“Rainy Wedding” — NPR Three-Minute Fiction
She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. Her son lay dying on the other side, his blue, pale skin in stark contrast to the bright red blanket on his bed.
I’ve always appreciated the short-story genre, most likely because I don’t have a lot of time to read novel-length fiction. More substantively, I’m always amazed by good writers’ ability to pack in so much into such a short length. In today’s analogy, short stories are like pithy and witty tweet.
Over the weekend, I happened to be in the car running errands while the NPR contest on three-minute fiction came on. The challenge for this round—Round 8—was to start to the story with the following sentence: “he closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.”
The winning story is incredibly moving. It manages to walk through over thirty years of life in about three-minutes worth of spoken story. The winner is not a professional writer, but as the judge announcing the winner encouraged her, she should be.
