"I'm going to speak my mind because I have nothing to lose."--S.I. Hayakawa
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Friday, October 31, 2014

An Ann Linquist Writing Prompt: A Night on the Town in Phoenix




Online writing instructor Ann Linquist hosts a blog wherein we writer wannabees can play. She gives us a prompt and with that we run amok.

I daydreamed my way through the mail route today, making up one sentence in response to her latest prompt.



The prompt: 

Russleman Greefolder
Old gum underneath the café table
Underwear label
Relentless smog
Dog and a beer





 The story:


A Night on the Town in Phoenix


Long after those crew-cut jerks with their mirrored Ray Ban Aviators and coiled wires behind their ears slammed him onto the scorching sidewalk of Central Avenue in downtown Phoenix without so much as a how-de-do or a do-si-do, long after that black-robed harridan shattered her gavel and shot him a look that left no doubt she felt she was dealing with slug slime, and long after those phony white-toothed piranhas decamped with their behemoth satellite TV trucks to another circus, Russleman Greefolder lay marinating in his own sweat on a cot in a sauna-like tent, clad only in Sheriff Joe’s mandatory pink boxers stamped with the acronym for Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, wondering why, after a satisfying all-afternoon-and-into-the-evening interlude tipping a couple cold Coronas with lime wedges—well, maybe more than a couple but, hey, who’s counting when it’s 117 in the shade out there,  your dog is sprawled in the sawdust at your feet, and you’re hoisting a few in the air-conditioned refuge of Jose’s Cantina—why oh why he chose that moment, that particular moment when he was floating out the door of Jose’s in the unrelenting smog of sudsy befuddlement, to drop his drawers and rid himself of the annoying label sewn into the waistband of his X-rated (certainly not XXX-rated) boxers that his ex, when she was still his wife, bought for him at that adult shop over on what he liked to call Not-So-Grand street, just as the president’s motorcade and its gaggle of black Suburbans with dark-tinted windows was passing, all of which resulted in an indecent exposure rap eternally stuck to him like old gum underneath a café table.



Care to see what others wrote?    http://annlinquist.com/2014/10/29/a-night-on-the-town/

2 comments:

  1. That has to be one of the longest single sentence stories ever written.

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    1. Tried to respond via the iPad but the iPad has a mind and direction of its own. This is only the third time I have tried to write long, convoluted, complicated sentences. Because I tend to write in the short sentences of print journalism, surviving the above sentence relatively intact was deeply satisfying.a

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