Quick NaNoWriMo break to throw out a few paragraphs from my work in progress. Not because it’s the most beautiful prose ever written. Not because it perfectly encapsulates the quintessential character as he confronts/surmounts his conflict of self vs self and self vs world in only one sentence.
No, I just thought this passage was particularly funny. It still makes me giggle almost a week after I wrote it. And from an existential sense, I feel like I need to put more humor in my writing. I can do it in flash fiction or blog posts, but as soon as I sit down to write something longer than 2,000 words, I cue the inner Tolstoy.
Plus, I can’t disappear for the entire month. That would be FOUR wasted dollars going to WordPress. So here you go:
Katherine Christie, known to most of the world as Miss Kitty, hears a knock on the door. She isn’t open for business yet. The sign on the door clearly says they open at noon. This isn’t one of those twenty-four affairs, like you might find in one of the bigger towns that allow her particular style of business to exist. But wherever they exist, in any of the seven counties, nighttime is the right time for her kind of business. So the mornings are her downtime. Downtime for her workers, who desperately need to rest. Downtime for her to do some of the business of staying in business. Accounting and payroll and deposits and deliveries all detract from the magic of this place. Nobody wants to see the garbage trucks running down Main Street in Disneyland, and nobody wants to see hookers on their hands and knees polishing knobs.
But this isn’t the first time she’s had a rather insistent customer. When you’re dealing with addiction, noon is a little too far away. And even though she doesn’t like to think of herself as a pusher, sometimes she has to admit that she caters to customers who suffer from some rather specific psychological compulsions. Sometimes when the men show up, bleary-eyed with trembling hands, she tries her best to placate them. Sometimes they just want to know the schedule of their favorite worker. Other times they need a quick pick-me-up before a vital job interview. In instances such as that, Kitty doesn’t admit out loud, she’s been known to serve the haggard man out of her own regard. Once you master a certain technique, you rarely lose it.
And if you’ve got time to clean, as the saying goes, you’ve got time to lean.
Except the man knocking at the door this time isn’t looking for a handjob.
“Hi, Miss Kitty, can I use your phone?”
So there you go. Enjoy. I’ll try to post some more of my failed flash fictions to keep engaging for the rest of the month, too. But apart from that, see you in December.
The Writing Wombat 