It's day two with the sticks from Writer's Toolbox, and can I just say, these things are a PAIN to put away and sort? I'm probably going to have to come up with some other kind of storage for them.
I pulled all three sticks at the beginning this time, but I still wrote based on the first one for six minutes, then moved to the second for six minutes, and finished with the last. It turned out...oddly, but I'm not unhappy with it.
First sentence - My only defense was to write down every word they said.
Non sequitur - “If you don’t take chances,” said the man in striped pajamas, “you might as well not be alive.”
Last straw - the tear in her dress
My only defense was to write down every word they said. I learned to take shorthand, once I realized that I was never going to be able to write quickly enough and it would make too much noise for me to type. I needed to be able to track everything they were talking about when it came to the project, because I knew that they would try to blame me for anything that went wrong.
I hate group projects.
It hadn’t started out so badly. I was the last person to find a group, as usual, and was stuck with the two people who had been in that will-they-won’t-they stage all year, so of course they knew each other well. We were working on coming up with a project related to improving the mood of people in care homes, which seemed like the kind of thing that we should have been able to knock out in an afternoon. Instead, she decided she wanted to tour the facility associated with the college and get to know all the ins and outs of the home, how the people were treated, all that kind of thing.
This led to six weeks of meetings, always ending up in the same sunroom on the sixth floor, where I always got stuck talking to the same lady. She seemed nice enough, for an older lady, but it was pretty obvious that she was there because she didn’t have anyone to take care of her. She did the same thing every time we were there, too - offer me a cup of tea and a biscuit, sit with me and have me tell her all about my school work, nod her head and act like she knew what I was talking about, hold the cup to her lips but never actually take a sip. It was very strange, but in a boring sort of way.
One day, while I was furiously taking notes on what my teammates were saying to each other (they were talking about going out to lunch, I think, but it could have meant anything - they talked in code sometimes), a man came to sit next to my friend, the tea lady. I almost missed a few words, I was so surprised by his presence. He had to be an inhabitant - no one else would go around in striped pajamas like that. I moved closer to them to listen to what they were saying to each other, momentarily forgetting about my teammates.
“If you don’t take chances,” said the man in striped pajamas, “you might as well not be alive.” He handed a cup to the tea lady, and I was startled to see that it was not a tea cup, but rather a mug. The smell coming from it wasn’t the delicate scent of tea, but the strong, overpowering stench of coffee. She sniffed the air over the mug, her face twisting at the bitterness, but he pressed the mug into her hand and smiled encouragingly. I was fascinated, trying to figure out what she would do. She never actually took a sip of the tea she offered me, so would she drink this coffee?
I could tell the instant that the coffee made its way past her lips. She nearly dropped the mug, and the man in the striped pajamas put his hands under it to keep it from falling. She glared at him, putting the mug in his hand fully and wiping her mouth with her other hand. “Why did you give me such foul stuff?” she cried, reaching for a biscuit covered in sugar icing and eating it much more quickly than she normally did with me.
“Forgive me,” the man said, putting the mug down. “I simply thought it best if you took a chance for once. You have to admit, it’s much more exciting than your tea, isn’t it?” He positively sparkled, and even as she glared, the corners of her mouth started to turn up in a smile.
My teammates met me just as I was about to ask the man for a taste of the coffee myself. “Have you spoken with Miss Hanson, Stuart?” she asked me, gesturing to the tea lady.
I made a careful note of her words before turning to them. They were standing too close too each other, and to me, as usual. They always stood as though they were trying to create a wall between themselves and the rest of the world. “No, not yet,” I replied, gesturing at the man in the striped pajamas. “She has company, and I didn’t want to interrupt. He got her to try coffee! I don’t think she liked it, though.”
“That’s very good, Stuart,” he said, speaking a little too loud and too slowly as usual. I don’t think he thought I spoke English, for some reason, even though I always answered him in English. Sometimes I thought in other languages, and my writing didn’t always come out in English, but I tried very hard to make sure the words I said to my teammates wer always in English. “We should probably get going, now. It’s time for lunch.”
I noted the words and closed my notebook, standing up. “I’ll walk with you, but I think I would like to eat here today,” I said. “I don’t like the places that you go to for lunch. They make the food too strangely.”
She nodded and gestured for me to walk in front of them. As I passed her, I noticed the tear in her dress, the one from the time she had tried to hug me and I pushed her away and she landed against the window and the glass broke and cut the cloth, had been mended. The sewing was very fine, but it was obvious to me that it had been torn once. I was surprised she had kept the dress, but she probably wanted to keep it as a memory of my hug. I had told her I was sorry afterwards, but I wasn’t, not really. She shouldn’t have tried to hug me that day.
They walked to the doors, and I nodded to the man at the door as he opened it to let them out. I turned around after I saw them leave and went back to the sunroom on the sixth floor. It was the place where all of our experiments took place, and I was the one to monitor our subjects. I had a lot to take in, especially with this new inhabitant in the striped pajamas and carrying coffee.
Besides, it was lunchtime, and I was hungry.
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