wordwhacker

Well, I love the prompts y'all gave me, so I think I'll use 'em - but they both are making me want to write something with at least a hint of meat (figurative, of course) to 'em. So I think I'll chew on 'em for next week.

This week I dropped by

daily15 and decided to write to their word prompt. The following piece was written in the 15 minutes immediately after learning the word; a really simple scene. Let me know what you think.

Disappointment (Vignette, 250 words)

Jimmy's shoulders slumped. "Oh," he said.

"It's not that..." Tess started - a little too quickly, it seemed, since she'd already run out of words. "I just... well, he asked me first. I mean, it's not that I - "

"Yeah, yeah." Jimmy stared at the dirt and tried to disappear into his ball cap. Talking to girls was hard enough when they weren't sputtering excuses. He couldn't seem to make his feet move, though. He was waiting for something - he just wasn't quite sure what.

She didn't say anything for a minute. He watched her sneakers scuffing the ground, packing it down in little circles. The sounds of the school yard weren't far off. They didn't exactly have any privacy here, but it was a little out of the way, on the fringe of no man's land - the curb by the school driveway. It was certain a teacher, somewhere, was eyeing them dubiously, just waiting for one of them to step out of bounds.

"Sorry," Jimmy said.

"No, it's okay," Tess said, then, "I'm sorry I - well, you know."

"Yeah."

"... Bye."

"Bye."

She turned and tromped off, her footsteps crunching off into the distance to blur in with the sound of a hundred other feet. Jimmy let out a deep breath. He'd figured that she would say no. Knew it, in fact.

But somehow that wasn't making the wrenching feeling in his gut go away.