{A fabulous writing practice book called "Write the Story" (available from Picadillyinc.com) guides my everyday "Pajama Pages"; those pages you write when you're in your pyjamas and you haven't yet brushed your teeth before crawling into or out of bed... early morning or late night scribbles. Each page gives you 10 words and you have to write a story containing all those words - Hope it entertains you.}
Sunday, 24 October 2021
Theme: Getting away with Murder
Snow Queen | windmill | tunnel | childhood | endanger | cypress | wine | horseback | temperature | imperial
HERE'S MY PAGE TODAY:
My face was blowing hot and cold, as if I was running a fever, but my body temperature stayed low, lower than human. I sat on my windowsill, sipping wine, and plotting murder.
From where I sat, with a view over the manicured gardens where I had spent my childhood, played hide and seek, I counted the cypress trees that hugged the long driveway, from the ornate gate to the ostentatious drive circle and water fountain in front of the house. I had watched those trees grow from defenseless saplings to the towering monsters they were now, listened to them whisper to the song of the wind and stepped on the cypress seed they weeped every year.
The evergreen lawns, so carefully tended by our gardener, is a thick cool mat, a bed where one can lie during the hot summer; I know the sweet smell that prickles your skin like tiny welcoming fingers, so well.
But someone had come to destroy all this; had made himself welcome in my home and the destruction was making my mind buck wild as if it was on horseback in a blizzard. The wine did nothing to calm me, but it was making me more creative. My plots were incredulous, the wine spicing it with twists of innovation and madness; nobody will suspect me, and I was sure I could get away with this small murder.
To kill, you must be cold and calculating but to get away with it and appear nonchalant after your heinous deed, you need to be the Snow Queen – as if you’re in the business of cold.
I’m listening to my mother’s favourite song; it was my ‘theme song’ and as the words drew me in, drowning me in spinning wheels upon wheels, I thought how brilliant it was that someone had written about a ‘windmill in their mind’, and how fitting it was to my current state.
But I must pace myself. The murder cannot be chaotic, I would be caught too soon, and that will endanger my bigger plan - the plan where my lawns are smooth crimefree carpets, my gardens innocent palaces of grace and welcome, and I lived in my childhood home as if nothing ever happened here.
I had to make it look like an accident, a prank even, like when you put a mint imperial inside a coke and it explodes, something like that…
My enemy, the gardener, appeared below my window and peered up at me, shaking his head. He was protecting my prey, ignoring the damage…He had said he didn’t ‘have the heart’ to do it, well I did.
Tonight, when that mole comes out of its tunnel, I will kill it dead.
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