The Spectacle of Falling

A woman finds solace in spending her afternoons in galleries. Enthralled by the beauty around her, she loses balance and suffers a fall, lying frozen in time as a statue, until she is picked up and sent out again into the modern world.

I used my notebook and pen for initial brainstorming and working on the first draft. I switched over to Google Docs to prepare the final version of 100 words.

They rush in and heads turn. Smiling mistresses adorned with jewels stay still in the background.
“Are you okay, miss?”
“I’m alright.”
Marble tiles, cool and refreshing, wash over me in restless waves, enveloping me in a soft ivory and carbon black net of safety.
“Let’s get you up. This is no place for an afternoon rest.”
I pass by the glinting strokes of a scene depicting a man and woman playing chess. Further down, a man is getting his foot amputated in the market square. I look up. A four-letter word lit in red. The door opens and closes.

Taking a more unorthodox approach, I approached the creative process by starting with title ideas that were freefalling. I used a version of Aniko Villalba’s timed exercise for a few minutes, focusing on titles alone, connecting together the first words that came to mind.

Then, I chose the setting. The story is not a personal account, but writing it in first person allowed me to escape back to the winter night I visited the National Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, and use all of my senses and memory to assume the role of the woman and bring the story to life. The images below are photos I took of the large staircase leading to the museum exit and the two Dutch paintings described by the woman in the story: "The Chess Players" by Cornelis de Man (c. 1670) and "Market Scene with a Quack at his Stall" by Jan Victors (c. 1650).

Finally, I drafted the plot. I chose the present tense as I wanted my words to depict the fleeting nature of time and the sense of serenity we feel when we are surrounded by undisturbed beauty. The reader is unaware of how long the woman lay on the ground, but neither is she.