Following our relaunch with The Prompt with Meg Pokrass, we invited Pokrass Prompts subscribers to contribute flash pieces of 100 words or less inspired by Cj Hendry's Dropshop Crown Series event, in which visitors braved the August heat to go on a treasure hunt at our 432 Park Avenue gallery. It's quite fitting that now, almost a year to the day since the Drop, another heatwave leaves New York with a cool reminder of the season ahead, and nothing says "fall is coming" like a look at the summer reading we never got around to.
For added fun, we provided a few optional prompt words: clutter, russet, finger, drift, drip, swelter, fever.
Read our selections below and check out previous installments here.
Gallery visitors sift through Cj Hendry's Crown Series at Phillips' Dropshop event at 432 Park Avenue in August 2023.
First Selection
Karen Crawford, "The Missing"
You learned to make yourself small. To wither beneath the fever in his eyes. Bow down before the fire of his moods. Suppress your tongue. Kiss his ring. "Do you hear me?" he demands. "Do you see me?" you whisper. After you perfect the art of disappearing, he organizes a search party for appearance's sake. Neighbors comb parks, fields, and yards while he pretends to care. You drift among them invisible, his collection long buried, melted by heatwaves. You hear the ground rumble. See it shift. Then split. Crown by crown by crown, they rise. Yours, among them.
Second Selection
Jeff Friedman, "What Had Been Lost"
They combed through the red crowns, grabbed handfuls of dirt, let it trickle through their fingers. “How will we recognize what’s been lost?” one asked. And one answered: “It’ll be like a ray of light breaking through a dense cloud.” On their hands and knees in the red flowers, they breathed the rich fragrance until one stood up. “I’ve found it,” he said and held up a chipped blue ball. “The billiard ball I lost many years ago.” One by one, they stopped looking — each of them content something had been found, even if it did not belong to them.
Honorable Mention
Sreemanti Sengupta, "Summer"
Ma bent over our spread out backs and clucked her tongue. “How red they are!” she said while spraying us with prickly heat powder. Baba came in and saw us and started scratching his back too. “You too?” Ma said, shaking her head and blaming the heat of Kolkata. That night, when there was a loadshedding, we kids gleefully packed up our pillows and bedding and went screaming up to the terrace. The floor was hot and our backs sizzled against it. The four of us lay flat out on our thin bedsheets and looked up, praising the stars.
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