Question

Analyze the photograph and imagine that you are part of the scenery. Imagine you are traveling by train. Write a creative short story, but you must include an ironic twist at the end. Where are you going? Who do you expect to see? Who do you meet along the way? To establish irony, one must first establish the set up and build suspense.

Write at least 200 words but don't write over 275 words.

Remember: there are three kinds of irony

verbal when something is said that is the opposite of what was meant, sarcasm

situational when the expected outcome is not what actually happens

dramatic (tragic) - when the audience knows something that the characters don't

Answer 1

Rain stitched the window into motion as the train unrolled the countryside. I was part of that smear, seat and coat and small, nervous hand on the paper ticket. I was going to Harrow’s End to find Anna — the sister who left ten years ago — and I expected to see her waiting on the platform in that red coat she always wore. I imagined confrontation, excuses, the undoing of a decade.

Along the way I met people who seemed to belong to other lives: a father coaxing his daughter’s crayons into a tiger, an old man who kept folding his hands over an empty map, a tired conductor who said, without irony, “People look for what they miss on the last stop.” Their ordinary kindness made my purpose sharper, my chest a drumbeat.

The station smelled of salt and newspaper. I scanned the crowd, looking for that flash of red, for the familiar tilt of her head. Instead I caught a red in a shop window — fabric in the sun, as precisely Anna’s as memory could carve. I pushed through the bell and there she was, not on the platform but behind the counter: hair shorter, smile practiced. She ran the vintage shop.

My mouth was full of accusation. She offered me the coat. “It fits you,” she said, folding the collar as if apologizing with fabric. “You’re just in time.”

I had imagined answers and reconciliations and the furious justice of words. Ironically, what I found at the end of the line was a receipt for the past: I’d come to meet her and left with the very thing she’d left behind.