The exercise:
On Location Week continues with something that takes place at: the paint shop.
Feel free to two haiku them or not. I kinda skipped haiku, prose, and poetry days last week but if you're not trying to tie a story together this week then it should be easier to manage them this go around.
4 comments:
I'm traveling the rest of the week -- see you Tuesday!
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Purples and pinks
Aquas, greens, and
Indigos. Every single color you can imagine -- and some you can
Not -- scattered about the
Shop, ready to add eccentricity to the world.
@Morganna: enjoy the travel! I hope you're going somewhere nice. I really like this poem, I feel it's something that Red 5 would say, or think -- though Marc's the expert there. However... is the acrostic deliberately missing a T?
At the paint shop
Red 5 sniffed the air as he walked down the darkened corridor of the old school building. Lockers still lined the walls of the corridor but now they were larger, often the size of five or six school lockers, and bore stencilled numbers, presumably so they could be rented out to the artists in residence. The tiled floor, checkered in black and red, was badly illuminated by the light at the outside door, but what Red could see suggested that someone had dragged something heavy -- probably stone for sculpting -- across it. He walked along, part of him comparing this to the school he'd gone to (well, three days out of five at least) when he was a teenager. At a cross-junction he got his phone out, and used the torch function to find some guide-signs on the wall. His options were "Fine Arts", "Sculpture and Metalwork", "Crafts and Tatting" and "VIPs". Since he'd come from the VIPs direction he chose Fine Arts.
Barely halfway along the new corridor he smelled the familiar scent of turpentine, and checked the nearest doors. Both looked like paint shops -- studios of artists who turned out pictures-on-demand for high-street home furnishing stores and Etsy-sellers. One room had four canvases of wolves howling at a full moon; identical at a casual glance. The other had several copies of the Haywain. He carried on, resisting the urge to whistle something by Amber Run.
The next door looked promising: not only was it locked and a blind drawn down 80% of the window, but peering in he could see nothing: the windows were clearly covered by closed blinds as well. He rattled the door -- it was loose in the frame -- and decided that it was quiet enough in here that he could spend a little longer. Lockpicks were slid out of a hidden pocket inside his sleeve cuff and the door lock yielded almost immediately. He pushed the door open, and immediately the electronic beeping of an alarm started up.
Red 5 moved with speed and precision, abandoning the door as it was and racing back the way he'd come. By the time he reached the outer door the alarm had stopped beeping and a siren was blaring. He twisted the door-handle, and the door refused to move. He twisted again, both directions just in case he'd picked the wrong one in his hurry, but the door was now locked.
Guard patrol he thought, half his mind occupied with what he was going to do now. They must have gone outside to patrol and now they're back in. So that means they're going to be responding quickly to that noise.
He tried the first studio door and it opened without changing the alarm tone. He pressed it quietly shut and looked around -- the sculptor's room with the bust of the ex-Mayor. A mean smile played over his lips, as he reasoned that the guards were probably hunting for a break-in, not a break-out....
The unfinished bust smashed through the window and rolled on the ground outside, crunching as though bits were breaking off. Red darted through after it, tucking himself him tightly to avoid catching anything on broken shards of glass left in the frame, and ran straight to the fence. He tucked and rolled as he jumped down, and was already in the shadows of the closest buildings, finding handhold to climb back up to the roofs, as a lone dog hit the chainlink and started barking.
Morganna - I hope your travels were enjoyable, wherever you ended up going :)
Love your final line!
Greg - man, another prompt happily lending itself to the continuation of this tale. So pleased it worked out like this.
Bonus points for the Amber Run reference :)
Ah, jeez, Red. Always finding trouble, that one is. Fantastic writing and descriptions of the setting, by the way. Felt like I was right there with him. The tension was making me read it quickly, so I had to go back and reread parts of it again.
Prompt inspiration:
With the parks and washrooms being relatively slow at this time of year, there's a chance to do extra things before tourist season ramps up. Things like repainting washroom floors.
I ended up repainting two sets of floors (men's and women's sides at Lions Park, where I often take the boys, and Cottonwood, where we take the boys when we don't feel like going across town to Lions). Tammy repainted some doors and doorframes as well, and now they all look much nicer. For now, at least.
So yeah, that's where at the paint shop came from.
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