The exercise:
Write about: an unrefined man.
The weather was not being very agreeable today. Maja and I still managed to get 84 pints out of the strawberry patch but we were nowhere near finished.
We had just had our fill of the rain by that point.
Might finish the pick in the morning, if there is time leftover after the box harvest. And if it's not raining.
Mine:
"Hold on, hold on! You can't possibly be serious. You did not just call Harold an unrefined man."
"That's precisely what I just said," Moira said. "Why, what would you call him?"
"Me? Oh, I don't know... how about boorish? Or maybe uncouth, primitive. Or... hold on a second." Richard grabbed his smartphone off of the coffee table and began fiddling with it.
"What in the world are you doing, dear?"
"He's pulling up Thesaurus.com," Angie called from the kitchen.
"How could you possibly know that, darling? You're practically at the other end of the house!"
"Because -"
"Thesaurus.com has some interesting suggestions," Richard cut in, his nose almost touching the glowing screen before him. "Like vulgar and barbaric. Ooh! How about troglodytic? That sounds pretty badass, right? Do you think we could get him to legally change his name to that?"
"Because," Angie continued after a deep sigh, "he does this every time someone tries to say something remotely polite about his dad."
2 comments:
Have you got enough strawberries out of the patch yet that it could be called a glut? Sadly I have no idea how many pounds or kilos there are to a pint, so I can't convert the numbers into something meaningful to me :( Anyway, I hope the rain let up for you and you managed to pick for the box harvest in the dry!
Harold seems a little picked upon, and he didn't even make a cameo in the story! Still, I love the conversation -- three-way talking is never easy to put in, and you've done it rather well! -- and the suggestions for unrefined that you've found. (I'm voting for barbaric, by the way!)
An unrefined man
"You told him to make himself at home!" Kathy dug a finger into her common-law husband's ribs, and he pulled lazily away, his bulk peeling off the sticky sheets of the bed like a snail meandering down the path. They were in the bedroom, whereas Kathy would normally have been settled down for the evening by now in front of the tv, an ancient CRT with an ill-tuned colour function that hurt the eyes and gave everyone it showed a perma-tan. Lewis, her husband in all the ways that mattered to them, would probably have been in the kitchen digging through the build-up of ice in the freezer to mine out a gallon of ice-cream or a stack of microwave meals for supper. But now they had retreated to their last bastion of defence, the bedroom, and both of them were starting to wonder if it always smelled like this.
"He's a guest," said Lewis, pushing his pudgy hand under the waistband of his stained grey sweatpants and scratching himself.
"He belches at the dinner table!" Kathy's hiss was vicious as any rattler. "Over other people's food! And he's clogged the toilet every day he's been here. Twice yesterday! He cuts his toenails on the couch and doesn't pick them up again! He--"
"You do that," said Lewis, trying to sound reasonable.
"Yes, but it's my trailer!"
"The bank own the lease pretty much," said Lewis in the tone of someone who knows he's not been keeping up with the repayments.
"He picks his nose and eats what he finds!"
Lewis guiltily sat on his hands, and tried not to sigh. His brother was going to be with them for another week still.
Greg - apparently not. Never had any trouble selling all that we grow. Not sure what the upper limit is :)
It's usually about .75 pounds per pint. Sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. Averages out to about that though.
Ugh, that description in your opening line. Really sets the scene. Some suitably gross follow ups as well :P
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