The exercise:
Write about something that has been: eliminated.
There's like half a row of strawberries left to weed, which feels pretty amazing. Planning on finishing that off tomorrow morning and then turning our focus to getting the remaining rows mulched.
Once that gets done... we might actually be able to do other things in the garden again.
Weird.
In sporting news, Montreal was eliminated from the playoffs this evening after a 1-0 loss to New York. My consolation, since they were only my temporary new team to cheer for, is that this is only disappointing, as opposed to soul crushing.
Mine:
I stand on the sidelines and watch the proceedings continuing on without me. How quickly I seem to have been forgotten. Left alone. By those I considered friends.
It was not so long ago that I was out there with them, part of the team. Chasing the same goal, working together, all that good stuff.
Now? They're too busy competing to even acknowledge a fallen comrade. I bet most of them don't know what happened to me.
Oh, here comes Eric. We've been best friends since Grade 2. Maybe I can catch his eye and get...
Nope.
Man, forget this. I'm calling my mom to come pick me up. Screw laser tag.
2 comments:
How much bigger are the weeds that you pull out at the end of the weeding compared with the ones you pull out at the start? It seems like the weeding takes a week or so, which is quite a long time for growing plants.
Sad news about Montreal, but it sound like they were fighting a bit of an uphill battle in your last update.
Heh, nice story today! Again, you have a neat little twist at the end, nothing earth-shattering but enough to make me smile. And I completely agree with your protagonist :)
Eliminated
The coffee shop smelled stale and the coffee tasted burned. The milk had been a slightly caramel colour, and she suspected that it had been burned as well. Not so much a latte as a late, she decided; this coffee had been dead on arrival. She sipped it anyway, looking through the dirty plate glass at the concrete-paved street outside. The only car visible on the road was broken down at the kerbside and had been graffitied. She tried to read the words, but the only one she could make out was Mogdenafilazide, the wake-up drug the entire populace took for breakfast every morning.
A man wearing a sweaty grey suit suddenly appeared at her elbow and then sat down opposite her without asking. She controlled herself, not screaming, and felt her heart-rate double.
"Marie-Elise," he said, and it wasn't a question. She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. "Your parents were Olive and Arthur Threpodian," he said. She squeaked, startled, and he focused watery indigo eyes on her and frowned. "What?"
"No," she said, and the word was very hard to say. "My parents were Amy and Simon Detrovitz."
The man regarded her with his wet, soulless eyes for a moment. Then, "No. You were born to Olive and Arthur Threpodian on the 3rd August 1965. They were eliminated eight days later for sedition and hate crimes. You were put up for adoption and adopted by Amy and Simon Detrovitz, where you were classed as a problem child for the first six years of your life. Then you were appropriately medicated."
She sat there in shock, her vision narrowing down to a little tunnel of colour in a thick grey fog and his words seeming to echo from a long distance away. Adopted? Problem child??. He waited until she stirred, seeing him again.
"You were not aware you were adopted?" It was his first question, and she nodded, almost grateful for the near-humanity.
"Then it will probably hurt less to know that Amy and Simon Detrovitz have been eliminated because they were considered to be biological surplus. That is all. Proceed about your day."
Greg - it varies, but generally... quite a bit bigger. And the plants, being more buried at that point, tend to be smaller as well.
Really enjoyed your opening in this one, and it's a delightfully horrifying scene overall. Seems like a world that could do with some more exploring, as most of your creations are :)
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