Tag Archives: Prompt

Twenty Plus

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One summer evening, our writers’ group meeting took place at Sally’s. She is a gourmet cook, as well as a published author, and her husband, Allen, is a master in the kitchen himself. He often prepares part of the meal served at our meetings in their home. He makes a heavenly guacamole and is willing to share his recipes. He is a real treasure for our little group. On this early evening, Allen prepared a grilled salad with his own recipe for homemade Caesar dressing. Sally made sourdough bread and a luscious three-tiered strawberry and cream dessert. Sally’s presentation of food is an art form. We look forward to her creations. She had stopped by the store for fresh strawberries and lettuce on her way home from work.

Linda and I arrived, plopped our notebooks and purses on the sofa, and went to the table. Jackie was already there.

While Allen and Sally put the finishing touches on the meal, we all chatted about our day. Then Sally told us she had a prompt for us. She and Allen exchanged amused looks, and she told us the story of the bag of lettuce she picked up at the market. Yes, the very lettuce that was part of our salad. Their story went like this:

Before Allen opened the package, he noticed money inside the bag.

“Sally”, he said, holding the bagged lettuce in the air. “Did you look at this lettuce before you bought it?”

“Duh, of course,” was her exasperated reply. “I always check for the freshest. Why? Are there brown leaves in it?”

“Not exactly, but there are some strange green things in it.”

“Bugs?” she asked as she stopped measuring the cream for whipping.

“No, more like dollars.”

“What are you talking about?” Sally turned to look closely at the bag. Sure enough, there were dollar bills in the sealed package of lettuce.

A squeal and “What the heck?” escaped her as she noticed in the sealed package of organic lettuce a twenty-dollar bill and six ones.

Thus, a prompt was born – Tell how the dollars got into the bag. After dinner, we grabbed our notebooks and began to write. (Needless to say, Sally washed the lettuce before making the salad.)

The story of Harmon Pettigrew developed as I wrote. During dessert, we shared our theories about the placement of the money. Harmon only had a couple of pages, and I knew he would need more to tell his whole story, so I continued to write after I got home. At the next meeting, I read Harmon’s story to the group.

The Almost True Story of Harmon Pettigrew and His Crop of “Lettuce”

You’ve heard of money being called lettuce.  Well, here is a true story validating the claim.

Once upon a time, around 2008, in a small town in California called Salinas, the salad bowl of America, a lettuce grower named Harmon Pettigrew decided to diversify. After the E. coli scare took his business down to practically nothing, he went into his basement and began to develop the seeds of a new enterprise. He retrieved the savings from the family bank account and worked day and night diligently for nearly two years to produce a new kind of lettuce seed, one that would ensure future profit no matter what blight might come upon the lettuce crop.

Harmon grew up on a small farm on the outskirts of Salinas. He worked in the fields harvesting lettuce from the time he was a sprout of five. His daddy taught him the fine points of how to plant Romaine and Butter lettuce from seed in shallow holes 8 inches apart in rows ten inches wide with twenty-four inches between rows. They used organic fungicides and fertilizers. Both his mother, Claudia, and his father, Earl, were flower children of the 60s. They believed world peace would eventually come about if the whole world ate organic. Harmon’s legal name was Harmony Light-of-the-World Pettigrew, but for obvious reasons, he shortened it when he was in high school. He had every intention of getting out of Salinas after high school graduation, but his father died from a heart attack the week after graduation, and his mom, who was losing her sight to a genetic disorder, needed him to keep the farm going.

Claudia prided herself on being self-sufficient but quickly realized some limitations as her eyesight made it harder to carry on the business side of the farm. That had been Earl’s job. Reading contracts and doing the accounting became challenging. She was still very capable of tending the gardens as well as house chores.

“I know you’ve been waiting to get out on your own and explore the world, Harmony, but I do need you to stay, if only for a year or two, and help stabilize the business and find a good manager for me. Dear boy, I want you to employ all your talents in ways that make you successful in life. If you could please delay for a short while, I promise I’ll save enough to give you a stake in your future.”

Harmon acquiesced to his mother’s plea.

