Flash Fiction Friday: The Girl and the Guitar

"Woman with Guitar" by Peter Carter

The young woman lounged on a sofa, naked save for a cowboy hat.  She played a strategically-placed guitar that concealed her nudity.  Her legs were demurely crossed.  Her facial expression conveyed contentedness brought about by the very act of strumming the instrument.

It occurred to Jack that the woman was a country music groupie.  After bedding her favorite star she had awakened in the night and gotten out of bed to don his hat and try out his guitar.  And while her expression was as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s, Jack’s story was incomplete without a twist.

Most of his stories had some twist, a revelation if you will.  Few, if any, just faded out.  That’s when it hit him.  What if the singer’s talents came from his enchanted Fender Telecaster?  Or, much like Frosty the Snowman, a hat?  What if by using these things, the groupie usurped his talents?  Like Samson losing his locks, such a theft rendered the country singer impotent.

Despite his lack of knowledge where country music was concerned, Jack began crafting a story.  He couldn’t shake a sense of familiarity, of deja vu.  He’d written a few lines when he realized he'd been down this road before, and called it The Luchador and the Lady. (209)

-Jack

Behind the Scenes 

This is one of two Flash Fiction Friday prompts posted this week in Panserbjørne's absence, this one courtesy of Max at Thoughts from a Mystic Satyr.  There was no required word or phrase, though players were given a choice between composing an extremely short story of between fifty and fifty-five words, or a longer story of between 200 and 210 words.  In search of that all-important story hook, as well as a final twist that would re-frame the entire story in the mind of the reader, I brainstormed extensively.  As mentioned above, I had an idea that the young woman pictured had slept with some bigshot country singer after a concert, and now found herself sitting on a sofa in his hotel room, wearing his hat and playing his guitar.  The scene, as it worked in my mind, played whimsically, with no real weight or consequence.  The twist, as described in the story above, came to me quickly, and I began writing.

The first speed bump that hindered my progress occurred in the first sentence:  I wanted to refer to the country singer by a stage name rather than a proper name (which I determined to be Buck Butler).  I did some research online in the hopes of coming up with something catchy and alliterative.  "The Tennessee Troubadour" had a nice ring to it, but "troubadour" didn't lend itself to country music.  I decided to skip the singer's name, write the rest of the story, and return when I was finished in order to fill in the blanks.  I gave it some more thought, and then turned to Twitter to vent about my lack of inspiration.

My first of two #FlashFictionFriday stories has hit a serious snag thanks to my complete lack of knowledge about country music.
— Jack (and Jill) (@jackandjillcpl) February 24, 2012

The majority of the replies I received seemed to imply that every country music song followed the same basic formula, or some variation thereof:  The singer loses his woman, his dog, his job, and his pickup truck, and then gets drunk.  Perhaps a simplistic view of the genre, but I'm not enough of a fan to say otherwise.  It's true, however, that I didn't make it too far into my story before I realized that I'd written more or less the same story on November 11, 2011 when, during a week without a new prompt, I went into the Flash Fiction Friday archives and wrote a story from a prompt posted before I began participating.  I did attempt to write something similar to The Luchador and the Lady, even going so far as to attempt to think of a similarly illiterative title.  When this proved fruitless ("The Singer and the...Sorority Sister?"), I decided on the very self-referential story included above.

Soundtrack

I've got nothing.  My knowledge of country music is pretty limited.