Write on Wednesday - Small Expectations

From Ink Paper Pen...
This week's writing prompt is:
Imagine yourself as tiny as your thumb.Where would you live? What would you do?
...and here's what I imagine would happen to me!

Small Expectations


Nobody else notices.
Not even me at first.

I mean, that's a huge serviette holder, I tell myself. HUGE.

It's one of those things, those mundane objects, so mundane that it's been chosen by a small town to be made into a giant statue in the utter conviction that no other town would care less to make a giant serviette holder.

We're home to the Giant Serviette Holder. We are unique!

So that theory lasts as long as it takes me to realise I'm analysing the Giant Serviette Holder from where I sit on the fat lip of the Giant Coffee Cup. Same town. The same cafeteria. Yep, even the same table. Home to the Giant Coffee Cup.

I'm blinking, finally, but perhaps over-staring. If you stare at something hard enough, does it just...seem awfully big?

I look down to where a bacon strip extends for half a mile, a pink undulating road crisp with boulders of salt and streaked with long, luscious gutters of fat. Surely the road less travelled, Mr. Peck. The end of the porky road, like a busted bridge, falls into nothing. Only, off the edge of a white plate.

A pudgy mountain of yellow edges the bacon road, lightly quivering, the way I should be, if it wasn't for my propensity for delayed reaction. Yes, undetectable to the standard human eye, scrambled egg does, in fact, quiver.

How did I become so small? I have a memory from the moment before, the thing I did to cause me to shrink to the size of a fake nail. But alas, for some reason the memory is too big and overwhelming to fit in my tiny brain. I have to make new tiny memories.

I remember the serviette holder. I remember the quivering scrambled egg. This is going to take a long time.

I jump down the side of the coffee cup, practically slashing my face open on the sugar grains lining the saucer. But I'm good at smelling sugar. I can remember something small and inconsequential like that. This isn't sugar.

On the table, over the edge of the amazingly not-all-that-smooth surface of porcelain I'm standing on, I see the sachet, ripped open at one end and lying there like a sleeping bag for a giant.

Salt.

Who's ever put salt in their coffee? Has anyone on the planet even tried it? No, how would a caffeine addict manage that, even with the jitters of a drunken surgeon.

Well, I can't say I remember doing it. But I will say: don't ever, ever, add salt to your coffee!

 

Write on Wednesday - Possessing Beauty

What a wonderful writing prompt we have this week, from InkPaperPen:

Write about a collection. Write about something you or someone you know, collects. Think about the "why" behind the collection - why is it important to collect this particular thing? How does it make the person feel to add another piece to their collection? Is the group of objects there to be seen, to be studied or simply kept together? Write a real life story or a piece of fiction. Wherever the prompt takes you...Keep your post on the short side: up to 500 words OR a 5 minute stream of consciousness exercise. Link your finished piece to the list and begin popping by the other links. Oh, and enjoy!

~

Clippings

Beth crossed her hands neatly and rest them on her scrapbook on the table. Outside, the groundsman pruned the roses that edged the pathways. Beth could see Cherie making her way slowly, but adamantly, toward him on her walker. Beth smiled and reminded herself to look out the window again in a few minutes. She enjoyed watching their exchange.

"I'm sorry to keep you waiting, Beth. It's taking me a long time to do my rounds today."

"That's fine, Kathy." Beth beamed with love, because her patience was one of the many little gifts she gave people, and it made her feel good to give to others.

"Henry believes I have his pills mixed up again. It's made a mess of my morning." Kathy winked.

Beth smiled, knowing Henry was really a favorite with all the nurses at Dalkeith Nursing Home. "I guess we're your children."

"I wouldn't go as far as calling you all kids, but some do test me." Kathy chuckled as she rolled her eyes. "Anyway, here's the scissors and the sticky tape you asked for."

"Thanks, Kathy."

Kathy remained, watching over Beth's shoulder. Meticulously, Beth cut out an article from the morning's newspaper and taped it in a fresh page of her scrapbook.

"Who's Mary Wallace?"