Harmon Pettigrew was not a genius in the sense of book learning, although he went to Hartnell Community College in downtown Salinas, where he took introduction to business and introduction to computer classes. He found complex theory taxing, so he quit after the first semester and enrolled in night classes at Wayne’s College of Beauty just a few blocks from Hartnell. He figured he would acquire a backup skill in the event that a lettuce crop failed. Harmon was more of a hands-on type of learner. It was at Wayne’s where he discovered the concept of mixing chemicals and transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Mrs. Haven was one of his biggest achievements. A transformation from a seventy-year-old grieving widow to a seventy-year-old go-go girl took Harmon only a few months. He created unique hair and makeup applications with the help of chemistry and science that wowed not only the salon but the entire town. Mrs. Haven acquired a whole new outlook on life and was beset with proposals. Harmon became the favorite of the over-sixty crowd even though he only worked at Wayne’s part-time while maintaining and improving the farm. He was offered several opportunities to open his own salon, but he knew his true calling was agriculture, where he adapted his peculiar brand of genius.

After ten years of farming just as his father taught him, he decided to change the crop and grow money. He knew printing counterfeit money was illegal and would land him in jail. Using his beginning computer skills, he went online to research state and federal penalties attached to growing money and found there was no restriction, no penalty and, in fact, the concept was not even mentioned in law. He read about sheep being made in petri dishes from seed and even human babies being made in test tubes. He reasoned that if something as complicated as a baby could be made, why not money? Money is made from organic materials, so all he needed to do was take it down to basic elements and formulate a seed from which it could be reproduced.

Harmon had the perfect laboratory to work out his experiment in the basement of the family farmhouse. Earl, the hippy lettuce farmer, had grown pot as a side business. The basement was set up for growing plants.  The walls were lined with sixteen seventy-five-gallon aquariums and grow lights for each. When Earl passed away, the pot-growing business fell off. Claudia lost interest in the plants, and Harmon had never been a part of the operation. Now he had a use for the abandoned equipment.

With the aid of a few simple chemical compounds purchased at the local feed store and beauty supply and his community church teaching “…faith is the assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen” (Heb.11:1), Harmon labored to develop a seed that grew into money. He practiced with one-dollar bills, going through nearly four thousand dollars in ones, trying to reduce the money to its most basic form and then to seed.

One morning in early February, after trial and error, when he was near the end of his family fortune, he went down into the basement to check his plants. There, in the third aquarium from the east wall, he found a tightly curled one-dollar bill poking out of the soil. He almost fainted from surprise.  He was a man of faith, but it had been tested for so many months. He didn’t want to pluck it before its full growth, and he wasn’t sure if it was a single or if the seed would develop into a branched plant with many singles. He packed up twelve PB & J sandwiches and told his mom not to disturb him for the next few days while he stayed in the basement working on his new project. Claudia surmised he was starting up pot production again.

For five more days, he waited and watched, giving small amounts of plant food and water to the incubating plant as it grew and unfurled. In the early evening of the sixth day, Harmon noticed the dollar bill was beginning to wither, so he plucked it and laid it out under a clear glass plate. With a magnifying glass, he examined it both front and back, checking for any imperfections. The only thing he found was a tiny soil stain on the bottom left corner of the bill.  Other than that, it looked exactly like the one-dollar bill he had in his wallet.

For the next several months, he worked on developing five, ten and twenty-dollar bills, all the while planting and growing the lettuce crop in the field. He was able to recreate his success with one-dollar bills, but the fives and tens withered before they completely formed. The twenty-dollar bill seemed hardier but not as prolific as the ones. He successfully grew two thousand dollars within ten months and decided to take it to the bank for a final test.

Shifting his balance discretely from one leg to the other and twisting his clammy clasped fingers, Harmon asked, “Ms Hempshaw, could you please check one of the twenty-dollar bills? I have a feeling they may be counterfeit.” He breathed deeply to calm his rapid heart rate.

The teller called the bank manager from his office to support her findings. “No, Harmon, it doesn’t appear to be counterfeit. Why did you suspect it?” asked Mr. Withers.

“It was part of a cash transaction for a truckload of cabbages. I’d never done business with the guy, and I wasn’t comfortable with him. I don’t often do cash transactions.”

“It’s fine. We will accept it for deposit,” Mr. Withers nodded.

Harmon exhaled a sigh of relief. His crop was now ready for planting.

His next hurdle was to plant his seeds outside to see how they would grow in his lettuce field. He picked a small field he could manage all by himself and told his mom he was planting a prototype new lettuce, and he didn’t want her or any of their seasonal crew to work in that field.  He placed a row of money between two rows of Romaine and watched it carefully. He planted the money seeds after the lettuce was nearly ready for harvest because money grew much faster, and he wanted it to be hidden by rows of fully leafed lettuce.

