The exercise:
Happy Halloween! To celebrate, write something that takes place in: Candyland.
Spent a good portion of the day getting the garden ready for winter. We need to plow it all in and plant our cover crops, but first we need to get everything harvested and cleaned up. Yesterday we hauled out all the potatoes and now I'm working on getting the (far too many) tomato stakes out. Hopefully that'll get finished tomorrow.
Oh, pirate picture. Right. Here you go:
I made the label on the bottle in Word. In case you can't read it all, it says:
One-Eyed Jack's
Bathtub Rum
X X X
Who needs both yer eyes
when yer blind drunk?
I'm a classy guy.
Mine:
There are no veggies to be found,
Nothing green comes out of the ground,
All flavours come from metal cans,
In sugary sweet Candyland.
All its citizens are toothless,
For the dentists are quite ruthless;
Nutritional labels are banned,
In this magical Candyland.
The worries of old age are gone,
Swept off by rivers of bonbons;
Soon these castles will turn to sand,
And no one cares in Candyland.
Looks like pirate time was good fun!
ReplyDeleteCandyland
The ground was soft, like the pink marshmallows it was made of. Chocolate dripped from the roof, softened under the sun's heat. The windows were made of thin toffee, the colour of honey, with a taste that was similar, at least that's what Henry thought when he tested the theory.
He was due to meet Janice here around noon, but he couldn't tell the time as the sun dial, also made of chocolate, had melted. He had to guess. He had no idea what was keeping her.
Meanwhile, Janice had stopped to eat the daisies and, instead of smelling the roses well, you know, she ate them. Food dye in pinks and yellows adorned her mouth and cheeks. She was a messy eater. She was also fat, no wonder, her indulgences were never curbed here in Candyland.
Her exploits made her late for her romantic rendezvous with Henry. She stooped to pick one more flower and then... A noise from the forest caught her attention... Was that a wolf's face she saw? Surely not, that would be too cliched... A mixture of fairy tales ...
But then...yes, it was a wolf! Janice started to run but her fat legs would not carry her...
The wolf caught up and what was to follow was not a pretty sight! Let's just say it was more than pink and yellow food dye that graced Candyland hereabouts.
Henry decided to look for Janice, taking the buttery yellow popcorn road she usually used. He stopped dead in his tracks, gazing and gasping aloud at the scene before him... A selection of licorice all sorts had a smaller colour pallette than did this ...this...mess!
A heartbroken Henry walked off in dismay. He knew then never to take the wonderfully innocent looking panoply of Candyland for granted again, and he looked over his shoulder just in case ...
@World of experience: this is a great little story; it's crying out to be a little longer and have a little more detail lavished on it I think! And your death scene was much more tasteful than mine or Marc's would have been :)
ReplyDelete@Marc: You make a pretty convincing pirate! I'd certainly call out the redcoats and dogs and start hunting you down if I saw you :) And I see the gardening's doing you good... you look a sight more muscular than you did a few years back in Vancouver!
The last line of each verse of your poem does a really good job of dismissing the previous three, building up and dashing the reader's expectations quite cruelly. It's very effective!
Candyland
The talking liquorice allsort was a man in a suit; Margie saw that straight away. When he tried to bend down to talk to her, his suit squishing out in odd ways as the foam resisted, she stamped on his foot.
"I don't talk to strangers!" she shouted.
The liquorice allsort dropped his tray of candy-canes and fell over. Margie's younger brother Daniel saw the canes and tried to pick one up, so she grabbed his wrist.
"No Danny," she said. "They're sweets from a stranger. They'll be poisoned."
"Who's poisoned what now?" said a tall thin woman who'd been listening to a cell phone in the queue behind them.
"Someone poisoned something?" said the man next to her, who kept sighing whenever he looked at the child they were with.
"There's poison?" said a woman behind them, who had four children in tow, all older than Margie. "What's poison? Are the sweets poisoned?"
"The sweets are poisoned?" shouted someone further back still.
"The sweets are poisoned!" shouted the woman on the cell-phone.
The liquorice allsort was rolling around the ground making funny noises, so Margie pointed at him.
"Oh my god, they've poisoned all the sweets!" screamed cell-phone woman. "We have to get out of here!"
As the crowd turned and stampeded, screaming hysterically, Margie's dad leaned down to her.
"We didn't even get inside Candyland this year," he breathed. "Just what is your problem with this place?"
Greg...ha! A sequel to my Candyland might be in order eh.
ReplyDeleteYours reminds me of vacation...
So do you have plans for NaNoWriMo this year? I think I'll probably be a bit too busy with that to do a lot of participation on here for a little while. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteWorld of Exp. - it was indeed :)
ReplyDeleteVery nicely done. Panoply is a great word!
Greg - gardening is doing me good, though I wouldn't have thought it showed in that picture. Either way, thanks!
The human chain of communication was perfectly done and made me smile :)
Drake - no worries about being too busy to take on the prompts, but I hope you'll be able to drop in and let us know how it's going for you!
Best of luck :)