Your Literary Implications #3: Just Out of Sight.
Subtle messages. Nuanced implications. There’s a story hidden beneath the words printed on page. What is it telling us, and what do we take away from it? Truly, the ability to make one go back to search for each detail… This may be an art unlike any other.
Welcome back to Your Literary Implications— a bi-weekly writing prompt with a focus on making you (and I) think.
Last week’s prompt focused on The Hourglass, which posed the scenario and question: An hour to ponder. An hour to wonder: What happens after the hourglass stops?
We received one shout-out submission, but we’ll dive more into that later. Ready to dive into the prompt? Make sure to submit your submission here. And uh, don’t forget about our poll later!
Prompt: Just Out of Sight.
Description: Your house is eerily quiet when you get home from work. It’d been a long and exhausting day, so the silence failed to phase you as slouched onto the couch. Though, it was weird your kids weren’t there to greet you. Maybe they were asleep?
Reaching out for the TV remote, which rests candidly on the rustic coffee table in front of you, something moves in the corner of your eye. A flickering of light, subtle yet unsettling. Something is off, but what exactly?
Rules:
Don’t directly reveal what’s in the corner of their eye, but describe or allude to it.
Responses should be no more than 1500 words. Poems are allowed.
After you have finished your response to the prompt, submit to our form to be eligible for a shout-out in our next prompt.
Before we get to our poll, we now have the opportunity to introduce the shout-outs segment of our prompts! Sort of… see, we only had one to include this time. So if you decide to participate, make sure to submit yours to our form to be eligible.
On the bright side, since we only have the one to go over, I can get so much more in-depth with my review!
Pretend We Have Forever by
This shout-out goes to my dear friend
of The Writer’s Journey publication. Getting to see him evolve in his poetry has been an endearing experience. And now I get to talk in more detail about one of his pieces.Pretend We Have Forever is a piece which studies the relationship humans have with time with each other. It takes on how our perception of it, and how we can get stuck when contemplating its meaning.
Humans are busy people, and probably the only species to worry about how much time we have left. It creates a churning in our stomach, an anxiety we refuse to fathom. But even more so, how much time do we have left with each other?
The piece does an amazing job at alluding to the end of the poet’s relationship with another— not directly saying what’s ending between them— just that it is. There are some strong implications though, and I love it.
Perhaps my favorite lines comes at the very end of the piece, referring to that alluded ending. Let’s take a look:
Hold me close as the story ends.
Cosmic hands flip the hourglass,
just as they were asked.
A reminder that our time has passed.
It’s beautiful. Bradley really knows how to wrap up a piece. Not just in the writing itself, but with the inclusion of a complementary song to listen to. This piece’s inclusion uses Happiness Does Not Wait by Ólafur Arnalds. It is recommended listening to this song while reading the poem again.
Thanks so much Bradley for submitting this piece! This one felt like a great one to showcase here, so I’m immensely grateful for the opportunity to do so. And to everyone reading this, he writes a lot more than just poetry. So if you like fantasy and horror, go check out his short stories.
Look’s like it’s about time to wrap up this week’s prompt post. However, we can’t leave until you vote on the next writing prompt. Your influence matters, so come along now, and make a decision. It’ll be worth it, I promise.