Downtown – Part 1 of 6 – Room 101

Entering my office the first thing I noticed was her legs were as long as the days were hot.

These things tend to be short pieces that may or may not be the beginning of something else. They are, this month at least, just 101 words only. They dont always finish, I just like to try and evoke a certain feeling or scene. I also decided to combine this with M’s prompts. Today it was ‘Jet Lagged and Jilted’. I am going to try tell a short tale in 6 one hundred and one word pieces.  To be honest this was rather rushed and it might end at 1 of 6.  Just trying something different.

Entering my office the first thing I noticed was her legs were as long as the days were hot.  Or was it that she was as hot as the days were long?  Either way I knew she was going to be trouble.

I watched as she lit a cigarette and used my favourite cup as an ashtray.  She smiled in a way that told me that this was going to be cost me no matter what I charged her, and as smoke curled from her dark red lips she spoke, her voice like syrup.

“I need you to find my husband”

Author: Michael

Husband, dad,(ex)programmer, comic collector and proud Yorkshireman. I have no idea why im here or why im writing but i rather enjoy it. no great fan of punctuation;

15 thoughts on “Downtown – Part 1 of 6 – Room 101”

  3. Funny isn’t it that a picture and just a few words structured in a certain way brings back all of those other images that we have in our minds of the tall leggy blonde walking into the private detectives office and the curl of cigarette smoke lit by light streaming through slatted blinds . that was kind of the hope with this piece because it’s a traditional opening and quite cliched in many ways but it just shows how you don’t really need many words to conjure such a vivid image

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  4. Perfect thank you I was just commenting to somebody else but that was kind of the point of this piece it’s more about trying to tap into what people already know and simply mentioning a curl of cigarette smoke the leggy blonde and an office and couple it with that picture and already much of your work is done for you in terms of setting a scene

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  5. Wow – what a description of the femme fatale Michael. I’m trying to think what this reminds me of … maybe Mike Hammer, the detective in that TV series? I never read any of Mickey Spillane’s books, but I see Mike Hammer in my mind as I read this.

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  6. THats kind of what I was going for thanks. It was really all about seeing whether just a few chosen images could conjour up so much more 🙂

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  9. I bet I have it squirrelled away in my head because I grew up in South Africa and we had very little TV but what we did have was MIke Hammer and I loved it!

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  10. Interesting! I don’t watch any TV at all anymore, and haven’t since 2010 (can’t say I miss it), but I could just picture that music from the intro of Mike Hammer and had to hear it? Back then all the TV shoes had a theme song that you’d hear a few bars and know what show it was just by that. Like L.A. law that horn or trumpet that started the theme song. I liked Mannix, but Mike Hammer had panache!

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