The exercise:
Write about: the injection.
Had a pretty mellow day off. Kat took Max to the beach to meet up with his cousin and auntie this morning and I stayed behind to... well, it turned out I caught up on a lot of comments on the blog and then had a nap. I'm not sure that was the intention, but whatever.
This afternoon Max had an hour and a half long nap, so we got a bit of cleaning done around the house and then rested some more. After dinner he decided he wanted to bring a couple of his books to Rebecca's trailer so she could read to him, and they also had a dance party in there (somehow), so that gave Kat and I some unexpected time together without him.
Back to the garden tomorrow. The new strawberry patch awaits.
Mine:
"This had better be worth all the trouble."
"Oh, I can assure you: it most certainly will be."
"And this stuff is guaranteed to make me stronger?"
"My dear boy..."
"Ow!"
"... nobody said any such thing."
"What? You promised me this would win me the competition!"
"I most certainly did not."
"Yeah, you did. Why else would I let you shove a needle in my a-?"
"Precisely."
"Excuse me?"
"That was the only way to get you to agree to the injection. I mean, you wouldn't have volunteered if I'd told you what was actually in the needle."
"What... what's in the needle?"
"Now? Nothing! See? All empty."
"That's not... that's not what I meant... you son of a... I don't feel so good."
"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that - it will pass soon enough."
"That's... that's good..."
"Then again, so will you."
"So will I... what?"
"Pass, my boy. As in, pass away. Do I really need to explain every last little detail to you?"
3 comments:
Allergy Shots
Be still, though you'd
Rather not
All to help you -- it's
Very hard to see -- an injection
Every week is hard to take.
Really I can see it helps, though
You say you can't.
@Morganna: Very nice acrostic, and I like the stop-start nature of the poem that feels like someone trying not to cry. There's so much artistry in your work that I struggle to find in mine, and you make it seem so easy! I know I'm going to have this in the back of my mind for the next few days now.
@Marc: Rebecca will be asking for a percentage increase in her pay if she's au-pairing for you as well! I do think it's sweet that Max picks who he wants reading to him though, and I'm looking forward to him deciding that he wants Rebecca's dog to read to him. And then hearing about how you had to google how to ventriloquate in order to convince him that the dog was reading. :-D
Heh, your characters are normally less overtly evil than this! I like the conversation and the fact that one side is very definitely getting the advantage of the other; there's an air of inevitability that leads to the ending rather well. Though I wasn't expecting the injection to be lethal :)
...and well done on catching up on the comments! I was reading through them yesterday after I spotted you'd started, and then there were more this morning as well :)
The injection
Professoress (she insisted) Styles set the boxy white container down on the front bench. The lecture hall was full, with students standing in the aisles, sitting on spare chairs they'd squeezed in at the back and in one case perched on the dado rail that ran around the hall at head height. There was a low hubbub of noise as people speculated on what the Professoress would be demonstrating, and there was a general miasma of humans who didn't wash quite often enough. Which became noticeably worse when the frisbee team trouped in and sat down on the floor in front of the front seats.
"This is busy," said the Professoress looking about her. She pushed her tortoiseshell-framed glasses (rumour had it that they were made from real tortoiseshell after the turtle-soup-incident) back up her nose and wrinkled her nose like a small dog sniffing something unpleasant. "Humming, almost." She showed no sign that she might have been presenting the room with a gentle double entrendre.
The room quietened down, only the regular, synchronised breathing of the students breaking the silence. To someone walking past at that moment it must have sounded like the lecture hall itself was breathing.
"Right," said the Professoress. She pointed at the white box. "This is a microwave, as some of you will have already surmised. It is however, a prototype; it is the world's first fuel-injection microwave!"
A tentative hand raised in the sea of students. "Yes?" snapped the Professoress, her hand hovering over the on button.
"What does fuel-injection actually mean here, please? Surely you're not running a petrol-driven microwave?"
The Professoress smiled thinly, her lips pressed together so tight they were white.
"Well," she said. "I did build one of those, for use in countries where the electricity supply is unreliable. They're a best-seller in parts of Africa. However for this one I looked at the fuel we use to generate the microwaves."
"You're injecting... fissionable material..."
"Into a strong toroidal magnetic field, yes." The Professoress smiled a genuine smile this time. "You have fifteen seconds to remove anything metallic; when I turn this on the magnetic field strength will briefly be strong enough to rip electrons from heavy atoms. So far it's not pulled filling from teeth though."
There was a tinkling that crescendoed briefly as people frantically pulled off rings, necklaces and removed piercings or tried to get out of the room. Then the Professoress's hand hit the on button, and there was a bang like a god's motorcar backfiring.
"Perfect!" said the Professoress happily, looking at a perfectly cooked audience. The smell of cooked meat filled the air, replacing the earlier miasma.
Morganna - agree with Greg, this is some excellent work.
Greg - and here I am, once again attempting to catch up on comments...
Some great lines in this one, with my favorites being '... it must have sounded like the lecture hall itself was breathing' and '... there was a bang like a god's motorcar backfiring'.
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