Dateline Boston — I write on a regular basis, every week. Usually I’ll have a story in my head all week, and I’ll write it down in 30 minutes. Sometimes I’ll wrack my brains for a topic. Other times, something will happen to me and I’ll think, “Now that’s an essay!”
I took an online writing course once. I also played an online writing game. A couple of weeks ago, I joined a women’s writing group for a couple of hours. In all of these different writing groups, we used prompts, which was new for me. I’ve discovered that writing prompts are a great way to get my imagination going, or bring up memories that needed to be dusted off.
Last weekend I joined another writing group, but this time there were no prompts. Everyone just worked on whatever they were writing. I wasn’t working on anything, so I looked up “writing prompts” on my phone, and found one I liked. Here’s the result. Enjoy, and try a writing prompt yourself sometime. You never know what you’ll come up with!
Prompt: The first line should be, “For my first Thanksgiving as host, I bought the biggest turkey they had in the store.” The last sentence should be, “And that’s why we all ate hamburgers.”
Turkey and Math Clash
For my first Thanksgiving as host, I bought the biggest turkey they had in the store. Thing must have weighed 30 pounds. Having never cooked a turkey before, I consulted the Internet. Apparently, cooking a large bird required a whole bunch of mathematical equations which I was not prepared to do. I was also supposed to reach into the turkey and pull out a bag of something, then fill the empty space with something else. Eww. Gross. Disgusting. I guess I thought you put the turkey in a roasting pan and turned the oven on. No, it wasn’t that simple.
The roasting pan I had gotten from Ikea was nowhere big enough for this massive fowl. Is a turkey even fowl? Who cares? I attempted to put the turkey in the pan. It slipped out of my hands and onto the floor. The cats immediately ran over and began licking it—they certainly didn’t need a roasting pan! I shooed them away and hoisted the turkey into the kitchen sink, figuring all it needed was a quick rinse.
As I lifted it into the sink, one of the legs hit a glass that was drying on the dish rack. The glass fell into the sink and shattered into, well, not a million pieces, but at least a thousand, that’s for sure. I began to cry as I picked up bits of glass embedded in the turkey. I wiped the back of my hand across my face to dry my tears, and as I did, a shard of glass scraped across my face. I started bleeding. Now I had blood, sweat, tears, and snot on my hands and face, a glass encrusted turkey, and two cats who kept jumping onto the counter.
I grabbed a trash bag, heaved that state bird of Massachusetts into it, and lugged it down three flights of stairs to my apartment’s trash containers. And that’s why we ate hamburgers.
Ms. Vaillancourt may be contacted at snobbyblog@gmail.com
