Valentine’s Day
My friend Christine took a list of words from another friend and wrote a piece using all the words on her MySpace blog (Christine get a real blog, so I can link to it).
And she posted the following word list: intrude, behavior, never, electric, down, envelop, silhouette, ask, lipstick, whiskey, pale, handwriting
So here’s what came out:
“Valentine’s Day”
I was driving around town between appointments looking for a Valentine’s Day gift for my girlfriend when I got the call. I quickly rushed back to work, mulling lame gift ideas and hating myself for waiting until the last minute yet again. Making it up to her always costs more.
As I walked in, his body swung from the ceiling, the silhouette of his legs dancing on the floor. I suppose he figured it was a better way to go than the electric chair, but still, he could have waited for the judgement to come down after all the work I’d done on his case. If for nothing else, so that I would have known if I had succeeded or not. I felt like a high schooler who stayed up all night perfecting a homework assignment only to learn the next day that it was just a completion grade. Some people just never think about anyone but themselves. But there he swung, like an over-stuffed pinata.
On his cell walls, he had counted off the days using a luxuriously bright red lipstick against the drab gray. The marks totaled sixty-eight, just one shy of some bad prison joke. I didn’t want to intrude, but the warden wanted me to look around, him being my client and all. I guess they thought I would have some insight into the behavior of a mad man. I searched through his belongings: notebooks filled with his old world calligraphy styled handwriting; the labels from whiskey bottles — just the labels, no bottles anywhere; a plastic bag filled with every hair that he had ever shed, shaved, or cut from his body while in prison; a pile of dirt from the prison yard…
As I poked around his belonging, the guards cut him down. They stuffed him into a body-bag. Before they closed the zipper enveloping him in darkness for the rest of eternity, I took one final look at his pale face. I thought to myself, if I could just have one more day with him, one more chance to talk to him, one last opportunity to get inside his head, I would love to ask him, “Just where did you get the lipstick?”
10 words for anyone else that wants to play:
jump, karate, aroma, friction, wool, spasm, shadow, paparazzi, candle, emphatic
I love it! And comparing a prematurely dead client to a completion grade made me laugh out loud.
Hmm. I wonder what that says about me.
Ha! Glad you liked it. Don’t worry too much about laughing. I mean, at least, you didn’t write it
Thanks for the new game. I always ignore all the messages that ask you to write answers to silly questions to describe yourself, but this was more fun.
So next time you play scrabble, you should make everyone write something using the words.
That’s a brilliant idea. I’ll even make the players include my bluffs, like “toer” (81 points) and “fusal” (30-something). I also recently got away with “oi,” which I really think should be in the scrabble dictionary, since they include other exclamations like “ah.”
Those silly questions can be fun, with the right person answering them. Most people just give straightforward answers, and straightforward answers are always boring. You just gotta spice it up with a bit of commentary and humor. Example from my last questionnaire:
Q: Who from high school would you like to run into?
A: There are lots of people I’d like to run into, but I wouldn’t want to mess up my car.
okay, now you should feel bad.