The exercise:
Let us see what we can do with: results.
I got my blood test results back on Monday, and everything looked good. Well, my 'bad' cholesterol was a little high, but my 'good' cholesterol was so high that it more than made up for it. My doctor was actually rather impressed, as apparently it's more typical for men to have lower 'good' levels.
Anyway, the overall message was to keep doing what I'm doing, which is always nice to hear.
Mine:
These were not the results I had been searching for. Looking at the documents and equipment for the tenth time this hour, I cannot fathom where things went wrong.
The phone on my desk begins to ring and I let it. Distraction is not a luxury I can afford right now. Not when there should be a bottle of bluish-green liquid sitting in front of me, but instead there's... this.
"Aren't you going to answer that?" Michelle asks. That's her name. She's been quite adamant on that point.
I have no idea what my blood cholesterol levels are like, and I'm not sure a doctor's ever checked them for me. I'm kind of curious now. Your levels sound pretty good though, and it's definitely nice to come away from the doctor having passed your test :)
ReplyDeleteMichelle seems like a fascinating result to achieve from an experiment, and I'm definitely curious to read more about this... happening.
Results
"They're Results," said Lionel, carefully pronouncing the capital R. He waved a hand at what, to me, looked like a long curving line of catapults pointed at the city. I said so.
"Well yes," he said. "Of course they are. Don't you know what Results are?"
"The final happening in a chain of related events?" My grandmother used to beat me for smart-alec comments like that.
"Hah. Well these are Results," and there was that capital R again, "that is to say, Rescue catapults, only that's too long so we say Results instead. They're perfectly ranged and targetted on the City ER department. You load the injured person into the cup," he pointed, "and launch them straight to the ER. 14.1 seconds to cover nearly five miles."
My jaw droppped, literally, and I nearly bit my tongue trying to close it quickly again.
"You see?" said Lionel as a screaming woman with broken ribs was forcibly herded into a catapult cup. "With the Results you get results so much quicker!"
marc, nice twist.
ReplyDeletegreg, too clever. how do you come up with this stuff?
mine...Results
She looked at the noticeboard and saw her name there near the top of the list.
Yippee! She had a top chance of getting into med school. Her dreams were coming true.
She got into Harvard, excelled in her residency and did her consultancy in neurology at St Thomas in London. She ranked amongst the world’s finest brain surgeons, married a law professor, bought a penthouse in Boston, had three kids, all doctors, and retired on the French Riviera.
When she died there was a state funeral to commemorate all the good work she had done. The kids inherited the penthouse and the husband kept the French villa.
............
She looked at the noticeboard and saw her name there near the bottom of the list. A bunch of Ds, one E and one C. She flunked out. Maybe she should’ve stayed off the dope and studied harder. Even her weekends at MacDonalds were on the way out as younger kids took her place. There was no college for her. Check-out chick at Walmart was the next big break for her. She fell pregnant to her loser BF and then ended up marrying an alcoholic who fathered two of her five kids. She didn’t know who fathered the other three. They divorced after five years and she struggled on as a single mom with two jobs to pay the mortgage but the bank foreclosed on her loan during the GFC and she lost the house.
She ended up as a bag lady when the kids left home, half of them left as street kids, joining gangs in the rough neighbourhood where they were born.
She died in the gutter, alone and penniless, her only possession was an empty bottle of vodka in a brown paper bag. When the police found her they had to prize her cadavarous fingers off of it.
There was no funeral, just a body bag in the morgue. The cost of burial was a debt the oldest child inherited.
They say life can turn on a dime.
Maybe the result of your life just depends on your results.
“Sarah, you do a good job of getting your ideas on paper but you simply must learn proper use of commas.” Mrs. Abernathy said disappointedly.
ReplyDeleteSarah rolled her eyes and sighed, “You’ve said that like a hundred times. I don’t see what the big deal is. A comma is just an extra smudge of ink. It’s stupid that we even have to use them.”
Unfazed Mrs. Abernathy left her seat and walked to the board. On the board she drew a picture of a building; a combination restaurant and gas station. Under the picture she wrote a sample sentence. Eat here and get gas. Then she wrote it again using a comma. Eat here, and get gas.
“Do you see the difference between those two sentences?”
Sarah rolled her eyes again “Yeah one uses a comma and the other doesn’t.”
Mrs. Abernathy turned to face the class.
“Can anyone else tell me what the differences between these two sentences?”
Josh Harrington pressed his hand to his lips and blew. The resulting noise sounded similar to a whoopee cushion.
“Josh! The sound effects are not necessary, none the less you are correct.”
Greg - I shall keep that in mind and see if I can find more inspiration for Michelle and my narrator :)
ReplyDeleteThat is a fine patient delivery system. I hope you've patented it!
Writebite - that's a stark contrast between the two outcomes, makes it very effective.
Krystin - hah, that's an excellent example :)