Monday, July 28, 2008

100 Jam-packed Story Sentences: 51-75

51. "I love my sister, I love my sister," I chanted to myself as I started my fourth hour working on the cross-stitch of her wedding date, her name and her husband's above it, with a border of little hearts.
52. "You're turning twenty-two.... and the theme for your birthday party is 'Disney princess'?" my husband asked incredulously.
53. Crouching low over the sidewalk, she asked, "Isn't it beautiful?" All I saw was a worm, or I guess a caterpillar or something, but I nodded and smiled to make her happy.
54. "Is that a man or a woman?" Cheryl whispered to me as we watched the person in a pencil skirt and heels cross the street, but I honestly couldn't tell.
55. I spent seventy-five dollars to rent that karaoke machine for the night of the party, and not a single person got up to use it.
56. "Sure you wanna be doin' that?" Adrian asked her in a low voice, an easy smirk curving on his lips, but the girl just smiled, looking up through her eyelashes at him, and stepped closer.
57. It all made perfect sense now: if he could just pile the dirt high enough, and make the right shapes in it with leaves and sticks and drops of his own blood, then they would see, they would all see!
58. She would write a sentence, take a sip of coffee, then stare at the screen for several minutes; it went on like that all morning until finally she had a page.
59. "Okay, just because I'm knitting doesn't mean I'm pregnant!" the girl snapped, and the old man shuffled uneasily further down the aisle of the bus and away from her. "I'm just fat!" she shouted after him.
60. Clayton had failed to tell me he had to be Frosty the Snowman in the school play on Friday until Tuesday evening, so here I am at one in the morning, sewing a big white fleece bag with leg holes, and wondering where on earth I'll be able to find a top hat in the next two days.
61. As the sun slowly shot the smog with rays of pink and gold, drably-dressed men scuffed their boots while going from street corner to street corner, reaching up with long, cold poles to dim the lanterns one by one.
62. Adelaide decided that enough was enough. She made a complicated movement with one hand as the boy turned away, and suddenly he fell to his knees, coughing and choking, clutching his stomach. A moment later, several long, slender, green snakes burst from his mouth to fall, writhing, on the pavement.
63. It seemed to passersby that the girl just couldn't walk in a straight line, but in truth, she would never step on a shadow, believing that to do such a thing to the image of a bird or child or tree would harm the thing itself.
64. "Why is the dirt sparkling?" little Chloe asked, clutching mommy's hand on one side and daddy's on the other. "Fairy dust," Daddy said with a smile, the same time Mommy said, "Mica chips."
65. "Oh!" I cried softly, touching my thumb to the inside of my bare ring finger; where had I left my wedding band?
66. "But my mom lets me play with it at home," Dane said, holding up the plastic gun, but Mrs. Sommers just shook her head and took it from him, putting it on top of the fridge. Dane went back outside, and immediately found a stick with the right shape. "Bang! You're dead!" he shouted at his friend, Willow.
67. "Great job, I liked it a lot," Claire said with a bright smile, but as soon as she was out of the garage where her son was practicing with his "band," she shook her head, rolling her eyes.
68. "No, you can't sign my cast," Mallory said, causing Mary Anne to turn away, sniffling and fighting tears.
69. "I don't see why all of us should've got kicked out just because you couldn't keep your mouth shut," Jared muttered as the group of boys exited the theater. It had been pretty funny, though, to watch Chris yell at the mother of the kid who wouldn't shut up.
70. "Harry Potter is not for losers!" Katie said, stomping her foot. She felt self-conscious about her "Mudblood" t-shirt for the rest of the day, though.
71. "No!" he cried, grabbing the pen out of her hand. "This is only for writing my novel!"
72. It had all started--from the disastrous first date to the pregnancy scare to the incident at homecoming--with a simple question: "Does Kelly have a MySpace?"
73. The smell of bacon always reminds me of my grandmother's kitchen: blue and white dishes, ancient silverware, the sugar and pepper shakers shaped like two cows, and the avocado green linoleum that went with the knotty pine cupboards, the very wood seemingly infused with the scent of pan-fried bacon.
74. I thought it was an over-exaggeration that all New Yorkers are thin, something TV tells us to make us envy the city; now that I live here, I know the truth. Everyone walks everywhere, and that keeps them thin!
75. The only reason I was able to pretend I liked the hideous thing so convincingly was that I knew I could return it to the store and get all that cash back to buy something I actually wanted.

1 comment:

mikkers said...

i see a lot of potential in these :). What a great creativity excercise!