Misunderstood?

 

 We are back in touch. My writing Mate and I had made a number of Skype dates, but she never beeped in and then reported trouble with her Internet. All became clear when she realized that the connection had been pulled out of the wall by her cats as they played.

As always the first line is the trigger for our free-writing exercise. IT comes from the short story Country of the Blind H.G. Wells

Others also said things about him that he heard or understood imperfectly…

It wasn’t unusual for him to misunderstand. He often felt people were talking about him behind his back, and sometimes he was even right. 

He would round the corner approaching his office in the English Department and whoever was standing around, be it students or faculty, would suddenly be quiet.

His wife, when he complained, told him if it were true, which she didn’t believe for minute, it was his own fault. She encouraged him to be friendlier with his coworkers. “Eat with them,” she’d say.

“I prefer to work in the library with my sandwich,” he would tell her. Every day it was a cheese and pickle sandwich. She offered to make egg salad, or peanut butter and jelly but he always, said no he liked the cheese and pickle. One day when she was out of cheese she’d made a sliced turkey sandwich. It had been the Monday after Thanksgiving and she’d been trying to get rid of the leftovers as well as not shopping for his cheese.

When he complained, she told him to get over it.

His students probably talked about him too, although he knew he did have a reputation for being a fair professor and interesting. Even kids who didn’t like Shakespeare told him that for the first time, some of that language made sense.

His parents had questioned why he wanted to be a teacher when he never really enjoyed time with people. They also were surprised when he brought Angie home and introduced her as his fiancée.

He’d been a bit surprised too. Angie had been an English major and wanted to be a writer. His job let her stay at home to write, and she’d had moderate success: two books published, but modest sales. He believed in her and it suited him as part of their bargain to not have to deal with running a house, preparing meals.

Angie even took care of the lawn and had made a nice garden. Their deal worked.

He didn’t think himself odd, although that is what he thought other people said about him. He was just who he was. Maybe had he been a boy today they would assign some three letter syndrome to him. Maybe not. 

He was who he was and he could live with that.

Ice cream

 I'm so happy. My writing buddy and I are back on doing our writing exercises, this time on Skype because she's in Argelès and I am in Geneva. The hiatus was caused by her moving. Now that she is settled our next writing date is tomorrow. The exercises are a wonderful trigger. Interesting in this one she concentrated on Betty and slowly unwound thread after thread. The book we used for this exercise was...(she said it was the only book unpacked.)

Welcome to the World Baby Girl

Fanny Flagg

Trigger: Betty said, “Mackie get some vanilla ice cream in a dish. I’m a nervous wreck.”

Mackie sighed. Betty solved every problem with ice cream which was why she was no longer the lithe girl he’d married twenty years ago. Now she heaved herself out of chairs and panted when she walked upstairs. She used ice cream as something to calm her nerves or to celebrate any event such as the sun going down.

Who ate ice cream on a winter night?

His wife did.

He took his car keys off the peg by the door where they always hung. His truck was parked in the yard. He had bought it shortly after they were married and it had over 154,000 miles on it, but it still was in pristine shape.

He wasn’t one of those good ole boys who let his truck get rusted. Any spot of rust and he was out there with his sandpaper and spray paint can. Even the bed where he hauled wood and landscaping equipment was cleaned every Sunday.

The engine hummed with the turn of the key. He pulled out of their driveway. Sometimes he felt like just going down the road and to keep going to he didn’t know where—a new life somewhere. He could set up a landscaping business anywhere.

He loved his work, turning chaos into something beautiful. His latest job had come from the new rich bitch in town who had bought the $4.8 million mansion that everyone said would never sell because of the price. The lawn had been boring she’d told him, and she’d wanted him to create a magic spot. He’d done that with fountains and bushes that hid a silent place with a mosaic bunch where she could sit and read.

He suspected she never had time to read, what with her being head of the software company that he was always reading about when he looked at the financial papers.

