This is what ten people on a Thursday morning came up with in an hour and a half. Exquisite corpse, by the way, is a game where each participant can only see the last sentence (written by the person just before them) of a story in progress . The participant writes their own sentence, covers up the previous one, and passes it on so that only their sentence can be read by the next person. It’s therefore a kind of chain story. At the end, the paper is unfolded and the whole story read out. To know more, go here. And also here. Also, if you want to read a desi version by Samit Basu, Shakti Bhatt, Rana Dasgupta, Ruchir Joshi, Tabish Khair, Meenakshi Reddy, Madhavan, Monica Mody, Vivek Narayanan, Raveena Rawal, Nilanjana Roy, Anand Vivek Taneja, Jeet Thayil, go here.
I've paragraphed the stories and cleaned up spelling and punctuation, but otherwise this is pretty much as written.
THE COLOURS OF SIN
The wind blew through her flaming purple hair. She looked at the train tracks ahead and a tear trickled down her cheek. The train rushed towards her and in that second her life flashed before her. She could see all her favourite colours --- red, blue, violet, pink and brilliant green; she held her breath.
Boom! Boom! Wheee! Fizz! Bang! The inky black sky broke into a fantastic array of colours that took her breath away. The guy standing next to her suddenly held her hand tight. She gave him one tight slap right across his eager face.
‘Aaaah! My mother never hit me as hard!’
‘I am your mother now.’
‘I will look after all of you, even that thing lying in our cellar.’
She was still hugging him, when she felt the barrel of the gun.
The class laughed over this so much they had another round, this time with each participant given one minute to write, timed by my stopwatch (since we had twenty minutes class-time left).
High-speed exquisite corpse:
THE MOUSETRAP
Twelve blind mice ran down the dark, dank alleyway. They could smell the cheese, and they couldn’t stop. It smelt like Rohan’s shirt, the one he was wearing ‘that’ day. That sweaty shirt she hoped she would never have to smell, ever again.
He stood in front of her, dishevelled, perspiring, his hat askew, and stared at her with dull eyes; she wished she could shove him out of the 10th floor window.
‘We can’t help it, you have to go ahead with this now.’
He lifted the heavy bag onto his shoulders and dashed towards the door. But no matter how many times he tried to hit the door with the bag, it just would not give way. He was stuck. Undaunted he searched for an alternate exit … and there it was right behind the cupboard in the cabin.
The door opened … it was pitch black … he walked out and banged into something solid. It was a trap!
