Chuck Wendig's terribleminds Blog Flash Fiction Challenge: A Novice Revenges the Rhythm

First the Theory behind the Tale:

Welcome to my third week of taking up Chuck Wendig's terribleminds blog Flash Fiction Challenges. This week's challenge was to incorporate the randomly generated sentence "A novice revenges the rhythm" into a piece of writing less than 1,000-words long. Here is this week's process.

 

Okay, so when I started this, I was very aware I was working in a limited time frame. For a start, I only had time to really look at it today, after finishing my novel. So, at first I was going to write a thousand-word story, exactly 1,000 words like last time, and that reminded me of the hundred-word challenges I'd participated in before. I was also going to use the mandatory line "A novice revenges the rhythm" somewhere in the middle of the story, but when I started writing, it wanted to be first on the page... and that's when the whole project changed.

It stopped being a hundred-word prose piece. You might have noticed that the mandatory line has a certain rhythm of its own, and this influenced the whole way my mind saw what was going down on the page. Instead of plain prose, it became a standard poem written in rhyme, or close to it.

And it stopped being a hundred words. No matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get the wordage to come down and still allow the story to play out in rhyme. And, yes, the change of tense was deliberate but the story frame that resulted was not. So, without further ado, here's my bit of bloggery and word murder:

The Novice and the Damned

A novice revenges the rhythm and we all sit here stunned. On stage the feature band lies bleeding, but the novice did not run. Brought in to open the concert, soothe the fans and set the stage, the novice played a killer riff while on the drums whole wars were waged. The sax did not stand idle, the base-man channeled doom. The feature band, though in demand, could not drown their echoes from the room.

The feature band took to the boards and played their hearts out to the stands. The novice made the audience and listened to the damned. When the gunfire came, and gouts of flame shot from the speakers on the stage, the novice took the gunner down and tried the band to save. When all was done and the cops had come, the novice wept alone, surrounded by the empty chairs for those nearest her had gone. We all sit in silence as the ambos do their work. Her grief tears at our hearts and minds as we in shadows lurk.