Wednesday November 10th, 2021

The exercise:

Write about: a little help from my friends.

2 comments:

Greg said...

I think this is slightly more like 'without a little help from my friends' but it's certainly what your prompt inspired. It started off as being an idea about dressing-up (with a little help etc.) and went a little sideways. As usual :-D

With a little help from my friends
The teachers at WrongStart, Sixticton's premier pre-school, school and college facility (who were being sued over what they felt was an overliteral interpretation of their motto, Give me your child and they are mine forever) were gathered in the car-park. It was a little before eight in the morning, when the parents would start arriving to drop off the children, and the staffroom where they usually met was full of balloons and costume props.
"Are we sure this is a good idea?" asked Steve. He was partly clad in an Iron-man costume and was hopping around on one leg trying to get his foot into another piece of it. His underpants were on display and he was feeling embarrassed. "I mean, are the kids really old enough to understand a Marvel-theme day?"
"They're not goats," said Marjorie, primly. She was the school's home economics teacher but had views on language that weren't helped by the state's prescription that all children be bilingual. In her view, everyone else should be made to learn English. "They are mini-mes if you must be informal."
"I hope to several gods that there are no mini-yous," muttered a voice behind her, and she whirled. Finding no obvious culprit she glowered at the other staff members in general, and then turned back. Steve managed to get the rest of his costume on and heaved a huge sigh.
"Who are you supposed to be?" he asked.
"She-hulk," said Marjorie, who weighed a little under 60kg and sometimes had to ask the student's to pick up bags of flour and sugar for her. "Pre-transformation, naturally."
"You mean," said Emma, "that you couldn't be bothered to dress up and just came in your ordinary clothes?"
"How dare you!"
"How dare you? Everyone here has made an effort, and even if the kids -- oh do excuse me, I mean children -- don't have a clue why they're dressed up, their parents enjoy it and they're paying for it all."
"I have made an effort! You just don't appreciate the subtlety of it!"
Emma raised her eyebrows and managed to peer down the length of her nose at Marjorie, who snorted with derision and turned her back on her.
"Guys?" said Steve. "Oh, I guess I mean Maxi-mes, don't I? Anyway, I think there might have been a mix up."
The parents had finally started arriving in the carpark and to the teachers's perplexity, every child emerging from a car was dressed as a Dalmatian puppy.

Marc said...

Greg - lol, I look forward to reading this one after your opening comment...

Hah, poor Steve, having to get into costume outside. At least he managed to get into it before the kids... children arrived. And it's a minor miracle nobody has found a way to get rid of Marjorie by this point...