Part One: Write a paragraph to a page (150-350 words) of narrative that’s meant to be read aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect—any kind of sound effect you like—but NOT rhyme or meter.

The train at the platform gleamed. 

It shone, and in its shining, stretched on and on, as far away as any of them could see. None of them had ever seen a train this long, not ever, would never. 

At the front, Annika, for once her boldness beaten into hiding at the sight of this particular, this long, impossible train, stared. 

And above Annika, an anxiety hung about. This anxiety was the kind that made a crowd stuck, its members unable to decide whether to step forward, decisively, or to stay still and static, safety in defiance.

So the anxiousness hung above them, and then it hung between them and before long it hung inside them. At the time, it was fond of hiding in pockets. If you asked it, it would say it liked to be held. Anxiety is needy. 

Then, the bell rang, because the bell always eventually rings. The bell always rang in the same way that the train always left, in the same way that every ticket holder step on board. The bell had never not rang. 

It rang with the bright, piercing sound as it always did, just as it would the next week, and the week after, and every week until you held this in your hands, your fingers on these pages. 

So just as it was the week before and the week after, the bell’s forever sound was the signal for the lingering anxiety to disappear. It didn’t slink away: it simply wasn’t after it was. Then, the crowd snapped. 

Each crowd snaps in its own way, and each crowd always snaps when the bell rings, before the gates start to snick-snack open and shut. This crowd snapped into three. Not the most common snap by far, a snap into threes, happening perhaps once or twice every three thousand scheduled departures.  So this crowd had distinguished itself before boarding, before even the first ticket had been sucked into the first gate.

Annika was the first. Her anxiety had snapped, of course, into boldness, the easiest shape for it to snap back to, less of a snap and more of an eager relaxing into its most comfortable spot. She stopped fingering the ticket in her pocket, the soft and smooth front side, the curled curves and the back, distinguished by the rough and raised magnetic strip. Like most of her group, she had not believed that black strip was magnetic, not at all.

Annika’s ticket left her pocket. Held between finger and thumb, presented to the ticket machine at platform twelve of the midnight train station, the ticket first slid then drew itself into the gate. 

In the distance, the midnight train was waiting.