The exercise:
Write four lines of prose about: old habits.
Managed to get out of the bakery by quarter to five today, so that was an improvement over yesterday. Still figuring out ways to be more efficient around closing time.
It got up over ten degrees this afternoon. More of that, please.
Mine:
I still think of you when I'm having a tough day. And when I think of you, I reach for the phone. And as I'm dialing your number, without having to pause to think how it goes, even for a single second, I start humming our song.
And when your new husband answers the phone, in your new home, in your new life, I don't bother to explain to him just how hard of an old habit you are to break - he already knows that for himself.
I do like that you're constantly looking for ways to improve processes and be more efficient. I think it's a hangover from your Project Management days :)
ReplyDeleteThe contrast between your first and second paragraphs is nicely done; the first suggests one way doing things, the second another. But then bringing it all back together at the end kind of humanizes everthing, for all there's a subtle suggestion that this woman might be something very odd indeed...!
Old habits
"There are holes in this, and they... they look like they're from cigarette burns! And this discoloration looks suspiciously like bleaching, like you might get from... oh, I don't know, a drug obsession."
"Just shut up and put it on! Yes these are old habits, but we're not going to get into the Nunnery at Our Lady of Particular Sorrows and see Shanghai Suzie if she can see us coming, Ben."
[In case you're curious, the fifth line of this would have been, "And why are we always chasing after that old whore anyway, Red?"]
Greg - yeah, maybe so.
ReplyDeleteThank you! And, well, she's definitely got her hooks into both of these men - one currently and the other in the past. I wonder how much longer the current husband will remain... current.
Hah! I appreciate the throwback to How the Best, the name of the nunnery, and the clever take on the prompt. And that would have been a perfectly suitable fifth line, had it been allowed by the prompt :P