Work Stories

This week Rachel gave us a prompt to write eight stories, each comprised of only fifty words. 

I haven't really felt like writing. As easy as all of the other assignments have been, this one was difficult. It wasn't a difficult assignment, but the act of sitting down and writing was hard. There's so much going on right now and none of it seems like it's turning out right. Trying to be creative under these circumstances is nearly impossible. I don't play the tortured artist well.

So if writing is going to be work, I decided to make them all about work. Some are real... some are fiction... some are a mix. All I know is that I want to fling my macbook into the river right now so I'm not reminded of things.

I'm tired. I'm glad I don't write about my personal life in my blog any more. My life doesn't need any more editing.

Work Stories

Tim pulled on the gorilla suit and mask in the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror through the eye holes and wondered how much longer the “Going Out of Business Sale” would continue. Feeling his hot breath reflected at him, he picked up his sign and went to work.

A lady came up to the front desk and told me her friend hurt her finger in a deck chair at the pool. She had her hand wrapped in a towel and when she unwrapped it, the tip of her index finger was snapped off at the first knuckle.

Everything Ted touched turned to shit. We asked him to help unload the bronze sculpture from the truck. When we placed it, the pedestal collapsed like a house of cards. The rest of us just looked at one another and knew we could only blame ourselves for bringing him along.

The sun beat down on me and I picked up the sports bottle and took a large swallow. The Seagram’s Seven and Seven was the only thing that made calling BINGO on the pool deck tolerable. Their vacations to the beach were my misery, but they never discovered my secret.

There is a certain look to back roads in the south, where asphalt fades to a unique light grey. By day you count remains of the previous night’s armadillo casualties and note the occasional snake or gopher turtle. Once he’d even seen an alligator belly up in the hot sun.

“You’ve got a long row to hoe.” doesn’t make sense to anyone that has never had to do it. He gripped the rough wooden handle, conscious of the blisters forming at the crook of his thumb. From this vantage, bent over at the waist, the foreshortened rows stretched on forever.

Mornings before work he’d go for a swim. He wasn’t a strong swimmer, but he’d continue through the waves until they became slow swells and he couldn’t make out people on the beach. And on some mornings, it was all he could do not to swim to the rising sun.

Dad chopped that tree all day. It was a huge sweetgum, with big branches that liked to snap off in a windstorm. He cut it with an axe, as though a chainsaw was an insult to either him or the tree. With a final squeal of protest, it crashed down.