Wednesday June 3rd, 2009

The exercise:

Today's prompt: the ice cream truck (van for you damn Brits).

Mine:

Around and around you circle,
Blasting that infernal jingle.
But I'll admit: at thirty
That tune still makes me tingle.

With the sun melting me down
You are a sore temptation.
And given but half a chance
I would trade you vocations.

So keep those kids a screaming
Every time you pass on by;
And I'll take two steps forward,
Then pat my belly and sigh.

5 comments:

Marc said...

Not a word of a lie: as soon as I hit publish I heard an ice cream truck jingle in the distance.

Those guys are everywhere right now.

Greg said...

Cool, you should write about me winning money and see if you can that to happen too!
I've not yet seen any ice-cream vans but given the variability of the British weather they may not yet believe that the sun will last.

Ice cream truck

Our ice cream truck is silent. It appears out of nowhere like a ghost, pulls up to the kerb and parks. It never makes a sound, and yet all the kids somehow know when it's there.

It's run by our local order of monks who've taken a vow of silence -- hence the lack of music from the truck. The ice cream flavours are all described as herbal, natural, and freshly grown, yet the kids seem to love them.

When I ordered the wormwood icecream, more out of curiousity that anything else, I remembered half-way through that wormwood is used for flavouring absinthe. And is an hallucinogenic...

Marc said...

I shall try to use my powers for good - or at least mutual gain :)

A monk driving an ice cream truck - with ice cream full of happy drugs to boot! Nice.

Tricia/Tasha said...

Don't talk about making things happen when you write about them, Greg. It's far too scary.

In July last year, I wrote about a character called Patricis (my name, but in someone else's story) who turned into a plastic figure on a little boy's model railway. In the story, the little boy twisted her right arm off. About a week later, I suffered the worst pain I'd ever experienced in my life, when I had a prolapsed cervical disc. The nerve the disc compressed was the one which supplied my right arm, along the upper surface, down to the thumb and index finger. Yeah - it felt exactly like my arm was being twisted off... for two weeks. The pain went away but I was left with permanent nerve damage in that hand.

Anyway, I recovered enough to get out of bed and not chug down strong painkillers every four hours on the dot, and when I went back to Protagonize, one of the stories I wrote involved an elderly lady dropping dead at a supermarket checkout. Two days later, I was in Asda when an elderly lady dropped dead at the checkout.

When I told my daughter she suggested writing a story about someone called Tricia winning the lottery...

The ice cream van that visits our road plays the Italian national anthem and is vaguely reminiscent of Michael Schumacher winning Grands Prix in his Ferrari :)

Marc said...

Ah Tricia/Tasha/Trics/Tashs, I always knew your writing was powerful. I guess I had no idea.

I'll be keeping an eye out for any of your stories with a Marc in them, that's for certain.