This Week's Prompt
by 
"A first sentence is all it takes to get the story going. Just start writing and see where it goes," suggested Mrs. Mowry as she handed out the composition notebooks. Some of her students eagerly grasped them, while others reluctantly dropped it on their desk. With a shuffle they each pulled out their pencil cases, although Charlie already had his half-chewed pencil in hand.
The classroom was especially cheerfully decorated, from the colored pin boards hanging on the walls to the beanbags in the reading corner. Even the chairs the children sat on were varying shades of blue. Some of the students were shifting in them, mostly out of anxiety or excitement.
"Mrs. Mowry, do we need to write in pencil?" asked one of the younger girls, Alicia. Her utensils of choice were falling out of their case in a myriad of colors.
"So long as I can read it you can use whatever you want." The teacher smiled as the girl excitedly picked up a bright blue pen, and then a green one. "But I do recommend one color at a time."
My continuation:
Great grandmother and great granddaughter surely had a special bond, and Alicia’s mother would have to cut off the yap yap yapping these two did in secret every single night since the old woman had come to live with them. What on earth did they talk about? The Mother knew her grandmother to be a silent and dour old woman, but here the two of them were, night after night, yapping. Alicia was devastated when her great grandmother died.
The Mother gleefully expected that the useless old hag's money would be hers now that the hag was dead. The Mother downgraded that expectation to a nice fat trust fund for Alicia after the letter arrived informing her that her daughter had been named in the will, but not her.
As it turned out, Alicia had inherited a set of colored pencils and nothing else, quite a let-down. The Mother vaguely remembered her grandmother's lecturing her about the famed pencils of her tribe. The Mother would sit not-very-patiently whenever Alicia rapturously spoke of the pencils, and told how they were made from the hollow stalks of a hallucinogenic lettuce that had been dried and then stuffed with colorful pigments of magical leaves, stems, roots, bark and stone. Great Grandmother spoke words of caution too, not everything was roses with these pencils; they were powerful. Yes, they could heal the sick but they could also do great mischief. The Mother thought that was all a load of bunk, and she would much rather have gotten a lot of money. She was pretty pissed.
Alicia used the beloved pencils at home to draw on the backs of discarded papers. The Mother would not pay for paper when there were perfectly good used envelopes just lying around. The Mother would scoff whenever she saw her daughter's drawings and mutter “some magic that is”. The Mother did not object when Alicia asked if she could take her precious pencils to school. "Good." The Mother said. "The both of you will be gone for the day."
Great Grandmother's magic pencils spilled themselves onto Alicia's desk as soon as the teacher approved their use. And that’s when things got all wonky.
One by one the pencils lifted into the air and began floating around the room, hovering over student desks one to a student, a purple one headed for the teacher. Everyone lifted their hands into the air, carefully grasped their respective pencils, and began quietly to write in the composition notebooks.
For two hours, the only sound in the room was the scratch scratch of pencils making their marks on paper. Even the teacher lost track of time. The buses had all come and gone by the time the pencils stopped writing.
Pencils let go of hands. Pencils made their way back to Alicia. Writing turned to astonishment. Alicia, blinking, gathered the pencils that had splattered themselves in a pile on her desk, and put them back in their box on her desk.
This is my entry to https://steempeak.com/wewrite/@freewritehouse/we-write-9-the-classroom-last-week-s-winners-announced It's my first ever attempt at magical realism, which I found very hard to do, but here is what I came up with. I tried for fairy tale-ish too.
It also seems to be another of the only kind of story I can write these days, stories that beg to be continued but never are.
All images are my own unless otherwise stated.
The first one is mine of a painting by Chris Randolph of the Living Museum.
