For Thursday March 17th

First, post your short short story and include the statistic from Harper's Index.

Second, write the unknown. (250-500 words)

For this exercise, write the beginning of a story that contains an unknown, something you wonder about in a story. Certain elements in narrative texts open up enigmans--questions, or riddles, or just things that you wonder about in your reading--and these enigmas are one source of pleasure in reading. They are what engage us, take us up. But the pleasure lies not so much in the enigma itself, but in the variety and complexity of ways the text delays answering its questions. Pleasure springs from the delay itself, the putting off of closure, what remains open. Suspense.

On the top of a volcano you find a rock with some kind of image etched into it. What does it mean?
Your character coughs, but the sound is like something you have never heard before.
You are digging in your garden and you uncover--what, a small stone statue of a horse? someone's ring? the bone of a small animal?

Invent ways to put off discovering what you seek to know.

Fiction is almost always indirect. Write away from the story, not toward it. Look for satisfying enigmas in the drafts of stories. Put off the end as long as you can.