"She's one of my children," said Beth. "Mary always wanted to become a judge, and she's finally been appointed. I'd like to think I played a role in helping her achieve this, but I'm proud of her just the same."

"Wow! May I see your scrapbook? Are these your children?" Kathy flipped through the pages of clippings from over the years. "They all seem so happy and successful."

"I'm proud of each and every one of them." Beth smiled and looked at her fingers as she rubbed them in her lap.

     

"Beth?"

"Yes, Kathy?"

"There's about thirty people in this book. Are you... sure they're all your children?"

"Yes." Beth extended her hands so gracefully and with such conviction in her eyes that Kathy returned the scrapbook without question.

"Okay." Kathy smiled distantly, placed a hand on Beth's shoulder, and walked away.

Beth patted the new clipping down flat and closed her book. With a cheeky grin, she read the cover to herself.

Dalkeith High, class of 1975.

Then she remembered something. Beth looked out the window at the groundsman and Cherie, and began to giggle.

 ~

Write on Wednesdays 24 - choose your own exercise.

Due to my crazy schedule, I've opted for the short and very sweet one-liner exercise!

Write On Wednesdays Exercise - A Great One Liner... This week you need to come up with one good line to describe a part of your day. It can be 'real life' or fiction. But it must tell us 'who did what'. It has to be an amazing line, like a tiny little paper plane that must travel a big distance (figuratively speaking) with only a few folds ... Every word in that line must earn its place, or be cut as excess baggage. Let's get thinking about each sentence as though every word counts, like working one group of muscles to show how much weight they can carry.

And here's my attempt...

Rachel wedged one of her glittered fingernails deep under another, managing to flick unsubstantial cake crumbs to her poodle, while telling me I’d lost my job.

Write on Wednesdays, Exercise 23

We are learning to make fire.

Aron shook his head. It's not fixed, his eyes repeated to me yet again. It was a look that was beginning to define him, here on this moon.

As I stared out the window into the black soup of space, my mind became an instant reflection of it. I shook myself to think clearly.

The atmosphere control has nothing wrong with it - according to the computer's voice as it blurted at us in the wrong language. Lately I've had to reset it to English several times a day, so that both of us can understand when some kind of warning message erupts. I didn't change it this morning. I don't know why, I just got sick of it not working. The broken atmosphere control trumped all other potential disasters on this tiny base. If we can't breathe, we are soup.

The computer blurted another foreign warning in the same soporific tone, as if we are hearing we are about to die from a learn-a-language program. I bashed open the computer panel and yanked the power out for the voice command.

"Say something, Aron."

The stress set in my face like stone, and he knew what I was asking. He smiled for the first time today, but I still could not.

"We are... learning to make fire." Aron beamed with gentle triumph, but then a single, thick tear ran down his cheek.

His words did not do what I had hoped.

I gazed down at my pajamas. Aron looked over at the coffee jug still waiting to be made. Soon, our eyes became drawn to the flickering oxygen guage. We stared, de-focused, as the needle dwindled from orange into red.

Write on Wednesdays, exercise 20 - 'I thought I saw...'

Write On Wednesdays Exercise 20 - Write the words " I thought I saw" at the top of your page. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Write the first words that come into your head after the prompt. Don't take you pen off the page (or fingers off the keyboard). Stop only when the buzzer rings! Do this exercise over and over if you wish. Write beyond 5 minutes if you like, you can link it up as an extra post.

I'm so glad to be able to do another WoW piece. With this one, my aim was to explore self-doubt, which I feel the phrase ‘I thought I saw’ captures so wonderfully. If anyone is keen to find out, I don’t actually know if my character is right or wrong. J 

I was more interested in exploring her emotions and her choice of actions revolving around her self-doubt. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to give me some pointers – even down to punctuation. I haven’t edited this one very well due to time constraints, but I must admit I went beyond the five minutes... tee hee hee!

I thought I saw...

My fingers massaged the inside corners of my eyes. Surely it must be twelve-ish, I thought. Another involuntary giggle escaped my lips - Ted was on fire with his quips and comebacks tonight, and the raucous laughter from the others sparked a second wind in me. I blinked open my eyes to see the wine glass in my hand come slowly into focus. It had been empty for some time; nothing but a faint sticky red ring at the bottom and a few colours of lipstick on the rim.

