Prompt Fiction

I've nearly finished a fiction writing course at UNH, and it has reminded me to give time and care to my own writing - something I haven't done since I started work as a full-time teacher last August. Here's my response to one of the brief prompts from last week:

I can't see the moon. I want it, reflected off the still water, broken into ripples that roll from a swan - its body embraced by the water. I want that Rilke poem to play out here. But I have only mud on my boots, and the water only laps at them. No embrace. And the stillness stinks of rotten, raw earth. No grace here. Just depths that I can't see, but know: some slime haunts the bottom of the water; it will stay there until the lake dries. Even then, it will harden like a scab, covering the bed that once held such a poetic promise of beauty.


The prompt had two options, and I chose the first:
1) Describe a lake as seen by a murderer, directly after the murder, but don't mention the murder.
2) Describe a place as seen above by a bird, but don't mention the bird.

The punctuation near the end and the Rilke reference need work, among other things, but it was fun to focus on my own creative work instead of my students' writing. Now I need to get back to completing my short story.