Tag Archives: short story

Opting Out

While the boss was with a client, Jim logged onto his university’s website and registered for classes. Registration was closing that day, so it was his last chance. It looked like his schedule would be exactly the same as it had been for the past three years: work the mornings at the library, go to school in the afternoon, then work at the office in the evening. Of course, he’d have to do his homework on top of it all – if he got around to it. He rarely did. He checked his grades for the current semester. All C+s or lower. They had steadily fallen since his first year. “Cs get degrees” was his adopted motto, and he stuck to it.

Noticing that his boss was done with the client, Jim closed the window on the computer and opened up the sales log. It was nearly the end of the pay period, and he’d only made four sales. The leading sales associate, a new guy, had made 20. Commission was only part of their pay – they received an hourly pittance as well – but Jim knew the boss would take him aside if he didn’t make at least 10 sales a month. He checked the log for last few months: in October he’d made 9; in November he’d made eight; and this month he’d made four. What the log didn’t say was that the majority of the sales he’d made were reactive; he didn’t make outbound calls anymore.

The phone rang. The caller ID read Keith. Jim sighed, and picked up the receiver. He absentmindedly doodled on a notepad as he answered the call.

“Exceptional Car Insurance, where you’re service is always exceptional, this is Jim. How can I help you?”

“Hey there Jim! How are ya?” a man said.

“Good,” he replied without inflection. “How are you?”

“I’m doing fantastic! Hey, I’ve got a question for ya! My daughter is gettin’ her license soon, and I wanna know how much it’ll cost to add her to our policy.”

Jim pressed his pen hard into the notepad, scribbling a tornado that swept his other doodles away. He was silent for a moment. If he spoke he’d probably swear at the man, and that kind of service wouldn’t be considered “exceptional.”

“Hello?” the man asked.

Jim hung up and dug his palms into his eyes. The phone rang a few seconds later. The ID confirmed it was Mr. Keith again. Jim took a deep breath and answered.

“I’m sorry about that.” Jim said. “The call must have gotten dropped somehow. What can I do for ya?”

“Oh, no worries. I don’t get the best service with this phone. If you could just pull up my policy and tell me how much it would be to add my daughter I would really appreciate it.”

“No problem. I’d be happy to help ya with that. I’m gonna need to know your name though.” Jim hated when people assumed he knew who they were–even when they were right.


“Oh!” the man laughed. “You mean you can’t just read my mind?” Jim rolled his eyes. “This is Mr. Keith. Ronald Keith.”

“K-E-E-?”

“K-E-I – “

“Thanks. Just a second. I’m gonna put you on a brief hold.” He muted the phone so he wouldn’t have to fill the silence with conversation. The company prided itself with genuinely caring about it’s customers. He unmuted the phone.

“Okay, I’ve got the policy here. Just one moment, let me take a look at it.”

Jim pulled out a process sheet that walked him through how to find the best rate when adding a young driver. Adding a new driver was a moment of truth because the price of the policy usually skyrocketed.The company wanted to make sure their customers were happy, so they were very thorough in these situations; it normally took about half an hour or longer to find the best way to do it. Jim stared at the paper for a moment, crinkled it up, threw it into the trash can, and asked Mr. Keith for his daughter’s information. A minute later Jim told him the new premium – about a hundred dollars more a month – listened to Mr. Keith’s amazement, said something about the likelihood of young drivers having an accident, thanked him for calling, and hung up the phone.

The boss was with another client by now, so Jim got on Facebook and liked a few paintings that had been added to his feed. He wondered how long it had been since he had uploaded a painting of his own. A quick look at his timeline told him it had been about 6 months. Six months? he thought, rubbing his eyes and exiting out of the window. Sure, he had changed his major to business at about that time, since his worries about making money had finally caught up to him, but he had vowed that he would never stop painting. Without deadlines and assignments, however, he had.

Jim resolved to begin a painting that very night, and pulled out his phone to set a reminder. There were quite a few old reminders in the app already, things like: Read pgs 110-112 in Business in the 21st Century; Make 10 outbound calls a day; and Buy Milk. He checked of the last one, and deleted the first two. Then he deleted all of them. A clean canvas, he thought, and typed a new goal: Paint Something. He set a reminder for later that evening. He knew he’d want to forget it, so he made sure it would go off every hour after 6:00.

