The exercise:
It just occurred to me that it has been a very long time since I made use of the continuation prompt. So today each of us gets to continue the story from wherever the previous writer left it. As usual, try to end your section at an interesting point for the next person to carry on from.
In other news, I seem to be having a worse time with this cold than Max (who turned 11 months old today). Which, I suppose, would be my preference.
But I'm about ready to be done with it, thanks.
Mine:
A missed opportunity.
That's what the others wanted to label it. Stick it in a box, wrap a nice bow around it, stuff it somewhere none of us will ever look, and move on. Dust our hands of the matter and turn our collective gaze toward the next project.
I don't see things that way though. I can't. That's not how I operate.
That neatly labelled box? I know exactly where it is. Our mistakes haunt me. They call to me in the middle of the night, begging me to go back and fix them. Set things right. Get the whole group back on track, get us closer to that end goal.
Sleep is impossible for me. Moving on is equally inconceivable. There is an itch between my shoulder blades that lurks just beyond my fingertips while the others just carry on about our business, as though nothing is wrong. It pushes me to the limits of my sanity... and sometimes beyond them.
So I'm doing the only thing I can do: I'm going back to change the ending to this story.
And it all begins with her.
2 comments:
I hope you get over the cold soon, though if it's anything like the one that's going around in London at the moment it'll last for the full 5-9 days (7±2 for colds!) and the congestion will be the worst part of it.
Right, continutaion time. And you've set a scene, but given me little concrete to work with yet. Let's see who "her" is then!
Continuation
She was a commerical lawyer when I met her, analysing and writing contracts for a big distribution firm. She was with Damon, you remember Damon? He fell off a buliding in Singapore a month ago while BASE jumping and his parachute didn't open. But back then she was sat at a table in a bar, the kind of place where they only sell wine by the bottle and with food. He had a bottle of the house red in one hand, a bowl of olives in the other, and she was eating Oeufs a la tripe with a Sancerre.
He waved when he saw me, and when I saw her I couldn't help but go over. He made drunken introductions, and she smiled at me in a way that said, "Can you get rid of him?" So I told him that Abi wanted to talk to him, which sobered him up a little and had him running out to the back, and I sat myself down and picked up her fork and started eating.
"You're forward," she said. "That's inveiglement and theft."
I paused, uncertain, and she laughed. "Oh, carry on," she said. "I just needed something because you can't buy the wine by itself. She stuck her hand out. "Let me introduce myself."
Greg - yeah, I did leave that pretty open ended. I was curious to see where it might go from there.
... and I quite like where you chose to take it. I enjoyed the reference to Damon and his fate, which had me wondering *why* his chute didn't open :)
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