Every Wednesday, on Writing Under Pressure, you’ll find a post based on Today’s Word (from Wordsmith.org). Past essays, poems, or flash fiction pieces can be found under Wednesday’s Word on the sidebar to the right.
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This has been one of those days when life gets well in the way of writing, and swearing seems appropriate — especially when you have a self-imposed deadline at your back.
Enter Wordsmith.org’s theme this week: words about swearing and name-calling. Not the four-letter words, mind you, but a more sophisticated list of insults.
Today’s word:
odoriferous. adj. 1. Giving off an odor; 2. morally offensive.
Criticism with class.
*****
Cleaning Up
Carol’s position in housekeeping at the Holiday Inn never won her great respect. Her mother berated her for picking up the dirty laundry of strangers. Her daughter told her, at least once a week over coffee, that she should quit that lousy job.
“It’s a disgrace that women still make up the majority of employees in that line of work.”
“I like my job,” Carol repeated after every criticism, and she shrugged her shoulders.
She loved her job, really. She loved the sight and sound of the sheets as she snapped them and let them fall on top of the mattress. She appreciated the smell of a freshly-cleaned bathroom. And, she believed she played a large part in setting the mood for young couples who stayed at the hotel: she turned down their beds, turned on the lamps, and sprayed their pillows with a hint of Calvin Klein’s Obsession — a bottle she found in room 101 last year that she kept hidden in her housekeeping cart.
Anu Garg pins down the plight of every writer when he introduces this week’s theme on Wordsmith.org:
Illustrating the importance of using the right word, Mark Twain once said, ‘The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning-bug & the lightning.’
This week’s dose of words relate more in wrongly assumed meanings at first glance. Still, the quote from Mark Twain is a great reminder that every word counts in a story, especially in a flash fiction piece.
Today’s word:
psychopomp. noun. A guide of souls, one who escorts soul of a newly-deceased to the afterlife.
I never would have guessed that meaning.
*****
The Mets Fan
Natalie looked down at the face of her iPhone just in time to see the reception bars collapse.
“Excellent.” She hit the send button with her middle finger several times anyway in hopes that her assistant, Rick, would still get her text.
STUK N TRAFFK. PLZ STALL MTG. U R MY HERO 🙂
Natalie was on her way to meet a client, a new client, and she hated showing up late. She’d been inching along 8th Avenue for fifteen minutes in a sea of cars, when she finally saw a break at the next intersection. She figured if she turned right and bombed down Arcadia – which always seemed open to traffic – to 12th Avenue, she could circle back towards the business district and her office. She had whipped her steering wheel to the right, punched the gas, and looked down to finish typing her text.
That’s when the bars fell and her reception dropped.
She sighed and looked up to see a trash can on her hood and the reflection of her right turn signal blinking back at her from the Starbucks window. Starbucks was two doors down from the corner, and it was empty. No one inside. No one waiting at the door. No one parked at the curb. In fact, hers was the only car in the street now — in the middle of the street.
She gripped the wheel and peered around the trash can. “What the hell.”
She heard a knock on her driver’s side window.
She noticed the Mets hat first and then saw his face. He nodded slightly and motioned for Natalie to roll down her window. She cracked it an inch.
“Yes?”
“Would you like to step out of your car, Miss?”
He looked harmless, though a little weathered. But something about him was familiar. When he spoke, her shoulders relaxed. She rolled the window down another six inches.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
He smiled, stepped back, and pulled open her door. Natalie brushed off her skirt and swung her legs around. She climbed out of the car and into complete silence — no sounds of construction, no sirens, not even a horn to be heard. Downtown was never this quiet.
“Follow me,” he said.
She surprised herself by taking his hand.
They walked down Arcadia Lane for miles, past the bookstore and the Italian restaurant that serves the best gnocci in the county. Past the laundromat at the edge of town. She’d only been to that laundromat once, when her washer broke down. And, it was depressing: a real wasteland of lost socks and worn dryer sheets.
Natalie’s eyes followed her hand to the stranger’s, on up to his shoulder, and to his face. She studied his profile.
“You have questions,” he said, without looking at her.
“Yeah,” she said, but suddenly she couldn’t think of what she wanted to ask.
“You seem nice,” she said, finally.
“Yes. A lot of people tell me that.”
They were quiet for a long time, until she realized that somewhere along the way she had lost her shoes and her phone.
