FreeWrite: Betty Likes to Break
sooo,
Now that my first write-a-thon story is drafted, I wanted to cleanse my palette a little before moving on to the next one. Here’s another free-write exercise. 400 words from the pov of a character put in a new situation via a witness protection program.
Betty did bombs. Explosives. Fucking grenades. Betty didn’t do birthdays.
It was a suitable punishment then, that since she’d been plopped down in the middle of suburban New Jersey with four summer outfits and a nicely furnished two bedroom condo, every Saturday was spent in someone’s living room or backyard, eating cake.
That’s what you get for accidentally setting fire to the Russian Consulate.
“Is this black forest?” She said to Margaret as they watched the older women’s kids slide back and forth on the teeter-tooter. “God. It must be. So moist.” The words coming out of her mouth were as sickly sweet as the stuff going in.
You need to blend in. The suits in DC had told her. Fit in or they’ll find you.
Yum. Cake.
Margaret licked her hairy upper lip. “Oh, honey, you have no idea. I had to tell the lady behind the counter three times that I didn’t want that dry vanilla stuff we had at Leona’s last week. “
Margaret was a friend. Hmm, no. Maybe a ‘friend.’ She was nice enough, able to show Betty the ropes around town while providing a nice stash of local gossip, but with her pale skin and weak wrists, she was the kind of woman that Betty would have snapped in half is she were still working for the Covenant.
She took another bite of the cake, jabbing her tongue into the dull, cold prongs of the blue plastic fork. It was just past fifteen-hundred hours. She was supposed to be knee-deep in mission plans, not wrestling with her skirt.
“I love that outfit, by the way.” Margaret pointed her mojito in Betty’s direction. “The floral pattern is just lovely.”
“Thanks.” Betty took in Margaret’s beige pants hitched up to her sagging breast line. “I, uh, I really like the cut of your slacks, too. Very modern.”
In this moment, Betty wanted to blow something up. A half pack of matches were sitting next to the pastel clumps of used birthday candles. Seeing them made her fingers crawl with urgency. She held on tighter to her paper plate, but it was beginning to buckle.
Margaret took it and used it to gesture towards the kids. “How about a game of pin the tail on the donkey?”
Not now, Margaret. Not unless you have a Beretta 501 Sniper Rifle. And maybe a variable-power scope.
Progress
Finished a somewhat more together draft of my alien invasion story, now titled “The Way Forward.” Tomorrow I’m sending it off to a fellow write-a-thoner for critique. Another excerpt:
“Where are the onions?” She asked.
Walter had gone to the store with the other locals who had chosen to avoid the suffocating death of the military hole-ups. Together in morbid silence they had rummaged for produce enough for a few last meals. As usual, he had come up short.“Great.” Anne swallowed her tears as she emerged from the fridge. “Fucking radishes.”
Poor Willow
It’s storming here again.
As soon as it started raining I ran out on the balcony for urgent, strategic Jade Tree placement. Dubbed ‘Jade Willow’ by Dan, who has a fascination with naming all plants after a certain red-headed witch, it’s been with me less than a month and it’s already starting to shrivel. Am I watering too much? Too little? Poor Willow.
They’re supposed to be really hard to kill, but that’s what all the green-thumb types say about bamboo too, and I have three cute little dried-up stems of it in my living room to prove otherwise.
I’m good with other living things, I swear. I’ve kept the cat going for like five or six years now. Sure, he may have a bit of a weight problem, but he’s happy. Thank god he’s not green. He’d be dead in a week.
Storyline
Ho-hum.
I’ve finished the first draft of my alien invasion story, though to be honest, it’s not really ‘finished’ so much as I arrived at an interesting ending that really doesn’t have anything to do with the beginning. This is nothing new for me – I end up reverse engineering a lot of my fiction. I’ll go back and hopefully be able to bring the rest of the narrative in line with the ending.
Same goes for day-to-day life, at the moment. I’ve got little bits and pieces that are working well, and I know where I want things to end up, I just need to find a way to make everything fall into place.
Unfortunately, I don’t think this can be accomplished with magic beans or a rocket ship powered by Shetland ponies. I tried the latter and it didn’t end well.
I guess that only leaves effort. Time-consuming, frustrating, liberating effort.
Yay?
Lies!
My dinner-party story has been put on the back burner. I still plan on writing it, it’s just that it was getting very weird: Rob Roy showed up. Then Bono. And I don’t want to subject anyone to anything resembling the middle act of Across the Universe.
But all is not lost: I’m now over 2000 words into my new alien invasion story. To me, alien invasion can be totally cool or incredibly cliché, and I look at getting this piece into the former category as the challenge. Here’s a tiny excerpt:
The klaxon at the end of the street released one last curdling scream before breaking down into unending feedback. Walter was alone, then. The dead eyes of his wife and the thing inside her casting judgment upon him in the dark.
Also, this morning I sent out my Niagara Falls story “Horseshoe” to a good market, so we’ll see what happens.