The day he was to harvest his crop, he fell very ill with a twenty-four-hour flu and had to stay in bed. His mother, to be helpful and without telling him, went to his private little field to harvest the lettuce for him. Claudia, now in her early sixties, was legally blind from the degenerative eye disease but still had enough sight to do basic farm chores and keep house. Because of her diminished sight, she didn’t notice the difference between green lettuce and green dollar bills. She picked all the rows, took the lettuce to the bagging shed, washed it, bagged and sealed it for shipping with the label – Pettigrew’s Organic Lettuce – Grown the Old-Fashioned Way.

          Mystery solved.

Sally’s comment: I would never have thought of the extent of detail, background, locations, and science that would go into using the money found in a lettuce bag as Diana. Diana took this unusual ‘find’ to a level that becomes almost, almost, believable.

•             This story is in our book, Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets.

A Writing Prompt for Point of View

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In a recent Oro Valley Writers’ Forum meeting, we were given a prompt to write for five minutes from the point of view of an object. Prompts are always fun challenges for me, so I put pencil to paper and began. This is my short short story from the POV of an object.

I’m always the last to know what was for dinner. I get the detritus of the meal. I can only surmise how good it tasted or sometimes I am really happy I missed it all altogether. Those goopey gravy-laden things are not my favorites. Hard to choke down. On the other hand, I really don’t appreciate the crusty stuff that I have to scrub, or else I hear Madame complain that she will have to replace me. I do my best. I welcome the well-rinsed pot and plate.

Then there are the glasses – don’t get me started. Young master drinks milk, then lets the glass sit without rinsing, and a hard ring forms at the bottom. How am I supposed to get that out?? I don’t have fingers, you know – nothing that can reach in and rub the ring away. Again, I get grief for my performance because the glass doesn’t sparkle in the sunshine. Oh my, it is a hard life.

I overheard one of Madame’s friends talk about how she has never used her appliance for washing dishes. Her husband has somewhat of a drinking problem, but she enjoys a tipple now and again. Her appliance holds all the liquor in her house, so her husband won’t find it. He would NEVER think of opening the dishwasher.

As it happened, the last thing I did before leaving the house that morning was to turn on our dishwasher. It was the first thing I thought of when given this prompt. Try it yourself. Write a short essay or poem from the point of view of an inanimate object and see what happens.

A Dilly of a Dilemma

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I love to write to prompts. Quick stories, handwritten in a limited amount of time, jump-start the right side of my brain. The windows to my imagination are flung open and words fly freely onto the page. They are untethered to logic, only conforming to the guidelines of the prompt. Often, I am taken by surprise at the words that leave my pencil and show up on the page. Most of the time, they are zany musings, sometimes the beginning of a story to develop later, and sometimes a dark force compels a tragedy. Occasionally, nonsense dribbles out, and I find it hard to follow the labyrinth of thoughts. I am always in awe of the process and its revelations. The following story popped up when given ten minutes to write a scene from three different points of view.

The Scene: A female hitchhiker is dropped off at an emergency room with a problem. Tell the scene from the POV of the nurse, the patient, and a hospital administrator.

Nurse POV:

A young miss came into the ER early this morning with a problem. One I haven’t seen in my twenty-four years of nursing. She had been hitchhiking along Highway I-10 from Mobile on her way to Jacksonville, Florida. Her thumb was the size and color of a pickle, not dill, more like a large sweet. She didn’t appear to be in pain, and the rest of her hand looked quite normal and pink, but she complained that since the weather had turned cold, it had been impossible to put on her gloves. I took her vitals, then sent for Dr. Shambala, who was on call. He came in and examined the majestic, inflated digit with no discernible dismay.

His only question to her was, “Is it easy to get rides with that thing?”

To which she replied, “Actually, it comes in handy.”

“Well then, no surgery,” he said. “I think the answer is to buy larger stretchy gloves. I wouldn’t want to inhibit your travels or your gardening.”

I discreetly took a photo of her thumb. I wanted to show it to Hiram, our hospital admin. We had a meeting just last week about the anomalies of the human body and how to address those issues.

Patient POV:

My thumb had been bothering me for several days. Snow and sleet had become an everyday occurrence, even though I had consciously chosen a southern route for my winter journeys. My gloves just didn’t fit anymore. My thumb was getting larger and was really, really cold. I hitched a ride on a pig wagon to the nearest ER. It was a twenty-mile ride, but the farmer was swell. He asked me about my thumb, and I told him it was the reason I needed to see a doctor.

