I woke up yesterday morning and found myself @-bombed on Twitter as I slept. Once I had my coffee and figured out what it was all about, I saw that I was dared to come up with a one-sentence story (the longer, the better) before Wednesday. I was going to wait until Tuesday night since I'm not the biggest taker of writing-challenges. But then the idea struck, so I figured why not take my brain-dump now. :)
Thing was, I jumped the gun a little too fast and wrote a story that was just, IMO, too much the same as someone else's. Kinda really ticked myself off actually, but in the end, I did (despite how often I told myself not to) the only thing I could do.
So, Anatoly, Alex, Ken, Jake, Carrie, Damien, Tom, Amanda, and whoever else I might have forgotten -- you have no one to blame for this but yourselves... :)
Mr. Fix-It
(With apologies to Mr. Carver)
After my wife (now my ex) and I took the Wisdom of Solomon to its logical conclusion, having fought hand to hand over custody of our child and managed to walk away with an arm, a leg, and half a torso each, I ran out the door over the smashed-up furniture of our broken home, which allowed us both to move on to new and separate lives with new spouses followed by new, relatively whole children, and it all pretty much went more or less as well as could be expected until our halves of our child decided they wanted to be knitted back together, which pretty much ended up being more or less as arduous a task as expected to the extent that the ex and I were forced to interact, what with all the parent/teacher conferences, therapists' offices, and dates in family court which, I swear, the ex reveled in, not out of spite for me necessarily, but because having taken the first step to make all these things happen, she gave herself the enviable position of being the martyr on the cross up on the moral high ground at the tip top of her own personal Golgotha, which let her be the conduit for our child's healing and allowed her in her mind to say to me during today's latest go 'round in the family therapist's office, "Here you are, dragging your feet," harping, as always, that my problem was that I'm "too wrapped up in your own stuff to be fully present," and "didn't you learn anything from what happened to get us -- and him -- into all this trouble in the first place?" but what she doesn't know is that I did, and that I came prepared with all the tubes of Krazy Glue my cargo pants pockets could hold, and if I could somehow distract her and time it just right (unlike all those years ago), I can grab both halves of the kid, do what I have to, and finally fucking be done with it all.
(350 words)