Friday Flash Prompt from Carol Guess: A Brief History Of Broken Windows

Carol Guess is the author of six books of poetry and prose, including the prose poetry collection Tinderbox Lawn. Forthcoming books include a novel, Homeschooling, and a prose poetry collection, Doll Studies: Forensics. She is Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University, where she teaches Creative Writing and Queer Studies. Find out more at her blog.

In the small city where I live, nearly half of the downtown stores are shuttered. Each empty window represents the history of local commerce that thrived before big box stores and national chains drained downtown of its uniqueness.

Pick an empty storefront in your shuttering city, or, if your neighborhood feels blissfully immune to the current economic crisis, make one up. Give the glass windows the reflections of ghostly passers-by; fill them with color or drain them of weather.

This is a good opportunity to experiment with time, not just by channeling past eras, but by conveying time's movement, and the sense of inevitability the present moment often conveys.

If you're well-versed in the history of your region, you might consider downtown itself as an intruder: on indigenous people whose communities were usurped; on geological formations that were razed or rattled to form concrete foundations.

Try to contain all this bustling history in a 100 word flash. And then, if you're feeling lucky, pair that with a 25 word hint fiction companion piece.

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