“Going to have it cut off?” he asked.

“Heavens no,” I replied, “just wonder if it could be made a little smaller for my gloves.”

In the emergency room, the doctor asked the obvious question. “How did it happen?”

It’s not the first time that question has come up. I get tired of the same old answer, “I was born this way”, so I told him I was picking crops in Mexico and got a cut, and the juice from the pickles I was picking dripped in, and lo and behold, I woke up with a pickle-sized green thumb.

The nurse at the ER looked a little disconcerted, but kept her cool, and the doctor suggested I get larger gloves for my travels.

“We wouldn’t want to impede your traveling abilities. It clearly is a significant benefit to your lifestyle.

As I was leaving, a sour-looking gentleman, round as a wine keg, came up and asked that I go with him to his office. I did, thinking he might have a suggestion for my thumb. I found out he was a pervert with a title and a fancy office. He wanted to suck my pickle. I left without “goodbye.”

Hospital Administrator POV:

Nurse Nancy came to my office this morning with a photo she took of one of our ER patients. That’s strictly forbidden, but when I saw the photo, I understood her motivation. The girl had a thumb the size of a juicy green pickle. I had given a mini-seminar to the staff about physical anomalies and injuries they could encounter in a rural hospital; everything from nails in the head or hand, to animal parts embedded in human parts – enough said. The thumb picture triggered something in me, and I had to go down to see it in person. The young lady was just leaving the ER.  I asked her to come up to my office for a chat. She obliged, but when the door closed, a powerful urge overcame me. I just had to taste that thumb. I had been a thumb sucker up to the age of fifteen when the shame heaped upon me by my peers finally inhibited the craving, and I quit cold turkey. The girl was offended by my request to suck her thumb and left in a huff. I wished her well on her journey and hope she has a dilly of a life.

AI generated picture

My Fling with Fabio

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Prompts are a favored way of getting my mind engaged, setting aside whatever “project” I’m working on which may or may not be stalled, and opening myself up to a challenge. I am always surprised by what I write when I sit down to approach a random topic that is presented. This short short story was a prompt from our writers’ group. Sally authored the prompt. I chose to write it as a letter to a former lover. It was silly and fun.

  • The title is “Fling with Fabio”
  • In this story, you must use the words:
  • Churlish
  • Gallantry
  • Lame
  • Senescent
  • $5.00 (or use a five in another creative way)
  • and a quote of your choice from Romeo, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1

Dearest Fabio,

This is the hardest letter I’ve ever written. I know that sounds like a lame cliché. Still, the truth is that most of our relationship has been cliché — from the beauty, the passion, and those glorious mornings sitting on the deck of your condo on San Diego Bay drinking our $5 lattes and watching the sun peek its head above the horizon, sending shivering shards of light across the gentle waves of the Pacific.

You were, are, and will always be my gallant lover, but your senescence has become a problem. I don’t wish to sound churlish, but when you cuddled me and called me Shirley, I knew we were done.  

I would like your remembrance of me (which will be irrevocably short due to your lapses) to remain of our good times, our joy, our gayety, our desire.  As Romeo said,

“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs; being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes; being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears.” Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1.

Forever yours,

Julie

I especially love my reference to the sunrise above the horizon in the West on San Diego Bay, where the sun decidedly sets every day. It was an intentional faux pas that added to the silliness.

Don’t Judge a Book by It’s Cover

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This was written from a prompt for the critique group I’m in. The prompt was to rewrite something from a favorite children’s story, add to the story or change it in some way. At the same time I was considering the prompt, Hurricane Helene struck the East Coast. The two ideas came together as I wrote.

Don’t Judge a Book by It’s Cover.

Alice was snuggled close, her head on my chest. Her hand on my cheek.

“I can’t sleep Grammy,” mumbled the toddler who had been fast asleep for four hours. Slivers of lights from passing cars and trucks flashed through a wedge in heavy curtains at the window of our motel room. The roar of trucks on the highway, a sound that made the room quiver, woke her.  I was amazed she slept as long as she had.  We were on the way to my home in Georgia and stopped for the night to get respite from the very stressful day. Hurricane Gianni had torn through the Florida town where Alice, her Dad, and Mom lived. I had been staying with them for a long weekend. The storm tracker indicated that Gianni was due to hit only the edge of land about one hundred miles south of their town. Suddenly it took a swing northward and inland, a giant locomotive ripping through San Colima. Tyler, my son, and his family live on the edge of town and were not in the direct path but the debris from the leveled town flew into their neighborhood. A grand piano crashed through the roof and landed in the middle of Alice’s bedroom. Fortunately, we were all in the underground hurricane shelter at the high school. We returned to their house to find the devastation. Luckily only two rooms had been seriously affected, Alice’s and the guestroom where I stayed. Wind and water had done more damage through the open roof, but the house was mostly intact.

