Friday July 13th, 2018

The exercise:

Write four lines of prose about something that is: intolerable.

3 comments:

Greg said...

Hmm, so either the wrong decision was made by the people making decisions, or the heat is getting up over the mid-thirties over there.... I'm refusing to guess :)

Intolerable
"Losing twenty children when they're supposed to be learning how to swim is intolerable," said the schools's inspector. His moustache, reminiscent of the sweepings of a barber's floor, quivered aggressively.
"We didn't lose them," said Emma, feeling the need to defend WrongStart, "since we know exactly where they are. They're in the Sixticton cave system, and when the floods subside in three months time we can get them out."

[The rescued Thai boys obviously reminded me of our last visit to WrongStart :)]

Marc said...

Greg - well, it did hit 40 the other day. That wasn't the only source of inspiration for this prompt though.

'... reminiscent of the sweepings of a barber's floor' might be one of your greatest descriptions ever. Top 5, certainly.

g2 (la pianista irlandesa) said...

On the whole, as far as Roz was concerned, elves were insufferable—they always felt the need to take the simplest things Very Seriously, and often they so choked the air with these miasmas of assumed superiority that breathing was intolerable to the point of impossible.

Of course, there were some exceptions—though in her experience they were very few—but she also would never claim to exclude herself from that criticism. Even though she had run away from home and kept her distance from elven populations as much as possible, she was still subject to and a purveyor of some of the culture: the language still often came easier to her than others, the stories and songs still brought some comfort, she still maintained a connection to nature, even if she rolled her eyes at the sighing romanticism people insisted on giving that connection.

But she wholly rejected the veneer of omniscience that her kind was so bent on maintaining—this world would be their home for a few hundred years, give or take, the least anyone could do is show some respect and learn something for once.