During the past 20 months or so of the pandemic, some people I know have written books; others have grown addicted to jigsaw puzzling. Whoever experienced this jigsaw-piece cascade was either utterly fed up or had a moment’s calamitous cack-handedness.

What intrigues me is that they opted not to gather up their fragments. Does that mean it really was the last straw? I suspect a temper tantrum of epic proportions, but what other distraction or emotional fall-out could explain this pavement disarray?

Or perhaps they’ve deliberately strewn the pieces here in a superstitious act intended to keep Covid-19 at bay.

Can you use this as the prompt for a tale about how we hold up (or fail to cope) in challenging times? What could these scattered jigsaw sections represent? Or what could you swap them with to give your tale a surreal edge?

If you write or create something prompted by this idea, please send it to me in an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com for possible publication on SkyLightRain.com.