Dave Wright Writes

  Caught in an Elevator (Micro-fiction) The door closed to the elevator at the conference hotel. Alone at last. She was a cute co-ed with a trim waist, shoulder-length brown hair, and freckles that ran across her nose and cheeks. She smelled like the south—soft and sweet. They had run with a crowd for the past three days, but whenever he spoke, she looked at him with wide, interested eyes. Where you from? Alabama. What’s your major? History. How many brothers and sisters? Only child. Any hobbies? Boys. She giggled—then gave his shoulder an affectionate squeeze. He glanced at his blurred complexion in the stainless-steel elevator door. A lock of his hair hid the pimple on his forehead. A smear of Clearasil dusted his chin. He smiled. Still good. For two nights he had dreamt of her kiss and what it would be like to be kissed in return—the minty taste of her breath, her full lips pressed against his, her reluctance to part. Footsteps in the hallway. Quick. Punch L. It was a s

  All’s Well That Ends Well Single-Sentence 500-Word Exercise My mother, had she been here to advise me, would have reminded me that, “All’s well that ends well,” but since she died a year and a half ago—or even longer if you consider the dementia that robbed her of her memory years before that—I must be content to think of all the times that things ended well when I firmly believed that they would not, like the time when Sue and I cross-country skied the treacherous slopes at French River State Park, and I stubbornly led the way with one ski burrowing into a drift, the other splaying the other direction leaving me with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament and the firm but disappointing belief that we would have to stay home from our fortieth-year anniversary trip to Peru and Machu Picchu, only to find out from the orthopedic surgeon that no, if Lindsey Vonn can barrel down a mountain at break-neck speed without an ACL, an old man like you can climb Machu Picchu with the help of a