And now, to the point of the blog: prompts! I’m trying to force myself to write every day. I can remember when the problem was forcing myself not to write when I needed to be doing other things, but that time has long passed. Anyway, I invested in a couple of prompt books for my Kindle, and here’s the first one, from 1000 Awesome Writing Prompts by Ryan Andrew Kindler, and if anyone else writes specifically to this prompt, please link the result in my comments section. This is actually prompt #1, from page four of my Kindle edition:

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Describe an important item from your childhood. Why was it important and where is it now?

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Pansy Bear

When I first got her, Pansy Bear was bigger than I was. She was a three foot tall stuffed panda, black and grayish white with enormous eyes. I knew nothing about pandas at the time, and heard the word as pansy, so that became her name. Pansy and I had the obligatory tea parties, and sleepovers when she joined me in bed. She was so big, though, that I was the one who sat in her lap, and she “read” me picture books.

As I grew older, I grew away from poor Pansy, and one day she made the sad journey to the attic of my parents’ house and never came down. I had forgotten about her when I started to clean the attic out after my father’s death. I only remembered when I spotted the black and white fur over by the chimney. Delighted, I grasped the dusty fur to pull Pansy into my arms.

And then I screamed.

Pansy’s leg came off in my hand, and what spilled out was not only rotted stuffing, but the remains of roaches and the leavings of rats that had nested inside her body for years.

I stumbled downstairs to the toilet and threw up. I felt as if I had found a person I’d known who had been abandoned to be gnawed by vermin. Then I went back up and swept Pansy into a paper bag, and buried her in the back yard as if I were still a child mourning my lost toy.