Millicent, that was the first time I've ever used that name and have no idea why it popped into my mind. or Millie as her friends called her, sat on the park bench looking at the wooden statue This recreates a scene I experienced in Aosta when my husband and I went there for a weekend. scene as she ate her egg salad sandwich I was debating making an egg salad sandwich later and drank her tea from her thermos I imagined that Millie was staying at a BnB and where she made the sandwich. In reality, the shops that sell sandwiches in Aosta would be more French in style. A ham and cheese baguette might have been better, but the object is to keep writing.
She talked to the statue. I used her comments to give more background. I had decided not to do straight tell.
"You've aged well." When Millie fell in love with Marco, he was in his early 20s. I do believe what a writer doesn't say can still be in the piece.
"What have you done since I left Aosta?" Seemed like a normal question for her to ask.
"I had to leave to start my last year at uni." This explanation sets the approximate age Millie was at the time she fell in love with Marco. I debated using the word uni versus senior year of university. I wasn't sure whether to make Millie an American or a Brit at this point. If I were to expand the free write, a piece of flash fiction into a longer short story, I would need to work this out, but again with a 10-minute limit there was no time.
"I became a lawyer, married, had three kids, five grandchildren. I'm a widow." This is a quick way to give Millie's history since she left Aosta.
She had fallen in love with the Italian village of Aosta during her junior year abroad decades before.
She'd fallen in love with Marco Siragusa. He had looked so much like the statue, only he was younger. I wanted to make the first two paragraphs parallel.
That was 52 years ago. I could give the exact time that has gone by. In a longer piece, I might show how the village had changed, the people, etc. She could notice all the mobile phones or the Neptune statue rusted with age.
At first she'd written daily, then weekly, then monthly then not at all. He'd sent two postcards. Did Marco love her as much as she loved him, was she just one of the many students he romanced or was it that he couldn't write well? If he had written, would Millie have gone back to Aosta when she finished her degree? Again free writes in a ten-minute session don't allow for that.
Did Marco still live in the village of his ancestors? I wanted to show that Marco was a local.
***
At the tourist office a woman told her, "The Artist Guido Conti still works in his atelier." Had I had more time, I would have gone more deeply on Millie searching for Marco at the town hall, the library, the local church, but I sent her straight to the tourist office to ask about the statute.
***
Millie smelled the smell of freshly cut wood as she approached the door. Inside, sawdust filled the air.
Guido had white long hair fastened in a pony tail. He removed his goggles and mask. Guido is probably as old or older than Millie but as an artist he can continue to work as long as he lives and is healthy. I would have liked to have gone into why there was no plaque on the statue, but again, within the time limitation, it wasn't possible.
"Yes, that was Marco," he told her when she asked.
***
Millie's last stop was where Marco now lived in a nursing home. He didn't recognize her, but he didn't recognize anyone. A rather realistic ending. I could have staged a great reunion if he recognized her, but I left him mentally incapacitated.
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