The secretary brought him an envelope, which Jim opened. In it was a handwritten note from his boss. His heart dropped as he read the first line of writing:

Jim,

I just wanted to take a minute and thank you for all the work you’ve done for our agency. It’s unfortunate that

He stopped, closed his eyes, took a breath, and continued reading.

we don’t have more employees like you. I just wanted to remind you that, since you’ve been with us for over three years, you get two paid days off this Christmas, plus Christmas day itself. Please accept this gift card as an additional token of my gratitude for all you do. Thanks, and Merry Christmas!


Jim breathed a sigh of relief and slowly brought his heartbeat back to its normal rate. He flipped the card over. On the back was a family Jim had never met with his boss in the center. They were standing in front of the office, smiling broadly. Under the Exceptional Car Insurance sign were the words: Wishes you a Merry Christmas. Jim smiled back at the faces of the boss’s family. He thought they must be proud of their father: he’d built the company from the ground up. Jim pocketed the gift card and sent the boss a thank you email.

He was actually smiling when he answered the next phone call.

“Exceptional Car Insurance! This is Jim -“

A computerized voice interrupted him.

“Hello. This is your Google Plus specialist.” Jim pounded the desk. He had to listen to the whole thing. Again. “Our records show that you have not confirmed your business’s digital listing. This process is simple, and only takes a few moments of your time. To confirm your Google Plus listing press one. To speak to a representative, press two. If this is not a business number, press three.To opt out of future calls, press four.”

He pounded the four and hung up. How many times did he have to opt out? It was 5:30 PM when Jim checked his digital calendar, moved his untouched to do’s to the following week and went to the bathroom. He sat on the toilet and played a game on his phone until an alarm told him it was five minutes to closing. Then he went back to his desk and pretended to work until it was time to leave.

“Thanks for your help, Jim!” his boss said as Jim left the office.

Jim did his best not to look guilty as he said good bye. He resolved to do better the next day. He almost made a reminder for himself when his phone vibrated. Paint Something popped up on the screen.

 

After he got home and changed, he opened frozen dinner and set it in the microwave. He read the nutrition label while he waited. Disgusted, he threw the empty box toward the garbage can. He was too tired to make anything else though. The microwave hummed in the background as Jim sifted through a stack of letters he’d gotten in the mail. There was a Past Due stamp on one of them. Then there was a catalog for a grocery store and a credit card offer. He cut it to pieces, annoyed. I wish they’d stop sending me these, he thought. Then he cut up the bill too.

Jim watched TV while he ate, and ended up microwaving another dinner when the next episode came on. He silenced the reminder on his phone twice when it went off in the middle of the show. He watched a shootout, and it made him want to play a video game. It was nearly midnight when he finally turned the console off and looked at his phone again. This was the fourth time it had gone off since he started playing.

“What do you want?”

He read the words Paint Something as he picked it up. His ears rang in the silence. He looked around. On his table was homework he needed to finish, and a trail of crinkled up scratch paper leading to an overflowing garbage can. He sighed, and picked up a few of the papers as he took his fork to the sink. The sink was also overflowing. Jim put the fork into a dirty pot on the side of the sink and tried to stuff the remnants of the frozen dinners into the garbage can. He pushed the pile down, gagging when the reek of rotting food was forced into his nostrils. How long has it been since I’ve taken this thing out? he thought. Jim stepped on the pile, and eventually stood on it, jumping up and down and using the wall to keep his balance. When he stepped down, the trash sprang back up and spilled onto the kitchen floor. Jim rubbed his temples and looked for spare garbage bags. He was out.

“I’ll clean it up tomorrow,” he said.

Jim’s words echoed off the silent walls and back at him, weighing him down. He sank to the floor and wept. He curled up into a ball and sobbed, saying unintelligible things and asking himself “why, why, why me?” He clutched himself tightly and rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

“No no no no no…”

After some time his rocking slowed, and he stood. He walked to the bathroom and blew his nose. He found himself looking into his own red eyes in the mirror, and he spoke.

“I can be better. I am important. I am a good person. My life is valuable. I can change.” He wasn’t sure he believed any of it, but he said it anyway. He made himself say it. He went to throw the tissue away and found a mound of toilet paper where the trash can should have been. He thought about doing it later.

“No, right now.” he said, finding the can in the mound of paper. He emptied the bathroom bin down the garbage chute and came back for the one in the kitchen. The mess he left on the way out almost refilled half the bin after he got back, but he thought the apartment would look better afterwards. It didn’t, but he felt better for having done something. For a minute or two. Until his phone alerted him again.

Paint something.

