Wednesday October 21st, 2009

The exercise:

Welcome to the 500th day in a row of Daily Writing Practice. I'd like to mark the occasion by... carrying on as usual. That number up there is just going to continue to get bigger and bigger and I'm not planning on celebrating every milestone.

Though I'll admit that 500 is a very pretty number.

Anyway, the prompt, as hinted at yesterday, is: stiff upper lip.

Why did I think it was so funny at the time? Because I had just got home from a trip to the dentist to get three fillings done and my upper lip was frozen. Yes, I am quite creative, thank you for noticing.

Mine:

Ever since the operation all his smiles were halved - not in number, but in appearance. The doctors had told him that the chance of nerve damage was insignificant, that they had performed the procedure thousands upon thousands of times without incident.

But then, he had never been a very lucky man. He should have known, he realized afterward. If someone was going to find the needle in the ten acre wide haystack by stepping on it, he was the guy.

Knowing this did nothing to change the fact that his upper lip would never move again; that all his kisses would be only half felt; and that the jokes would follow him for the rest of his life.

As he set the timer on the explosive strapped to the chest of the struggling surgeon, he wasn't sure this would make much of a difference either. But as he tightened the duct tape around the wrists and feet of all the assistants and office staff that had so cheerfully greeted him on the fateful morning of his accident, he decided that it was worth a shot.