This is an exercise we did in the Writer's Guild at my high school. The teacher gave each person a random first line from a poem, and we had to either write a poem using that line, or write a story from that line. I chose to write a short story 'blurb', as someone called it. I am planning on building a longer story off of it, but am so far stuck in the idea process. So here it is, and I haven't edited it yet so it's rough.
“He dines alone surrounded by reflections”
Why anyone would want to become one of those reflections I don’t know. My best friend had turned into one of them, the popular athletes. They are all the same. So I watched him sitting there, and he looked so familiar, like the guy I used to know, but different at the same time. He looked like they all did, talked like they all did, even ate like they all did. It was like watching ten copies of one picture, though each one was morphed slightly. I sighed and finished my dinner. I then headed up to my dorm to study, when I bumped into him on the stairs. He looked at me like I was an old picture he had found in the back of his closet, mournful yet pensive, like my face stirred up a memory. Maybe it was a memory from when we were seven and had his snowy backyard all to ourselves, and we built the biggest fort ever, and we pretended to be a king and queen defending the fort from alien invaders. It must have been, because he touched his cheek where I had hit him with a snowball. ‘Hey,’ I said tentatively, not knowing what his reaction would be. ‘Hey,’ he replied automatically, then he continued down the stairs. I watched him go, my best friend since we were two. My stomach hurt thinking about all those fourteen years, of making fun of bad TV and listening to The Ramones, we had together, until he turned into one of them, one of the popular people that we used to make fun of, and left me in the dust…
