Missed Connection
Write a story or poem about an important missed connection or a neglected connection that later haunts a character. Before you write it, try and remember a time when you experienced the feeling of not connecting in some way with someone you might have cared about. Let the feeling inform your writing. Word count: 150 word limit.
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Optional Prompt words: violet, damp, gnaw, caved-in, island, music, jostle, damp, hand.
Manicure Onyx ignores the man in boy-band eyeliner staring at her until he flicks open a pocketknife to pare the fingernails of his left hand with his right, and she stretches out her own fingers, then snaps them back into her knuckles while the man gathers up his parings in a tissue and tucks the whole mess into his pocket and then opens a bottle of blue polish to paint the long nails of his picking hand with the short-nailed fingers of his other, prompting her to ask "guitar or banjo" followed with "ever try acrylic nails?" half-listening to his answer, "yeah, but I don’t like the change in sound" while picturing him handing her the bottle of blue as if it might contain their future full of sky with the umbrella still stuck in it.
I read the obit 20 years later, my brow deepening from furrow to trench. Why hadn't they told me? I remembered she kinda scared me accept that one time on our island holiday when she found me crying about Ace Conrad. She smothered me in a Blue Grass embrace, wiped tears with a Dior handkerchief, led me to the window and as we looked out to sea across the violet hour, made me laugh, 'If you don't win with the ace, try the king.'
I read about the War years, the merry dance she led them; a dance that stopped in a Brussels jail, where the British found her in the basement, rats gnawing. Now I know why she had the funny lisp I mocked, they said she wouldn't need a tongue if she didn't start using it.
But she didn't mock my exam nerves, smiled, said I'd be fine.