Write about: the seizure.
I took Max grocery shopping this afternoon and before I'd finished parking the car he was going off about a big red shopping cart. I was like, no, the big carts here are yellow. They're supposed to have two steering wheels each but actually have a grand total of one between them. Max only ever wants to use the one with the steering wheel.
As you may imagine, he is not the only toddler in town who feels that way.
This means that we only get the cart he wants when our timing is very fortunate - for both of us. Trust me, I may hate pushing that monstrosity around the grocery store but I'd still rather deal with that than deal with Max when we have to use a different shopping cart.
Anyway. Turns out, he was right. The store has replaced the two crappy shopping carts with two new ones - a red 'firetruck' cart and a black 'police car' cart. We got to use the red one today and Max was... deliriously happy about it:
I have no idea how much these things cost (I can't imagine all that much) but a) it was long overdue, and b) I can assure them that it was money very well spent.
Mine:
Carter was not a stupid man. He knew that the line of work he was in could lead to a bank or the government seizing his assets one day. Likely sooner than later, should history prove to be any kind of teacher at all.
So he was careful. He stashed cash in the most unlikeliest of places, both around his mansion and elsewhere. I'd give an example but, you know... urk!
When the end of his time atop the mountain was approaching Carter saw it coming. Very quietly he liquidated all of the major items inside his home. He didn't want to draw suspicion by selling the house itself so he had to eat that loss. The buyer already owned property in the neighborhood - he was just trying to fill up all of the rooms he had - so he didn't mind.
The day before the bank decided to seize all of his assets Carter... vanished. When the work crews arrived to take all of his stuff away they found precisely one item: a cardboard box, sitting in the center of the empty dining hall.
Everyone assumed it was a bomb, so several hours passed before anyone dared to look inside. They did not find explosives. What they found instead was a broken electric toothbrush and a handwritten note which read:
This was the only thing I couldn't sell before I had to leave town on an important business trip. I'm sure one of you poor pricks can make use of it and you're welcome to do so. I won't be returning.
At least, not looking the way I do now.
Be seeing ya, suckers.
3 comments:
Max does, indeed, look deliriously happy in that picture, and I can imagine that the store will have pleased parents no end by replacing the carts with ones with steering wheels :) Do the steering wheels actually do anything, though?
And... so I can see that you're unlikely to buy much produce in a supermarket, but I find it interesting that your picture is taken with an empty cart in front of... the sweet selection. Is that so your diabetes can mock you? ;-)
Carter seems like the careful, thoughtful sort, so I expect that the people wanting to seize his assets are going to be wanting for a long time to come. I like the cardboard box, that's a nice touch. And the hints of Carter's wealth are, I think, much more effective than any description of it would have been. So, a very nicely understated piece today!
The seizure
"Well, she swallowed her tongue, didn't she?" Betty managed to say this in a tone of voice other people reserved for commenting on how the frosting on the cake hadn't quite set before it was moved. As she was second from the front of the queue in the butcher's the rest of the line had no choice but to overhear her, Betty's indoor voice was her outdoor voice, and her shouting-at-people-from-quite-far-away voice too.
"Coo," said Agnes, who was third from the front of the queue and had already produced a list as long as her hand written in her neat Copperplate handwriting. "So what did they do then?"
"Turned her upside down and shook her till it came loose again. All the blood must have been rushing to her head, poor thing. We all thought it was going to be ok then until one of the kids noticed that her glass eye had fallen out and rolled off somewhere. We all had to spent five minutes looking for it, and when they found it one of the chickens had been pecking at it."
There was the noise, somewhere further down the queue, of someone quietly vomiting into a shopping bag. The butcher set a bag of beef mince down on the counter, and leered at the woman at the front of the queue. "Anything else, dear?" he asked.
"Why did the lamb have a glass eye in the first place?" said Agnes. "I mean, that's the kind of thing you forget about, and then you're making a nice brawn and there's this eye peering up at you from out of the broth. That could give you a funny turn, that could."
"Lost an eye when she had the first seizure," said Betty. "The vet reckoned that she'd be happier if she thought she had an eye, even if seemed a bit turned off."
"Was he the one...?"
"Yes. That why they closed the other butcher's down you know. Which is a shame; he did fantastic oxtail."
"Well he would, wouldn't he?" said Agnes, darkly.
"No thank-you," said the woman at the front of the queue. She looked rather pale. "I think... I think I might be sick, actually."
The Seizure
On day,When I was in K5, there was a girl named Taylor. She was weird and had seizures every single day at lunch. Like every single day for the WHOLE YEAR she had seizures at lunch time. When at lunch, usually she would be isolated from everyone because no one wanted to be next to her when she had a seizure. Well on this specific day,the lunch room was packed with a lot of people, so really the only space for me to sit was next to Taylor, so I did so.
I didn't really make eye contact with her because I never really talked to her before so I began holding a conversation with my other friends until...I felt some type of liquid form touching my hand. I turned around immediately and saw Taylor who already had vomited all over the table and was going into a seizure. I was traumatized and didn't know what to do until a teacher pulled me away from the table and took me to a classroom. Taylor rode in the back of the ambulance truck once again...and that was the end of that horrific day.
Greg - no, they do not do anything (other than entertain toddlers). Thank God.
Nah, that's just where we were passing by when it occurred to me to get a picture. At the time I was just thinking to send it to Kat, but it ended up being too good to not share it here :)
Thanks for the kind words on mine!
Agnes and Betty are delightful. To read about. Certainly not to be around. Some great details here. Impossible for me to not laugh at that oxtail bit.
Shifty - hello and welcome to the blog! Thanks for sharing this bit of writing with us.
Jeeze, I cannot imagine living with that sort of condition. Though, equally, it's difficult to think about being a classmate of someone with those kinds of regular seizures. I think you captured it all quite well in your writing.
I hope to see more of your writing here, should you care to share it with us :)
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