Everyday Canvas

Random Words

Prompt: Create a story, a poem or simply discuss what these words mean to you... audacity, octopus, Americana, bomber, insanity and flutter.
Yes, I was playing with random word generator again. Have you ever used this to help your creative juices flow?

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I do use random words to write free-flow, but I've never used the word generator. I usually get a book, any book. I open a page without looking and put my finger on a random place. I don’t use the conjunctions, articles, and the like but nouns, verbs, and adjectives. I repeat the process a few times until I have a few words. Then I write longhand in notebooks, using the words. This is my favorite-fun type of writing.

I don’t know from which part of me the following piece came from, but here it is:
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Medals

While waiting for my stop, I am watching my image reflected on the bus’s window, the image that rolls and floats like a ghost on a diner’s walls with colorful graffiti and a bold, red sign that says Americana Café, as if my likeness were double exposed. These walls of the city must now house many wars. Except its inhabitants do not wear medals.

For years I never mentioned war, my medals, or the guilt and the shame attached to being a bomber, the insanity of it all, for I could never tell what the reaction would be because, after the war was over and done with, everyone wished I could put it all behind me, as if I went to McDonald’s to have a burger and now I was home. Not that easy, is it!

What they don’t take into account is the audacity of my recall like an octopus grabbing me with its many tentacles and pulling me under the surface, while I flutter in and out of the waves of pain, haunting images, and my bit of indignity, as I try to hold on.

The bus keeps moving and I am still staring at me, at my image reflected on the glass, pasted over the city scenes. This could be me; it should be me, but it isn’t. Something has gone awfully wrong. I now feel jealous of the person I could have been, but all I see is the rage superimposed on my image, on everything, even on my medals.