Read Jhumpa Lahiri's "This Blessed House" from The Art and Craft of Fiction. Notice how the visual and narrative conflict in the story arises from an "incongruity": a startling and sacred object within a suburban middle-class home.
Your prompt for first story comes from Pamela Painter's book of writing exercises What If?:
"Something comes to your attention that is interesting precisely because you can’t figure it out. It doesn’t seem to make sense. Someone is breeding pigs in the backyard of a mansion. Who is it? Why is she doing it? Your inventing mind can find the motives and the meanings. An example from my own experience: Once when my phone was out of order, I went out very late at night to make a call from a public phone at a supermarket plaza. At something like two in the morning all the stores were closed but the plaza was not empty. There were three women there, one of them with a baby in a stroller. What were they doing there? It was several years before I figured out a possible answer, and that answer was a short story."
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