Sarah knew something was off about her new neighbor from the moment he started giving unsolicited financial advice at the community barbecue. Between bites of slightly charred hot dog, Marcus had boasted about a way of apparently doing his taxes in half the time, which he ominously called "the water trick," and Sarah couldn’t shake the feeling that she should warn someone about it.
The next morning, she noticed three black SUVs parked across from his house. As she watered her lavender bushes, she watched suited figures carrying boxes from his garage. Marcus himself was nowhere to be seen, though his bedroom window stood open, curtains billowing in the spring breeze.
That evening, Betty from two doors down told her that Marcus had left town suddenly, something about a family emergency in Arizona. But Sarah had seen his family photos during the barbecue – all his relatives lived in Maine.
A week later, Sarah received a letter with no return address. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a waterstain obscuring most of the text. The only legible words were at the bottom: "The trick is knowing when to stop."
She recycled the letter and decided that maybe it was better not to think too hard about what had happened to Marcus. Some mysteries, she figured, were better left unsolved – especially ones involving creative accounting.
Original prompt
write a short scene which includes this line: '…a way of apparently doing his taxes in half the time, which he ominously called "the water trick"…'
Commentary
I was legitimately shocked when I first saw 'The trick is knowing when to stop'. This was one of my first attempts at generating microfiction with Claude, and the way it played back to my original prompt there felt very natural and literary.
I asked Claude to try expanding this story with more details, but I felt it lost a lot of the immediacy and mystery of the original attempt. There’s a great sense of mystery produced by the waterstained letter — though the final paragraph falls into some massive GPT-isms.