I’ve been doing a lot of writing recently. Fiction; mucking about. I’ve started doing vignettes in a ‘free-writing’ section of a writer’s forum, just for practice. Anyway, I thought it might be fun to share some here. This is a very short story about dating:

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‘What’s this, baby?’ Mark swilled the milky liquid in his cocktail glass. ‘A lychee martini?’
‘No,’ Kelly giggled.
‘Smells… funny,’ Mark said, his broad smile shrinking. ‘Must be pretty special to invite me over just to taste it.’
‘Well,’ Kelly began, ‘remember that poem you wrote me – last week?’
‘I remember.’ Mark grinned and sank into the armchair. It transformed into a throne as he recalled Kelly’s reaction to the poem – how just a few sentences had melted her. It was actually a verse from a Stone Temple Pilots song. He nabbed it from the Internet to try to get things moving a bit faster. Kelly was a romantic. Mark was mind-bendingly horny.
‘Well—’ Kelly said abruptly, as though this one word somehow completed her point.
Mark smiled a toothy smile.
‘Well?’ he repeated, chuckling the way men do when they don’t understand what’s going on but think they’re definitely going to have sex anyway.
‘Ugh,’ Kelly sighed, glancing at the ceiling shyly. ‘In the poem, what did you say you wanted to drink?’
Mark’s smile dropped. ‘Huh?’
Kelly held a hand to her chest and closed her eyes. ‘Take a bath,’ she said, ‘I’ll drink the water that you leave.’ She opened her eyes again and sighed, a smile sliding across her pink cheeks.
Mark again looked at the cloudy liquid. Dark sediment was collecting at the bottom and its scent finally connected with the right neurons in his brain.
‘You,’ Kelly said, ‘are so romantic! I wanted to do something to, I don’t know, make that poem more than a poem! So… I saved it for you. My bath water.’
A false laugh stuttered from Mark’s mouth. But he could see in her eyes that she wasn’t joking. He thought of the opening line on her Match.com profile: Love is a unicorn that runs through our hearts. Yep, she was definitely mental.
‘Look baby,’ Mark put the glass down, ‘it was just a poem!’ His eyes smiled, but hers were welling up.
‘Then why did you write it?’ she squeaked.
A lump formed in Mark’s throat. He thought about blurting it out: I wrote it to get you in bed! It’s just a song – a bloody song. At least then he could leave, albeit to the soundtrack of wailing or shouting. But he had an idea.
‘It’s not fresh, baby,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I want the water straight after you’ve been in it.’ Mark sniffed the glass. ‘There’s hardly any you left in here!’ The grin stretched across his face in an attempt to mask the nonsense. Kelly’s sobs quietened and she looked into his eyes.
Silence.
‘Awwww, you’re so sweet,’ she finally said.
‘I know, baby,’ Mark said, ‘why don’t you go run a new bath right now. I’ll get a fresh glass – and a straw!’
Kelly leapt forward and hugged him tightly. ‘I knew you were special,’ she whispered.

–

It’s a good exercise writing very short pieces like this. I’ve found it stops me trying to be as clever with language. When I’m writing something longer, I think the scale of the story encourages me to over-think things.