“I don’t need shoes?” she asked him.
He looked at her and smiled. “No.”
Natalie turned towards the road, which rose up and opened out into the sunset.
“This isn’t at all what I expected,” she said.
“It never is.”
He squeezed her hand and she closed her eyes.
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Every Wednesday, on Writing Under Pressure, you’ll find a post based on a word prompt. Past essays, poems, or flash fiction pieces can be found under Wednesday’s Word on the sidebar to the right.
Mercy Loomis
Today, I welcome fellow She Writes member, Mercy Loomis, to Wednesday’s Word.
I met Mercy in person last month at a meet up organized by E. Victoria Flynn. Victoria, Mercy, and I nibbled on sweet treats for several hours that Saturday and talked all things writing.
We laughed at the story material found within the four walls of a coffee shop – a writer’s paradise when it comes to characters.
I also had a taste of Mercy’s writing during our meet up, and I decided to invite her for some “word of the day” flash fiction fun.
Mercy chose the route of a prompt from my personal word bag (in lieu of Wordsmith.org), thus allowing me to play Wordsmith for the day. Oh, how I love control.
The word I chose for her: bitten.
*****
Twice Shy
Trevor tried to pretend he wasn’t winded, but keeping up with Naomi’s long, shapely legs was proving to be more of a challenge than he expected. Not the he minded the view, of course; even though it was dark the trail they were hiking could just keep going up and up forever, as far as he was concerned.
Of course, his own legs would give out long before he got tired of watching. Flex and swing, flex and swing. When she’d picked him up and he saw the short-shorts he’d assumed she wasn’t the outdoorsy type, but either bugs didn’t scare her or she did a lot of Stairmaster. Naomi’s loping strides devoured the trail like…
Something pricked his arm, and Trevor swatted at it with a muffled curse. “Stupid mosquitoes,” he muttered, staring dolefully at the smear on his hand. In the deepening gloom the blood looked almost black. Pausing, he wiped his hand on his jeans and stuck the flashlight in his pocket, the beam pointing up into the leaves and giving the path a weird green glow.
“What are you doing?” Naomi stopped and turned to give him an irritated glance.
“Getting some bug spray.” Trevor dug through his fanny pack for the little bottle. “I must’ve been bitten half a dozen times already.”
Naomi sashayed back to him and took his hand in both of hers. “Aw, what’s a few bug bites? Please, I really hate that stuff. It tastes terrible.”
Trevor blinked, momentarily confused. “Tastes? But why..?” Naomi fluttered her eyelashes at him, and he tossed the bug spray over his shoulder. It landed somewhere in the bushes and was instantly forgotten. “Right. You got it, babe.”
Laughing, Naomi drew him farther up the hill. “C’mon, we’re almost there. You have to see this place.”
Trevor stumbled after her, giddy with the implications of her teasing, but when they finally crested the slope and emerged from under the trees his lascivious thoughts were momentarily silenced by the view. Barely ten feet ahead of them the bluff’s face fell away in a sheer cliff overlooking a glimmering stream that snaked through the wooded valley below. The moon lit up the landscape like a giant spotlight, and even as he stared open-mouthed he saw a barn owl swoop down over the water to disappear beneath the branches.
And another mosquito bit him.
Trevor cursed roundly, slapping one cheek and flinging the dead insect away. “Doll, I don’t understand how you can stand being out here dressed like that. Not that I don’t appreciate it,” he hastened to add, “but they must be eating you alive!”
There was an undertone to Naomi’s chuckle that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise, a low growling that went beyond sultry into something else, something animal. “Oh, they wouldn’t do that. Doll.”
Trevor turned to her slowly, trying to shake off a cold shiver that coursed down his spine. “Why is that?”
She grinned. That was when he saw the fangs. “Professional courtesy, of course.”
*****
Mercy Loomis graduated from college one class short of an accidental certificate in Folklore, which explains a lot. She has a BA in Psychology, but don’t hold that against her. Though fascinated by mythology her whole life, she blames her husband and the History Channel for her late-found love of studying history.
Her stories appear most recently in the anthologies Please, Sir from Cleis Press and Taste Test: Rainy Days and Mondays from Torquere Press, as well as in Hungry For Your Love: An Anthology of Zombie Romance, coming from St. Martin’s Press in October 2010. See what she’s up to and find links to her other work at www.mercyloomis.com.