I put the glass down on the splattered table cloth, stretched my knuckles, and thought about calling a taxi instead of walking home. On the long table, stacked plates were shoved to the side, where bare elbows propped up ruddy, beaming faces. Nina returned to her dining room, tears of laughter streaming down her red-hot cheeks in fine lava trails. All she could do was wave the jug of coffee at us, while she dabbed her eyes with her other sleeve and sighed. She had heard Ted from the kitchen, and she didn't mind at all that her fiancé was poking fun at her again. I thought - this time - though she gives as good as she gets, he was a bit unfair. I couldn't help but dart my eyes through the archway to the living room. Lucy was in earshot, having scampered down the carpeted stairs in her kitty slippers. As usual, it was well past her bed-time.

Drawn back to the table, I rejoined the conversation. Soon I was chuckling again, and my eyes watered effortlessly - for no reason, really. It was automatic, from seeing tears on a dear friend's face. Maybe it was just too much red wine and a very long day. Where was my phone? On the side table in the living room, I remembered. I peered through the archway again.

The most dreadful feeling rose through my nerves, so intensely it was as if I’d been lowered into another atmosphere. My whole body locked up, to the point I was afraid to turn my head for fear my neck would snap. My flagging eyelids widened into hard circles, only to see the whip of Lucy's long, red hair as she ran up the stairs. A man sat perched on the edge of the sofa. I struggled to remember his name from earlier that day. Was he a good friend of Ted and Nina? It was all I could helplessly think of.

But how should that make a difference to what I think I just saw?

"Coffee?"

I looked up at Nina, but her voice became lost in the vacuum of space that formed around me and bulged against my ear drums. A shadow fell across the room from a source I couldn't detect.

"You look like you've seen a ghost!" Nina said, without a care in the world. I wanted to cry. I was going to throw up. She squeezed my shoulder, too hard - with the grip of someone who doesn't realise how much they've drunk. She moved on to the next person beside me at the table.

I glared past Nina's lightly swaying form. Everything - right down to the weave in the fabric of her skirt - was completely vivid to me now. The stray cotton sprouting from the seam at her hip appeared as epic as a solitary tree on a hillside. Beyond it, my vision held the man just as sharply. And he had discovered this; I was now making him feel uncomfortable. I dropped my gaze to my arms in my lap, where they had remained the whole time, flattened and heavy like two sunken battleships.

Was I just seeing things? What exactly did I see?

No matter how many times I framed the question in my mind, I felt no conviction in my answer - I just didn't know for sure. You cannot be wrong about these things. I grew insatiably thirsty for something. Not water, certainly not alcohol. I just needed to know.

Surely I must be wrong. In fact, you could easily be wrong, I berated myself. If that was the case, I wanted to rewind the last few minutes, to have kept my eyes closed instead and not risk being so ridiculously, cruelly mistaken.

Coward.

I took a deep breath and steadied my voice. "Nina... what's your friend's name?" My words came out in the tone of a complete stranger, and I coughed to shake myself out of it. She looked over her shoulder to where I indicated.

"Oh - that's Matt. Remember? Ted's workmate. Why?"

"I've gotta go. I'll drop by to pick up my phone in the morning, okay? We’ll chat then."

Her neck shifted abruptly backward and her face screwed up in confusion. I let her trail after me as I walked to the front hall.

"Oh, alright…” Nina said, and then came up with her own explanation as we both reached to open the door. "You look... utterly exhausted!"

My lips pushed upward into a shallow smile and fell flat again.

"Do one thing for me, Nina. Go upstairs and check on Lucy."

"What? Why? What do you mean?"

"She was downstairs, a moment ago..."

Nina breathed sharply in, and as her eyes searched mine for some kind of context, I struggled to think what I could give.

Instead, I turned away. Feeling sick to my stomach, I knew that another second of looking into Nina's eyes would eventually feel like a lie of some kind. As I walked down her front path, my heightened nerves still felt the hard tug of her hand on my shoulder. I just needed to step back and think clearly before I said anything, I told myself, and prayed it was the right thing to do.

