If you missed last week’s episode, you missed a great one. You can watch the replay here.
As always, the ladies of the podcast created some great pieces of writing from this sprint prompt. This week, the prompt was: Wild Horses. We really enjoyed Jamie’s take on the prompt, and we think you will as well! Enjoy, and make sure you reach out to her to let her know you want her to finish this story!
I thought about wild horses the first time I cracked open my journal. The teacher had called the process of getting it all down on paper “caging the monkey mind,” but I never really resonated with monkeys. Monkeys were stooped and flung poop. Wild horses, running free, that was how I preferred to think of the unfettered thoughts in my brain.
“I’ll corral them,” I thought, “Between the beautiful binding of this book.”
The leatherbound volume made a satisfying creak the first time I opened it. I’ll never forget that sound. So much promise, so much potential.
I didn’t have much to write about back then. So much seemed insignificant. It took me a few false starts to really get the nack of this habit. So many entries start, “sorry, it’s been a while since I updated this.”
Eventually, however, I caught my stride. It happened after one particularly stressful campout—the mean girls I met there iced me out and made me feel alone. We had a trail ride on that particular campout. My horse was named snickers and he was the most well-behaved horse I’d ever ridden on such a ride. I wanted to draw snickers, and decided the place to do so was my long-abandoned journal.
I drew snickers and as I sketched him out, considered the actions of the bullies I’d encountered.
I decided to corral those thoughts, those feelings, within the boundaries of the leather volume.
What better place to voice the things I only now considered “the best retorts ever” to their snarky comments? What better place to let my imagination run wild with thoughts of the suffering I secretly wished upon those girls. What better place to repent for those feelings?
My journal became something altogether different to me after that campout.
It became a place where wild horses ran free.
I still have time but I feel this is kind of finished.
Jamie Hershberger enjoys writing shorts (short fiction) under the pen name, J. R. Nichols. She is the creator and curator of www.writingshorts.net and the editor of The Writing Shorts Newsletter. Her flash fiction has won several contests and has been featured in two anthologies.
