Fiction Fragment Friday
The inspiration for this week’s story came from taking my dogs out in the morning when it was around 40 degrees and then going back out around lunch when it was an incredible 71 degrees. I’m always amased by the swing in weather that can happen in a single day, but of course my body usually just decides to get sick from the quick changes.
Once I had my topic I knew my first few lines. That was when it became a writing challange. Could I write a story with only dialog? No naration, tags, or anything at all that was not words being said by the characters. The challange was to give each a unique enough voice they could be kept seperate despite no dialog tags to indicate who was speaking.
I thought about picking a color for each character’s dialog to make it easier on you all reading it. That would be helpful, but if it is required then I failed my challenge. We will never know if my challange was successful or not without ovoiding all dialog tags.
“Explain to me how it goes from 41° to 75° in the same day? That has to be magic, right? Some supernatural jerk messing with the weather?”
“No magic, just Missouri. It’s kind of normal around here.”
“Why do you live here again?”
“Asks the guy visiting me from Florida to get out of the path of a hurricane.”
“Don’t you have tornadoes here?”
“Don’t you have alligators?”
“Hey now, alligators aren’t weather. You don’t hear me going to mountain lions and meth labs, do you?”
“Fair, even though you just kind of did. How about this? We have humidity here, but you have a sauna you like to call a state.”
“I’ll take a sauna over two feet of snow any day.”
“What’s wrong with snow? You get snowmen, sledding, and snow ice cream.”
“Snow ice cream? You made that up. No way that’s a thing.”
“It most certainly is. As a kid, I always looked forward to snow so we could make it. You take a giant bowl of snow, add some milk and sugar. If you wanted to flavor it, just mix in a Kool-Aid pack.”
“Ok, I admit I’m kind of curious. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a Florida stone crab.”
“No thanks, I’ll pass on the seafood, but I don’t think your state has ever even heard of real barbecue.”
“If I lived so far from the coast, I wouldn’t know how to appreciate good seafood either. We know barbecue though. We have four different kinds.”
“Sure, because none of them are good enough to stand on their own.”
“Can we at least agree that St. Louis style pizza is the worst?”
“Okay, I’ll give you that. Provel is not cheese, and crust should not crunch like a cracker. Can you admit that every headline about your state sounds like a madlibs gone wrong?”
“Florida man on insert drug name was seen insert present tense verb while dressed like insert animal. News at 10.”
“Never at the beginning though. You have to watch at least half way through or more to get the one story you really want to hear.”
“Now that we’ve found something we can agree on, do you think you’re ready to tell me about magic?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever actually be ready, but yeah, I suppose we should. Maybe I should introduce you to my friend Lily. Do you think it would be easier to hear coming from a pixie?”
“Wait, pixies are real?”
“Something tells me it is going to be a long night.”