My Cardboard Balcony

In my office at the school I work at, I happen to have a game called The Storymatic . It is a great tool to have for students who are interested in timed free writes or creative writing exercises, as it provides prompts for both character and plot ideas. Rather than use a specific opening line this week - and because I am actually putting this here on Thursday to be posted on Saturday due to my going out of town for a wedding - I decided to use the story I wrote in one of my classes while a student of mine wrote his own story using the same original two prompts (I have a philosophy of working alongside the student, not just watching him or her work). This story was written in forty minutes, utilizing multiple prompt cards as per the game's rules. Before each section of the story, I will put the prompts down in italics and parentheses to give you an idea of how the story went in the direction it did. The title of this story (rather than an actual, y'know, title) will be the orig

Down the narrowest corridor, there was a village built from gold. But all the people there were gold, too. Their hair dropped down in flaxen rings that barely caught the light of the outside world. As beautiful as they were, they were trapped among stone walls, their huts and hovels built from the shrapnel and crystals dropped from cavern ceilings and slopes. When asked why they remained here and not out in the open, they replied, "We were deemed too precious for the world."