Nina called out into the darkness, her voice now sobered with apprehension.

"See you in the morning… and have a good sleep."

A Great One Liner... Write On Wednesday

This week's exercise over at Ink Paper Pen is to come up with a single sentence that packs some punch by describing a part of someone's day and telling a story [fiction or non-fiction]. *EDIT: Seeing as it's a quick exercise but a very helpful one, I've added a couple more.

I gripped the metal handle of the factory door and my knuckes instantly froze to it, just as I imagined my father's always did.
~
Lisa agreed with her mother that the sewerage drain outside the front door was an issue with her new flat, but a far more pressing one she loathed to mention was the door key glistening in the trickling, putrid water below.
~
As usual, I'm open to criticism, but please try to stick to the one liners. ;)

Max and his Incredible Underwater Adventures

Max wasn't here, in the grocery store, to steal the apple. He picked up a fine, glossy red one; good enough for Snow White, good enough for him. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out the other apple, the one his mum bought only minutes ago before he dropped it on the ground outside. If only it had just rolled across the asphalt, and not down into the cold stew of fallen leaves and the wrappers of yummier things. 

Mr. Tucker popped up from below the store counter, appearing like a highly detailed sock puppet. His lips tut-tutted stiffly, and Max imagined the grocer's mouth was controlled by a giant hand. Not a real one, perhaps a holographic hand. But the man's eyes didn't move from any giant holographic fingers. Instead they seemed flat pictures of themselves, cut and pasted on, with thick pen drawn over his curly lashes.

"Well?" Mr. Tucker’s fist faintly trembled and squeezed a plump kiwi fruit.

Max drifted, remembering the time he took his mum's razor and shaved a little beard on his Kiwi fruit. He returned his attention to the more immediate matter. "Well... what?"

"Are you going to pay for those?" Mr Tucker's voice crackled loud and then quiet, and loud again, like Mum's car radio. Max thought the words might have beamed out little holes in his chest.

"No." There was probably a better way of explaining the situation, but he couldn't think of it and his mum wasn't here. Yet. She would soon work out where he was - he always liked it when she did.

Max knew there were two extreme ways to express something when normal words in the middle wouldn't work. The first was to scream. The second was quite the opposite, and he believed it was a sign of his growing maturity knowing which was the most effective in a particular situation. 


He slowly sucked in air until his lungs felt like two overly pumped buggy tyres. Holding the air tight with the back of his throat, he exploded his lips wide open before clamping them shut like a cod fish, purely for effect. His cheeks puffed out and turned as red as the apples in his hands, and under the greenish tint of the flickering fluorescent lights, the grocery store magically transformed into his underwater world.

Mr. Tucker's lips drained of colour and pinched in, forming a cat's bottom. Max thought the man might be holding his breath too - in his own way, and given he was clearly very old it might be a better way than Max's. But he soon worked out the grocer was squirting short huffs of mostly air through his cat's bum and getting red-faced all on his own. Each time the man’s eyes twitched, they were looking in a new direction - probably for Max's mother.

Max felt giddy and excited, and his lips sealed tighter. Soon his mum would plunge through the door and rescue him from the seaweed monster behind the counter. She would gently pull him upward to the safety of air, with the two apples bobbing to the surface with them. He would give her the good apple, and he would eat the dropped one. The seawater would have washed it by then.

Swivelling his imaginary diver’s helmet toward the front of the store, Max felt a stone sink in his belly. The doorway remained empty, his mum was nowhere in sight and his chest was beginning to hurt. He eyed off the swollen, slightly mushed watermelons in the bargain crate and imagined his own head sitting there. Through the window beyond them, the street outside appeared a shade darker. He managed a faint frown and a little blip of air escaped his lips.

