“Two-Minute Tuesdays” are a series of micro-stories written in five minutes or less. Consider them “public practice,” like shooting free throws in the park. Prompts are supplied at the bottom in case you want to try your own hand at one of them.
Was it possible to see beauty in a cockroach, I wondered?
It was my seventh day of solitude. The doors were still locked, the windows dark. Not much I could do about either.
But as I studied the small, brown specimen, these things mattered less. It clung to the wall, near a piece of plastic moulding, lured into the open by careful inactivity on my part. Now I stared at its almond-like form, the bobbing antennae. How many discarded hamburger wrappers, rotting bird carcasses, literal pieces of shit had that small insect burrowed its way inside over its short lifetime? Could I see beauty in the mindless, unstoppable force of decay and consumption that this bug personified?
No dice; I was still crazy, and solitude wasn’t making it any better.
Write for two minutes using these three nouns: beauty, cockroach, dice