The exercise:
Write something which has to do with: glue.
Spent the morning getting caught up on rototilling again while Becky worked on weeding around the potato plants. It was hot, but not unbearably so.
This evening has been much more pleasant than the one I suffered through yesterday. It already felt basically comfortable by 10 pm and we might not need to have the air conditioner going all night.
Mine:
"This is a bit much, don't you think?"
"Well, you see, I d-"
"Anytime now. Come on."
"I'd really like t-"
"Honestly? Still? Do we have to do this?"
"I'm sorry, I re-"
"Just let go already! I'm not here to set any sort of record for the world's longest handshake!"
"It's like I've been trying to tell you..."
3 comments:
It's pleasantly cool over here today, a sudden dip down to 14C instead of the more standard 20C. It's still too hot for me, since I like single digit temperatures (positive or negative, I'm not fussed) though :)
Heh, I love how the dialogue conveys the punchline without actually spelling it out. Very nicely done!
Glue
"What're you doing now, Vince?" Dave sounded exasperated.
"Unscrewing the cap on the glue, Dave," said Vince. The distributor cap had popped off the double-decker bus mid-safari and Dave was sitting behind the bus trying not to look terrified while Vince tried to solve the problem. Above them, eight businessmen whose combined weight was treble their combined IQ, aimed rifles that were so shiny and new it was clear they'd never been used, and looked for things to shoot at.
"Why doesn't the glue stick to the tube, Vince?" Dave would never normally have admitted ignorance of anything, so this was a clear sign of how badly scared he was. Something rustled in front of the bus, and the businessmen (predictably) fired off to the sides.
"Oxygen, Dave," said Vince, squeezing the tube hard. Silvery glue arced in the sunlight and splattered on the ground some distance away. "Until oxygen gets to the glue it's not sticky at all."
"How the hell do you know that?" asked Dave. The undergrowth rustled again, and suddenly a jaguar lunged out, heading straight for them. The businessmen were checking their blackberries and missed it, and Dave was immobilised with fear. The smell that wafted from him suddenly indicated the only part of him that had moved.
The jaguar lurched to a halt, seemingly frozen inches away from Vince's face.
"See?" said Vince calmly, applying glue to the distributor cap. "Add oxygen and it can even glue the pussycat's footsies to the ground."
"P...P...Pussycat?"
The tune she hummed was one from her childhood. Something her mother must have sang to her as she tried to drift off to sleep. Or maybe it was her father. It certainly wasn’t something she had crafted herself, though all the nurses thought that to be the case.
“It’s her illness,” they would say. “Her way of dealing with the things around her.”
It wasn’t her fault her mommy brought a new man. How was she to know that he would come into her room every night while her mother was sleeping? At first, she thought he was going to sing her to sleep.
But that wasn’t the case.
After that, other things started happening that Christy couldn’t remember. She thought she saw flickers of that man hurting her mommy, of her mother surrounded by a pool of red on their kitchen floor. Or that could have been paint.
Next thing she knew, she was put in the nice large white building where all she had to do every day was cut out pictures and stick them onto paper. Sure, the nice ladies and nice men wanted her to talk to them, but she never felt like it. Christy wanted to keep making her pretty pictures for her mommy, whenever she decided to come back.
Greg - thanks!
Good lord, this was so great. I'd point out all the parts I liked best but then I'd just end up copying and pasting the whole thing.
So I'll just say that the ending was especially enjoyable :D
Ivybennet - that is a haunting bit of writing. Very well executed, with some excellent use of perspective.
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