Monday February 15th, 2016

The exercise:

Write about something or someone that is: frenetic.

Had fun with Max at a very busy soccer class this afternoon. Not that there were a lot of kids there, it's just that his coach put them through a lot of drills this time. At least that's the way it seemed to me.

Things have been pretty quiet on the job search front recently. Hoping that changes soon.

Mine:

"He's like a puppy dog, coming home for the very first time."

"That's not very nice."

"Nice? No. Accurate? Yeah."

"I suppose."

"You suppose? We're lucky he hasn't broken anything or ruined any of our carpets."

"Yeah... right..."

"No. Don't tell me."

"I'm not telling you anything! There's nothing to tell."

"Good."

"... but, on a completely unrelated note, you might want to stay out of the upstairs closet."

3 comments:

morganna said...

They think they can leave me alone, do they? Well, this dog will show them.

Eat this, chew that
Leap at the counter
Swipe down the recycling
A glorious mess!

Greg said...

@Morganna: lovely images! I can quite hear this as performance poetry too. I'm also delighted to say that chihuahuas are too small to be able to make too much mess when left on their own... but they try!

@Marc: good luck with the job hunt, though you might find yourself caretaking the community centre for a week if you wish too hard! If there weren't a lot of kids at the practice the coach might have drilled them for longer because he/she/it thought that playing a game might tire them too quickly? Or perhaps they're determined to get them so drilled that they win everything easily :)
And... well, at least your dog went in a closet where you can close the door and pretend it never happened :)

Frenetic
The doorbell rang; soft chimes intoned dully and the stained glass in the leaded windows was rattled softly by a heavy bass note. Half-way through Diana turned her head a quarter turn and looked indirectly at David. He turned his head a quarter-turn too. She mouthed, "the funeral march?" and he nodded.
The door didn't open until the chimes had stopped.
On the other side was a young man, possibly not yet out of his teens, wearing regulation beige pyjamas with his identity number stencilled in large black numerals up either leg. He ran a hand through tousled brown hair, rubbed it over his face smearing mucus from his nose across his cheek, and blinked at them. "Whuffle?" he said, though it might have been a laconic sneeze.
"Diana," said David, pointing.
"David," said Diana, pointing back.
"We're here to talk about your episode," they said together, eyes firmly focused forwards, looking an inch to each side of the kid's ears. He shuddered, vibrating from side to side as though trying to get into both lines of sight simultaneously.
"I was ill," he said.
"You were frenetic," they said together. "Shall we go inside?"
"I'm already inside," he said, a token protest. He made no move to stop them as they raised their arms, scooped him up by catching him under the armpits, and walked him backwards into the flat. The hallway was narrow and dark, lit only by the light from the open door behind them, and at the end it opened into a bathroom. They dumped him in the bath, where his feet stuck over the side and his head rested against the tiled wall. Diana sat down on the closed lid of the toilet seat and David leaned against the crazed, toothpaste spattered bathroom mirror.
"You were frenetic," said Diana.
"I wasn't," said the kid. "I was ill. Frenetic would be–"
"Illegal." All three spoke the word together. "Indicative," said David,
"Of drug usage," said Diana.
"Specifically Bugaija," they said together.
"I wasn't frenetic," said the kid. Things went bad then.

Marc said...

Morganna - heh, that sounds about right for a dog left unattended. For more than five minutes.

Greg - nah, they don't actually get to play a game at this stage. It's all drills, working on controlling their bodies and hand eye coordination and stuff like that. It just felt, last week, like he was cramming a lot of different things into the time we had, compared to usual.

And, for the record, what I was writing about was not a dog ;)

Fascinating scene you've shared with us. I thought the paragraph starting with "We're here to talk about your episode"... was especially fantastic. This is an intriguing world and I'd be happy to have a return visit.