300 Writing Prompts: #20

“You are a children’s book writer. Write the first few lines of your new book.”

It was a stormy day in Montmartre when the Grosvenor triplets stepped off the bus and disappeared into the fog surrounding Paris in late afternoon. Trena thought it was the most beautiful dusk she had ever seen, even though the colors were suitably dulled for a Paris evening. Yvonne was simply exhausted from traipsing across the city all day and kept sighing. And Siobhan was somewhere in between, not so tired she couldn’t go farther, but she would need prodding to do so. She was the youngest so she usually just went with the flow anyway, letting her sisters make the decisions most days. It was her way.

Besides, it wasn’t like that day was different from any other, not noticeably anyway. At the crack of dawn the triplets would be let out of the dungeon and given the day to wile about the hours in some semblance of play. However, they had to be back home by bedtime, which was 8pm in summer while the days were longer, so they could be locked back away until the next morning. In the between times they were left to fend for themselves, to find food, clothing, and shelter (if the rain began to pelt them too hard), and to stay alive long enough to return at day’s end. For five long years they had done exactly that and no more, if not satisfied with their fate at least tolerant of it. But that day they stepped off the bus into the gathering fog wasn’t like any other day. That was the day they met Destiny.

Now, Destiny was invisible, but she had considerable power, not the least of which was making dreams come true. And while she didn’t speak, she had an uncanny knack of knowing the deep, dark secrets of a person’s heart. That was her gift, and her curse, because no matter how much someone might publicly wish for one thing, she would give them their heart’s desire instead, which was always different. She had been following the triplets all day long, from their morning stroll in the Parc de Choisey, to their scrounging for scraps behind Beau’s Baguette Shop, to their stolen ride aboard the bus when a patron inadvertently let them in the back. As they turned onto the heavily graffitied avenue she finally caught up to them, leading them down a narrow alley, and into their new future.

Sam