winter 1983, New Moon.

From “My Karma,” by Joyce Hatsuko

can
or should
a poet
do that?

(7 word excerpt)

* * * * *

from “Maui Grandmother,” by Lue Zimmelman

The moon floats in the yellow tea,
my grandmother swallows the moon.

(11 word excerpt)

* * * * *

From “Obon,” by Wendy N. Sodetani

Mother!
I am your ancient scream
under water
finally
up for air.

(12 word excerpt)

* * * * *

From “White Christmas,” by James Conti

Less than a mile away they found Nicholas Himmelweiss.  He lay beside the collapse of his shack, a bullet in his skull.

(22 word excerpt)

* * * * *

From “The Road to Te Nono,” by Victoria Nelson

And where was Barry headed in such a hurry?  I thought I knew the answer.  Barry was off to mow the meadow, mow the meadow, mow the meadow.  And I followed as fast as I could.

(36 word excerpt)

* * * * *

From “The Gardener,” by Ty Pak

Muriel walked in to point out that I should perhaps drive him home, unless he was going to sleep downstairs.  He rose guiltily, and insisted on walking home, but I pushed him into my car.  When I returned and went to bed, Muriel wanted to know what we had talked about so long.

“Oh, nothing.  Just about the Korean War, the usual stuff, you know, the debacle, the recapture, the retreat . . . ”

“Good night,” she said, uninterested.  A U.S.-born citizen married to someone born in Korea, she had heard enough about the war, perhaps too much from too many, me included.

(104 word excerpt)

Contest Rules

A 25-word piece and that piece expanded to a 100-word piece, or a 100-word piece and that piece edited down to a 25-word piece.

This prompt is closed for submissions.

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