Mr. Tucker released the kiwi fruit and picked up his shiny black weapon from the counter. He boldly held the telephone like a gun to his own head, only this made Max feel frightened and Mr. Tucker grin with victory. He brought his other index finger up high and back down to the dial pad and pressed a number, his fingers punching on and off the buttons slowly, deliberately, like a little fish sucking on a pebble floor. The grocer now believed he was underwater, too. When the last number was pressed, the finger swam up to his tilted chin, and his eyes relaxed into circles of calm above.

Max's lungs desperately pumped tiny pretend breaths against the tight seal of his lips. What should he do? He had never got this far! Where was his mum?

"Hello...?" Mr. Tucker's voice boomed long and drawn into the phone, "Constable... Radcliffe?"

In one momentous pop, Max's lips burst apart, and his mouth became a quivering hole in his doomed zeppelin of a head. Air rushed out from his aching lungs to the floor as his body doubled over and deflated. The apples dropped from his hands and were still bouncing along the tiles as he practically teleported to the shop door. On the pavement outside he stepped right, but all he could see were strange faces poking out of coat collars, and umbrellas trying to flap away from the clutches of cold knuckles. Adults, dressed in all the shades of a worn-out road, were heading home to their families. Max turned and stepped left at the same time and smacked into a firm, padded shape; instantly recognisable to the entire length of his body. He wrapped his arms tight around her legs and let her rain coat fall around his shoulders.

“Mum! Where were you?” He tried to push her away a little, but her feet remained cemented and he sent himself backward instead.

“Well, Max, I’ve been waiting right here for you.” His mother glanced through the grocery window, and when her eyes returned to him, she was smiling her special grin. The one where she can see something glowing around the edges of him that she thinks is funny, even though Max is clearly not being funny at all.

“What happened to your apple, sweetie?”

Max wanted to tell her. He wanted her to feel sorry for him, to go back inside to face Mr. Tucker and come out with shiny apple, number three. But his mother hadn’t been there, she wasn’t a part of his underwater adventure anymore and without her to rescue him, the apple was just an apple. It no longer affected him as much as, say, being shipwrecked on a deserted island, or flying through the Bermuda Triangle. He felt very grown up indeed.

“I ate it,” Max lied. 

The Probability of a Trojan Hippo.

The following is my submission to [Fiction] Friday Challenge #218 at Write Anything.

Inspired by the image they provide, it's a fun exercise purely in creative flow. Oh dear - no editing allowed. :)

Somebody chopped it up. Right in front of my eyes. I reach, but my knock on wood just rings in and out of my ears. 

Someone carved up time and space, and the probability of them returning to how things were before. Quite neatly, but annoying, like a brash, not-very-puzzling pattern, as opposed to slashed, like jumbos cutting through a cloud over a delayed terminal. Life interrupted. Surely not the Butcher of Time, rather the Carpenter of Dimensions. Yes, this is their handi-work. A deviation from their plan, from their fail-safe design. Perhaps the linear lines seem dull after some time, even though their practicality is what held everything up, like cups and hiccups, and hippos under water gelled to the crust of a planet. Now it could be a pie, for all I know. Tiny little hippo snouts snorting chunky sweet custardy pleghm, the kind they just wake up one morning and have. Or is it one giant hippo with a foot snug in a custard tart? On, off. On, off. We see the yellow smudge of every fourth step, but there's no longer any evidence of the beats in-between.

I find myself grinding out dried up old custard from the grooves, so I can slot myself in them, instead. As soon as I get into the flow of one grain, I find myself going against the grain in the next. After all that effort. Now I am derailed, I need to adjust, like a clock quite happily 'being' and realising that yet another tick is needed, then for some unknown reason, a tock. Up down, Up down, tugged side-to-side, the tonal quality of happy, sad, happy, sad. Sixty mood swings a minute. 3600 bipolar blips an hour. A lifetime of bliss and pain and laughter and terror compressed, gone in sixty seconds before a new life begins. It must, it will. Time is manic, I suddenly remember. I much prefer the quiet still of the chaos I have found myself in. Chaos is so close to choice. Thankyou, I choose to sit this one out and watch. And pat this hippo, as I smile with self-content. Is that contents? Contents of self? Wait - who exactly am I?

To get a better look at myself, I take off my tool pouch and brush the sawdust off my hands and clothes.