Hot tears burst from his eyes and he clenched fists tightly as he sobbed. Jim pounded his head, punching himself in the cheek as hard as he could. He had exhausted himself after a few minutes. I’ll do it later, he thought. And then the decision was made. He felt distant from the decision, as if it had been made for him, as if it hadn’t been made at all. But it had. Everything else melted away. All that remained was the decision. He stood. No. I’ll do it now.

“Right now… right now.”

Then he walked into the bedroom, opened a drawer, tasted metal, and painted the ceiling red.

Kylo Ren Temper Tantrum – Video to Prose Prompt

The figure turned, blue light from the monitors glaring off his metallic helmet. The man who had approached him trembled as the eyes he could not see bore into his thoughts. Swallowing, he shuffled his feet on the metal floor and began to sweat. He delivered his message hurriedly, the words falling out of his mouth one after the other like a chain tumbling from a platform.

“We have no confirmation,” he said, voice breaking. “But we believe FN-2187 may have helped in the escape—”

Ren’s saber extended in a explosion of red flame. The man flinched, bracing himself for the impact of searing plasma. He heard the saber’s shrill hum as it sliced and crackled through the air – but the saber did not hit him. Ren attacked the console in a frenzy. The slashes fell at random, sometimes slicing gracefully through, sometimes stopping abruptly on a denser piece of metal. When this happened, the leader of the Knights of Ren wielded his weapon like a club, hacking and beating the console to a burning mass of scrap. Bits of sparks and liquefied metal landed on the messenger’s clothing and sent up tiny tendrils of smoke. He wanted to escape, to flee the room screaming, to hop into and escape pod and run back to his parents on Coruscant—but the man was too afraid to move.

Ren’s movements slowed. He hacked at the console once more, sending an arc of sparks streaming across the room. He panted heavily for a few moments before sheathing his saber. He turned to face the man again.

“Anything else?” he asked calmly.

Mind racing, the man stammered: “The two were accompanied by a girl.”

The messenger flew toward Ren’s outstretched hand, shoes clattering against the floor, eyes wide with terror. He felt the impact of the glove, and cold fingers tightened around his throat.

“What girl?” Ren said. There was a coldness in the voice that the mask could not account for.  

 

What is this Prompt?

In his book Image Grammar, Harry Noden compares writing to filming scenes in a movie. He says:

A well-described fiction or nonfiction work creates the mental equivalent of a film, leading readers through a visual journey of endless images with close-ups, action scenes, and angle shots. (4)”

In this metaphor, a comma “…controls a telescopic lens that zooms in on images. (6)” We wanted to play with this idea in my creative writing class as we focused on his first two “brushstrokes,” which are participles and absolutes. (If you’re not sure what those are, that’s okay: I will include a brief explanation later on in this post.) To do this, we looked up a clip from one of our favorite movies or TV shows and translated the action into prose. I figured if we need to think about writing as framing shots of a movie, why not practice by turning a clip from a movie into writing?

This is a pretty straightforward exercise that gives you an outline on which you can paint your prose. You can make it as spicy or as plain as you want, and in reality you could practice any skill you’ve been wanting to work on. I liked this activity because it lets you focus on the writing itself, whereas trying to practice skills and create a story at the same time splits your attention.

Even if you’re not practicing a certain skill though, it’s pretty fun to narrate a scene from your favorite shows.

Give it a shot!

 

Participles and Absolutes

Basically, a participle is an “-ing” word that is acting like an adjective (describing a noun). In the following example from my post, the verb swallow is being used to add to the image of the man. 

Swallowing, he shuffled his feet…

Swallowing is a participle, a verb-turned-adjective that happens at the same time as the other action in the sentence. An absolute is a similar, but it’s a noun+participle combo that adds another image to the sentence rather than just describing the subject. In other words, the participle focuses the image, but the absolute zooms in on another part of the subject.

The messenger flew toward Ren’s outstretched hand, shoes clattering against the floor

“The messenger” is the subject of this shot. That’s who we’re focusing on here, but in this scene there’s actually a point where the camera does a close-up on his shoes (I could not find a clip that showed this whole scene for some reason, but go watch it, it’s there!). The absolute phrase “shoes clattering against the floor” achieves the same effect in prose that the zoom achieves in the clip.

There is lots of good information on the web about these first two brushstrokes, but here is a google slides presentation I put together to help explain them to my 11th graders.

 

References:

Noden, Harry R. Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999. Print.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Dir. JJ Abrams. Perf. Harrison Ford, Mark Hamil, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2015. Blue Ray.