Friday June 3rd, 2016

The exercise:

Write four lines of prose about: the long day.

I picked berries for approximately ten hours today. I feel like that's longer than a reasonable person would consider wise.

It's going to be a busy market tomorrow, between strawberries (and the customers returning for them) and having 25 crates (about 500 pounds) of the first sweet cherries of the season. I'm driving up with Adam first thing, then Kat and Becky are coming up together with the babies, and Kat's parents are coming with the toddlers as well.

Should be quite the gong show, all told. I'm looking forward to it.

Mine:

The sun is easing its way below the horizon, having finished its work for the day. Lucky bastard.

No such good fortune for sorry old me. I gotta keep searching through this damned haystack...

2 comments:

Greg said...

That market sounds like quite the family outing! And with all those strawberries and cherries your stall is just going to be shades of red... I hope you remember your camera to get a picture of it all!
Well, searching that haystack certainly sounds like a long day. I like your narrator's feelings about the sun too :) Let's hope your day is shortened tomorrow by everything selling out by 11am again.

The long day
The sun hadn't set since he'd arrived on the island, and he was starting to feel a little bit irrational. He'd built a hut to protect his cooking fire what felt like yesterday, and of course it had filled with smoke. He should have known that, but the sun never moved in the sky, even when he screamed at it. He was chewing his fingers now, and wondering if it was really the sun, or just a lightbulb over a cage in a laboratory somewhere.

Marc said...

Greg - yeah, every year the first cherry market is the single busiest, craziest, most financially rewarding market of the year. This one was no different, but it was great to have so much support with us.

You've placed your character in a highly unpleasant situation here. I wasn't sure what was going on at first, but I think he might have it right at the end there...