The exercise:
Write something that has to do with: silver.
Lots more fun was had this afternoon at our second birthday party for a three year old in two days. Though Max consumed far too much sugar, to the point that bedtime tonight was an utter gong show.
I am quite ready for a quiet day tomorrow, and hopefully he will be too.
Mine:
The job was not an especially exciting one. The payment was borderline uninspiring. But times were tough, without question. In an ideal world I would have taken a pass and never given it a second thought.
Unfortunately, my world back then was far from ideal.
So I agreed to do it. Took about a week to figure out the logistics. Another couple of days to get everything in place. The job itself should have only taken about ten minutes.
Should have.
I guess they just plain old forgot to tell me that the statue they wanted me to steal was made of pure silver, meaning it weighed nearly five hundred pounds.
Like I said, those were some kind of tough times for me...
3 comments:
You're just not happy with a birthday celebration unless they last at least 48 hours, are you? It must be a Canadian thing... ;-) It occurred to me while reading about your effort to get Max to go to bed and sleep that we should theme birthdays like wedding anniversaries: the first could be be "Paracetamol" since that birthday is always more for the parents than the child. The second could be "Plastic" for toy safety, and, inspired by you, the third could be "Sugar". And I suspect there will be a strong teenage lobby for the 17th being "Car".
Heh, I think your narrator got lucky myself, there are plenty of heavier silvery metals out there! Still, he sounds like he's had an interesting life and problem has more stories to tell, so I shall look forward to hearing about them!
Silver
The moon hung low and orange in the sky like a misplaced pumpkin. It was very appropriate for Hallowe'en. Small children scurried about the streets of Sixticton dressed as their heroes, largely shapeless colourless blobs that made hooting noises. Connie, Sixticton's premier librarian, was dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein from the original 1935 picture and standing on the steps of her town house holding a large bowl of candy. She'd refilled it three times already; being childless herself and loathing the way parents treated the library as a daycare centre she was filling the kids sacks with as much candy as she thought they could carry. More than one child left her stoop dragging their candy-sack behind them, their eyes aglow with the thought of all that treasure.
The skinny thug, wearing only gold lamé y-fronts, stopped in front of her and flourished a piece of paper. She blinked, and then wished she hadn't.
"Can you help me, miss?" he said, his voice plaintive.
"What is it?" she said. She managed to keep her eyes firmly on his face. "And who are you dressed as." Please don't say Hugh Hefner, she thought.
"Rocky, miss. From the Rocky Horror Picture Show."
"Oh!" That made a horrible kind of sense. She looked at the paper. "Oh, is this for the treasure hunt?" Sixticton's council ran a treasure hunt for the adults to make the traipsing from door to door more interesting.
"Yes miss. I've got most of them," – they were all semi-cryptic clues to somewhere – "but I'm stuck on number 4."
She read it quickly: Singular winter warmer with chopped livers beating out hops.
"Well," she said, ignoring where the thug was now scratching. "Winter warmers would be long john, so if they're singular they'd just be 'long john'. Chopped is an anagram indicator, and livers is obviously an anagram of silver. Beating could be knocking I suppose, and out is another anagram indicator, so hops will be an anagram of shop. Altogether you get –"
"The Long John Silver Knocking Shop!" The thug was delighted. "Thanks miss!"
"You live and learn," murmured Connie, wondering what the Knocking Shop would make of 'Rocky' when he turned up.
So thin and papery, almost
Iridescent seeds on
Long, thin stems
Very fragile looking. Somehow it stands against
East Idaho winds and
Reaches for the sky.
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Silver dollar bush: native(?) shrub that grows in this area -- never saw it before I moved here. People use the stems with seeds as interest in fall/winter floral arrangements.
Greg - in my defense, this was a party for a different three year old. She just happened to be born four days after Max and this year her parents happened to decide to have her party the day after his. That's all :P
Hah, I like Connie's method of revenge on the parents of her city. And that is quite the costume our dear skinny thug has chosen. I hope that it's not too cold a night...
Morganna - that is a lovely ode to the bush. I think if you paired it with a photo or painting of the bush you'd have something quite special.
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