Quite a looker she was. Not skinny-skinny, but well curved and not over curved. Her hair was always in place not like Betty whose roots were two inches of dark trimmed with blond.

Not reasonable to compare the two women. Betty was his wife. She was loyal, took care of the kids, kept the house nice.

The store was coming on his left. He started to signal a turn and then changed his mind and gunned the engine heading toward the open highway.

The Kitten

Killing the Shadow

Val McDermid

Trigger sentence. "The theme music of the late evening news thundered out its familiar fanfare."

Jenna watched the news every night before turning off the lights, locking the doors and heading upstairs to bed. There she would decide what to wear to the office in the morning, bringing a suit from the closet finding the right blouse, making sure everything was ironed. She would get her underwear and put it on the shelf bra on top of the panties in the niche on the shelf where she kept her clothes.

The coffee pot had already been set so the coffee would be ready when she walked downstairs at 6:19 every morning.

This had been her routine for the past four years, three months and two days since she went to work for Abraham, Gold and Matthews as the fourth attorney in the company. They were not one of those huge law firms that had hundreds of big corporation clients, but handled the everyday business of people in the town where she’d grown up.

She worked at the law firm summers when she’d been in college and again when she was in law school. Jacob Abraham had been a friend of her father’s. Don Matthews his golf partner. It was natural that they would take her on when she graduated until she passed the bar. After she got her results Don had offered a full time place, but said he understood if she wanted something bigger and better.

She was content and had no desire to change.

In the middle of the night she awoke to a mewing coming through the open window, not a howl of a cat in heat. The clock read 2:26. Although she tried to go back to sleep, the mewing continued.

Damn, she thought and stomped downstairs where the mewing was outside her front door. Although her town had little crime, she didn’t like opening the door when it was dark, but she did anyway.

A strawberry coloured kitten, not much bigger than one of her hands a half sat on the doorstep. He strolled in, rubbed against her ankles and headed toward the kitchen.

She followed him. He sat down and looked at her.

I’m going to hate myself for this, she thought as she opened the refrigerator and found some tiny plastic containers with cream. She opened two and put them in a saucer. He made them disappear in seconds but rather than look for more he walked back into the living room.

Common sense told her to put him outside, but he was so tiny that maybe an owl would consider him dinner. Instead she found an old box and put some dirt in it from one of her plants that was not going to make it and sat it by the door.

The kitten watched.

“You can stay tonight. Tomorrow we find where you belong,” she said as he jumped up on her printer.

Upstairs she climbed back under the sheet. Within minutes she wasn’t alone. The purr reminded her of the theme music for the nightly news.

Power games

It was pouring when my writing friend and I met at La Noisette. Hot chocolate seemed almost as important as writing. We used Maeve Binchey’s The Copper Beech to trigger our free write exercises starting with “After tea…” My writing partner used an older couple stuck in a rut of always playing games and using the English version of tea as a meal. I wanted to know more about her characters, always a good sign.

After tea, they played games, not board games like Scrabble or Monopoly. They played power games. Trying to control her was Sandy’s specialty.

It would start with who would wash the cups. Sandy would talk about her dermatologist and her non-existent dish soap problem that caused rashes that never appeared. Anita gave her rubber gloves. Sandy would sigh and put them on.

“What movie should we see?” Sandy asked as she ran water into the sink.

Anita knew whatever she suggested Sandy would have a counter suggestion. “Give me a category.”

“Not a war movie,” Sandy said. They’d never gone to a war movie.

“James Bond?” Anita knew that would be rejected.

Sandy rinsed a cup.

“Musical?” Anita said not wanting to see a musical, which earned her an easy no. She wanted to see Lincoln. “Janice saw Lincoln. She didn’t like it.”

“Robin loved it,” Sandy said.

“He would. He’s a history buff,” Anita said. “But Janice said it wasn’t all that accurate.”

“Why don’t we check it out, “Sandy said.

Anita let out a long sigh. “I suppose.”

When Sandy went to get her coat, she pumped her arms and mouthed “yes.”