Wednesday September 16th, 2015

The exercise:

Write about something that is: tiny.

A quick hello and welcome to the blog to all the new writers who dropped in today. I'm currently terribly behind on responding to comments but I do promise to get to you all eventually.

Becky's mom is here for a visit until the end of September and Max spent this afternoon playing with Natalie under her watchful eye. It was very nice to get a break and to have a chance to do something on my own.

That something else ended up being sleeping most of my afternoon away. Which was not the plan. But it turned out to be pretty great.

Mine:

They are not obvious. In appearance, at least. Their handiwork? Undeniably more so.

I have felt their pull. Been held in their fierce little clutches. Their strength is... magnificent.

One might believe that they should be easily overpowered. They are so much smaller than us, after all. It should not even be a contest, truly.

And yet we have all been rendered powerless by the innumerable, invisible, tiny hands that keep us in bed long past the hour we had meant to rise.

2 comments:

Greg said...

I still reckon you've decided you're actually a pensioner, now you're having all these afternoon naps. But then you're looking pretty good for a pensioner, so maybe there's method in your madness. Maybe :-P
Heh, I like you description of your reason for staying in bed, or wherever it was you fell asleep, it's imaginative and evocative. But it's still not excusing you!

Tiny
"They called him Tiny, you know?" Betty picked up a set of scales from the shelf in the kitchenware shop. A young girl sat alone behind the counter on a high stool, looking nervous. Agnes and Betty might be elderly women, but in her experience it was the ones who didn't look like trouble who caused the most trouble.
"Because he was enormous? That's how it usually works on those kind of teams, isn't it?" Agnes scratched at the non-stick coating on a frying pan experimentally, peeling up a strip of it. She put the pan back on the shelf with a sniff.
"Chess teams, dear?"
"Communal showers, heavy drinking, running naked around supermarkets at closing time... we don't get enough of that any more, you know." Agnes sighed, a little misty eyed, and dropped a porcelain egg-cup. Luckily it bounced, but she left it on the floor.
"I think you might be thinking of rugby teams, though my second husband's chess team did get a bit spirited at Easter once," said Betty. She held up something corkscrewed. "What vegetable do you think this is for? Anyway, he was on the chess team, and they called him Tiny on account of his tiny brain."
"Cardoons, I should think," said Agnes. "I thought chess players were supposed to be clever?"
"You'll never render bacon fat in a pan that fussy," said Betty, picking up a coddling-pan. "Where's the cast-iron in this place? Well yes, but it turns out that single-minded can work out just as well. He used to terrify his opponents so much that they'd resign after 20 minutes just to not have to sit at the same board as him."
"How'd he get a brain so small anyway?" asked Agnes. "Here, there's a mucky calendar here!" She held up a calendar of famous chefs in the kitchen, each mostly undressed but carefully positioned behind kitchen equipment to suggest rather than reveal.
"He had a tiny willy," said Betty cooing at the calendar. "The doctor's gave him something to fix that, but the see-saw law applied, apparently, and it shrunk the other end as much as it grew the one."
"Coo," said Agnes.

Marc said...

Greg - method? No. Exhaustion? Yup.

But yes, at least I did manage to sleep in bed this time, not on the couch.

That is quite the kitchenware shop. And quite the tale of Tiny! I'm not sure I'd want to play chess against him either.