Aimee Bender Visits Pokrass Prompts

When I started writing flash fiction 14 years ago Aimee Bender was one of my greatest influences. So you might imagine how excited I was when when I asked her if she’d like to try a Pokrass Prompts, and she said she’d like to play!

What Aimee created below, working with a Pokrass Prompt consisting of a hand-picked photo (by Fran Cassidy) paired with a list of random words, is nothing short of magic.

(prompt: Write a story inspired by this photograph. Include 1 or all of these words: sniffles, picky,  strand, pale, mist, weakness)

“Naming” by Aimee Bender

Photo by Fran Cassidy

Georgia passed Jesus on the way into the church. She had sniffles. She was wearing her new fuchsia Crocs sent recently from Carl who was visiting Boulder, Colorado where Crocs were born, he told her in his scrawly handwriting. She was at the church to sit in a pew because sometimes on a Sunday that was the thing to do: not to listen to the music, or the words, not to think words or music in her mind, but simply to change the place she sat, and to let the other people and their thinking and singing waft onto her. They could pray, they could do that work, and she would sit there thinking of Steven and how he had come by and told her he wasn’t going to come by; it was confusing, she told him, to do and say those two things at once. Plus, it was not her wish; she would like to see him. But I can’t visit you, he had said. When you don’t see me, when you refuse me. I see you, she said. Right there in front of me! Steven! He hung his head. He had such a nice-shaped head, like a cartoon character. Not enough, he had said. That’s just my name, right? She did know his name. She had, after all, named him. Crown, it meant. Wreath. Seemed right for the first-born. The other parts of him she could treat like the words and the music in the pew. You’re right there standing in front of me and I can make you a sandwich, she said. Isn’t that enough? He had tears in his eyes at the door, wearing his collared shirt with the pocket that held a pen. Who was he going to write to? He liked a pen nearby, she knew that about him. Maybe there will be a point later, he said, trailing off. After he left, she made the sandwich for herself. And it was a good sandwich, with liverwurst. Carl had remembered that fuchsia was her favorite color and Carl would return home for the holidays and would enjoy being the main son and would get all her food and attention.

The woman next to her was singing the hymn so loudly. Who sang that loudly? Who knew all the lyrics? Shut up already, Georgia thought. Nobody wants to hear your pain. 

About the author:

Aimee Bender is the author of six books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award, The Color Master, a NY Times Notable book for 2013, and her latest novel, The Butterfly Lampshade, which came out in July 2020, and was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages.

Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and more, as well as heard on PRI’s “This American Life”and “Selected Shorts”.