27 Day Karma Free Writing Prompts - Honorarium

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Thursday, April 8, 2010

Day #20 - Theme - "The Liberty Bell"

#20. Theme: "The Liberty Bell"
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7 comments:

  1. JefferyApril 8, 2010 at 2:48 PM

    Felix couldn't fix anything but he was my friend so I kept hiring him as a handyman. Felix was short, very short and ageless, somewhere between thirty and sixty years old and he could not fix a thing. Everything he repaired got worse. "God Bless you, Jeff". He would say after destroying my heater. "God bless you too, Felix". I would sigh. "I going to fix your brother's sink", said Felix. My brother called Felix a Guatemalan Hill Giant. This sounds racist now but he was 4' 10" and so proud of Guatemala. He "fixed" the sink by busting a 'Felix sized' hole through the outer wall. "That's how we do it in Guatemala", he would beam. Felix wore a hard hat that was bigger than he was and had a tool belt that he wore strapped over one shoulder like a Bandolier. He kept wires and tubes roped around his neck like some kind of Upton Sinclair necklace. He had so much gear that there was almost no Felix in there anymore. "God bless you my brother", he would say, " I'm going up on the roof to check the electricity". "Oh no", I would say, " I need my electricity". But Felix was determined. I heard scraping and crashing and electrical hissing from the roof . It sounded like all of Santa's reindeer had met a bitter end with a satellite dish. Then all of my electricity went out. Felix came down declaring the problem solved. "God bless you my brother", Felix would smile. I was just grateful he was still alive. "God bless you, Felix", I would smile back as I looked for the electricians number.

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  2. Skull SwingerApril 8, 2010 at 7:47 PM

    Ha! Love this. Great stuff, love the consistent tone throughout. Love the deadpan descriptions. The wonderful economy. -How you do dat?
    Can I get his number?

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  3. shoegirlApril 8, 2010 at 9:26 PM

    One day I received the greatest gift in the mail, so I thought. It had an Airplane and a beautiful baby blue sky. So I knew it was a keeper. It had numbers on it-alot of #s. One time I had read something somewhere that said #s would control the human race.
    So I took it with me everywhere. I tried it out. I saw others with theirs. Wow it was so easy. So I used it every day everywhere. More and more. I was hooked. This made me feel so good. I could do or have anything. Isn't that what Law of Attraction is all about.
    Then one day somoething new was in my mail. I was so excited to open it. This wasn't right something was wrong it was a Bill with a big amount. This card must be broken. Where is all the money it said I had. $11,800.
    Noone said anything about a "loan"
    or "interest" wasn't 30% really high
    or fees either.
    I must have grown up.

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  4. Janet MaykusApril 9, 2010 at 7:29 AM

    There was an easter egg hunt at the church. The church was just down the street from my house, so I walked down to it by myself.

    I went to church most of the time by myself after my sisters graduated or quit going. My parents were just tired of most things by the time I came along.

    But this worked to my advantage this day.

    There were two golden eggs hidden along with all the normal candies.

    A boy, I can't remember who, and Lori McGinnis found the golden eggs. Their prizes were real live baby chicks.

    They each got their little chicken in a paper bag.

    Lori's chick pooped in his bag. Where the offending pile lay, the bag got soggy. Before we finished our snacks, the little leg and foot of the chick poked through the wet spot on the bag.

    It looked like a monster chicken-leg lunch sack. Lori screamed and threw her chicken bag on the ground.

    I snatched it up and reported that I had an aunt and uncle with a farm. I'd take this chick to the country.

    Really it went to our screened in porch on the front of the house.

    Chickadee was his name. I'd put a little string on his neck and take him for walks.

    He lost his down and began to grow his comb. He cooed and purred and chickens do, on the sill to my window at night.

    His shit stuck. It was amazing how much crap this one bird could produce.

    My father complained. My mother griped. I swept the porch every day, but the smell lingered.

    One night my father put Chickadee in the backyard. He'd had enough. He thought a chicken needed to be outside not on his screened in porch.

    Rusty, the golden retriever, thought Chickadee was a great play toy. Chickadee was no match for a golden retriever.

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  5. Janet MaykusApril 9, 2010 at 7:31 AM

    shoe girl...love it

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  6. Skull SwingerApril 9, 2010 at 11:12 AM

    I performed a performance one night not so long ago and it was not a first time performance of this performance, but one in a series of a thousand performances…maybe hundreds. It was an abandoned rail car packed with hobos, heads on fire, everyone screaming and trying to remember their lines, the rail car goes off the tracks, down a steep embankment, careening between red-coral canyon walls, two of the iron wheels fall off, three sides of the boxcar open, the car flips, yet the hobos keep singing and screaming, now ad-libbing the dialogue…holes in the floor appear, hobo’s falling into the hole, off the sides, some being scraped along the walls; blood everywhere….this goes on for appears to be about 18 days. Finally the boxcar comes to rest in a crevasse below the ocean.

    I talk to several people after and they say,
    “Great job, that was funny.”

    I explain to each person that “this happened and that happened, and I really wasn’t pleased about how we did this then, and the before moment came after, and the cue for the other thing didn’t go right, the 3rd act reveal broke in the 1st act and we couldn’t find glue so we used paperclips, the tech stuff killed us, the hobo fire was too bright or didn’t have enough orange in it, the two wheels came off and they were the wrong two wheels and we knew that you knew, we could see that you could see, we could feel what you were feeling, AND, the parking lot where you parked was fucked up, I stubbed my toe a couple weeks ago, fucking gas is expensive, man is hot out or what? -My haircut is wrong, this gum is too chewy, my lawyer is suing me, fucking hummingbirds are in my backyard again, the ocean is broken, the greeter at Walmart is an asshole, my coffee was tea, black is black, white is white. Did you like the thing? That really didn’t work. No it didn’t. You don’t know anything. Fuck you, it was horrible and you’ve deluded yourself to think that what you saw was good cause you paid a lot of money... -If you paid nothing you would’ve seen all the flaws that we experienced in the moment. Fuck you, you’re not my friend!”

    Finally a woman stopped me and said, “You just say thank you.”

    “What?....What do you mean?”

    “You need to just shut up and say, thank you….after your little show.”

    “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

    “It’s diminishing…what you’re doing--”

    “--Doing what?--”

    “--No, it’s rude. …Someone is trying to be gracious and you are refusing them. You are diminishing them. You need only be kind and say, thank you.”

    “Oh.”

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  7. UnknownApril 10, 2010 at 11:04 AM

    I can relate to that lesson, Skull Swinger, and you described it so well.

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