Sudden Fiction Prompt Response – Key West

The Zac Brown Band song “Toes” inspired a sudden fiction piece that follows.

Here’s the link for the song if you want to listen while reading. I highly recommend a vacation of the mind. It’s almost as good as the real thing when you let your imagination take flight with the seagulls. I smell coconut and rum. Do you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiL_beZtiQc

Key West

by Fay Moore © 2012

“So what do you want to be when you grow up?” he asks, as he places a rum punch in her hands. The savory scent of coconut and rum beguiles her. She touches the rim to her lips and sips before answering. She is a decade older than her new friend. He is ripped, tan, and used to the company of older women.

“I’m thinking maybe the pirate life isn’t so bad,” she replies, looking out over the cockpit rail, admiring the sky blue waters through which she peers to watch a conch crawling across the white sand bottom under her sailboat. The boat is riding on anchor a quarter-mile off shore.

They laugh. He sits across the cockpit from her, a teak folding table attached to the helm between them. Both recline with their backs against the dog box, feet pointed aft, and drink in silence.

Silence—what a gift, she thinks. In the real world, she spends her day talking, talking, talking or listening to others talk. The only jabber I want to hear is from the parrots, the seagulls. . .

At that moment, she hears a cock-a-doodle-do from somewhere on the shoreline.

Oh, yes, and the famous Key West chickens. I’ll listen to chatter from a cockerel all day long—as long as I have a drink in my hand, she thinks.

Her cockerel in the cockpit begins to babble about something.

Life is good today.

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

As authors, we are always looking for unique ways to make our stories stand out. One way to achieve that is to weave weird facts into the story line. Here are a couple to show you what I mean.

First, persons with a go-getter personality — dominated by ambition, logic and decisiveness — are likely to have a ring finger that is longer than his or her index finger. Why? The long fourth finger is an indication that this person was exposed to a higher than average amount of testosterone en utero, according to author Dr. John T. Manning of Rutgers University. He covers the subject in his book Digit Ratio.

Second, women change their taste in men based on their hormone levels. Researcher Tony Little found that women taking birth control pills tend to choose men with pronounced masculine features. The manly traits indicate a higher testosterone level, which is also linked to aggressive behavior and a higher than average likelihood of divorce.

Finally, an adrenaline rush can make the sparks fly between partners. Research by Arthur Aron and Donald Dutton prove it. They found doing something daring together increases the odds of bonding with your date. In one study, male subjects were asked to cross either a shaky or sturdy bridge to speak to an attractive female “researcher”  who provided the male subject her phone number. Those men who met the female after the shaky bridge crossing were more likely to follow-up with a phone call and an invitation to go out together. The exhilaration of being in a risky situation together increases attraction.

Who knew?