This was supposed to be a short story assignment (between 300 and 500 words). Its difficult writing something with a point, a message, that makes you think, with a climax in the short plot. Here is what I turned in:
She walked towards the bonfire, biting her tensed lip, looking down, and was within a few yards before she noticed how warm it had suddenly become.
“Hey there, sunshine!” a man crowed from the other side of the flames.
Her face, holding a down-turned mouth and creased brow, smoothed as she was caught off guard by the noisy crowd in front of her. An instant later she blanched, gasped, and dropped her sneakers next to the blue polished toes at which she now stared.
The largest fire she had ever seen was directly in front of her, reaching ten feet into the sky and stretching around a circle equal in diameter. Naked bodies danced around it: sweaty, quivering, and terrifying in a way that only nudity can be to a seventeen-year-old girl who didn’t even look at herself when getting out of the shower.
In her left hand, fingers furiously entered digits on her phone, then cleared them, then entered them again. After a few moments, she raised her eyes and exhaled, staring straight at each body that rotated near her lonely patch of sand as they danced. The thumb with a bright silver star painted on it cleared the numbers again.
The owner of that voice that called to her moments before had faded back into the primal din. None took notice of the girl in jeans and white polo shirt, standing just outside the glow. Her hair had been skillfully plaited by a woman with years of experience, but the bottom half was unfinished and pulled into a pony tail. She had forgotten a sweater in the hurry to leave.
She placed her feet solidly beneath her and dropped her phone into one of the bright green sneakers. Running her fingers through the complicated braids of dark brown hair, she unwove them each slowly.
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