“Take Alice and go back to your house Mom, Tyler said. “We’ll stay and help our neighbors then come up to get her when things are sorted out.” We hastily put things in a bag for Alice and I packed up a garbage bag with soggy clothes from my battered suitcase.

There was no electricity or water when we left to drive the three hundred miles to my home in Georgia. After a couple of hours on the road, the trauma of the day caught up with me and I needed to rest and regroup. I stopped at several motels along the highway but they were all full of people fleeing inland from the hurricane. The old Flamingo was the only motel with a room available. It had seen better days but at least it was a refuge for the night.

“This room is at the end of the building close to the road,” the clerk said. “It can get a bit noisy when trucks drive by.”

Beggars can’t be choosers. I was in no shape to continue driving and Alice was cranky even though she had dozed off and on as we traveled toward Georgia. “I’ll take it. I’ll only be here a few hours, then back on the road again.”

It was about 4 am, I had rested but only snoozed a bit as I held Alice close. She began to squirm and whimper. “Grammy, I’m hungry.”

“OK Lambkins, we’ll get back on the road as soon as it’s light and find a place for breakfast. I have an apple and graham crackers for you now. Come snuggle and have a snack until then.”

“Read me a story,” she said.

“What story do you want?”  I knew perfectly well which one she would ask for. We had hurriedly tossed some of her favorite books in her bag along with a couple of stuffed animals and what dry clothes we found under the smashed dresser in her room.

“Alice in Wonderland,” she said. It was the book I read to her at least twice each time I stayed with them or when she came to visit me. In the four years of her life, she must have heard it five or six dozen times either by me or her parents reading. She knew each page and would correct us if we read it wrong or missed a word. Sometimes she would ask for just one scene. “Read the tea party, or read who stole the tarts, or off with their heads.” She would say when told there wasn’t time for the whole story.

“Gotta go potty,” she announced.” I retrieved the book with its colorful cover of Alice and the Cheshire Cat, the Queen, and the White Rabbit, from her bag while she went to the bathroom.

She came back to the bed, stopping to grab her pink and brown giraffe that had been her crib companion since she was born. It went everywhere with her.

“Ok. Where shall we start?”

“All the golden afternoon,

Full leisurely we glide;

For both our oars, with little skill,

By little arms are plied..,” *

My Alice started with the beginning poem as she nibbled on a cracker.

I opened the book and started to read. It had been tossed about in her room. Some of the pages were crumpled and water damaged but the hardback book was mainly intact. Something wasn’t right though. Glancing at the rumpled pages I noticed pictures I didn’t remember being in the book, but I began.

“…when suddenly a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close to her…followed by three little pigs.” I read. And there on the page was a picture of the white rabbit in his tight-fitting plaid jacket and three little pigs dressed in red, blue and yellow jackets following close behind. 

“Grammy, there aren’t three little pigs in this story,” Alice objected.

“Look at this picture.”

She glanced at the page. “Hmmm,” she said and settled back on the pillow.

Then as poor Alice in the book shed a pool of tears because she couldn’t get out of the hall, she heard footsteps running and looked up to see a wolf dressed in a red cape. She peered out from behind the curtain that hid the door to the garden. “What big eyes you have,” said Alice to the wolf. “The better to see you with, my dear,” said the wolf.

“Grammy, that is the wolf from Red Riding Hood. How did he get into Wonderland?” Again, I showed her the illustration and again, she accepted the modification with no comment.

And on and on, the book had characters from Peter Rabbit, the Frog Prince, the giant from Jack’s Beanstalk, Snow White, and the three Billy Goats Gruff. Some attended the tea party with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, some played croquet with the Queen, and some showed up at the King’s court to defend the Knave of Hearts.

Every once in a while, Alice would stop me reading to peer at the pictures – strong evidence that what I was reading was true because the illustrations verified the words.  “Grammy,” she said. “I think the hurricane jumbled my storybooks.” As the story ended, Alice had fallen back to sleep, snoring lightly, clutching her giraffe. I, too, was able to close my eyes and fall asleep. Restoration and renewal for a new day, a new adventure, a new Wonderland.

*Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll