WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD? Friday Flash 55

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FRIDAY FLASH 55

The idea is to write a story in exactly 55 words.

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At the salon, Galina thought she looked great after having her tail feathers fluffed, but Capone, the insensitive rooster, told her she looked fat in her new do.

Galina ---a little hard of hearing ---crossed the road because she thought Bovina Cow had said, "The ass is always leaner on the other side of cements."

(You have my permission to groan now.)

(©2009, C.J. Peiffer)

SEEING PURPLE

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As my readers already know, I spent the first week of August at a Mark Twain Conference at Elmira College in NY. The conference was wonderful and the campus beautiful, but Elmira College has one strange quirk.

The school colors are gold and purple. There must be a full-time staff to paint everything in the college's particular shade of purple. At first it makes the place rather unique, but as you scroll through my photos, you may begin to think, as I did, that the school may be taking purple just a little too far.
The bathroom stalls are purple, and even the tiles on the floor and the lockers in the locker room. The soap dispensers are purple, and, yep, even the hand soap that is dispensed is ---you guessed it ---purple.








There are purple water fountains. Bottled water is labeled with Elmira College purple labels. One walks on purple carpeting. One eats on purple table cloths and uses purple napkins. Chairs are upholstered in purple. Even ashcans beside fireplaces are purple.

On campus buildings, doors, vents, flues, and other trim are purple.

Commemorative plaques on sidewalks are purple.





In the rooms where Twain scholars made their presentations, the AV carts are purple, the screens on which power-point presentations were made are purple (note actor Hal Holbrook in front of the screen), and even the foam pieces covering the microphones are purple. The lens on a slide projector is gold and purple, making even a black and white presentation rather colorful.

The flora around campus is gold and purple. The grounds crew drives purple carts, wears purple hats, and cuts grass with purple mowers.

Outside of the bookstore, there is a purple phone booth beside a purple waste basket. Inside, one can buy all manner of purple paraphernalia with the Elmira Logo, even bags of purple M&Ms.

We took a purple bus to a picnic at Quarry Farm (where Mark Twain spent his summers writing.) The tents set up for an evening reception near the auditorium and at Quarry Farm were gold and purple. The marker with information about Twain's study which now rests on the Elmira campus is ---as expected ---purple.

I asked one of the student helpers if she were sick of purple. She said after a while, one doesn't notice it much. She went on to mention that in the winter, the salt spread on sidewalks to melt ice is ---of course ---tinted purple.
The point at which I thought perhaps someone had gone overboard with the purple was at the site of the construction of a new dorm. The chain-link fence around the site is purple. The scaffolding is purple, and even the port-a-johns are ---yep ---purple.

I guess if a student survives four years of purple at every turn, s/he should be awarded a Purple Heart.

STAY AT HOME - Shadow Shot Sunday

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"STAY AT HOME"

by

Ann Wolf

1986

This image is in response to

SHADOW SHOT SUNDAY

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This is a beautiful glass bowl from the contemporary collection at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY. Because they are on the inside of the closest side of the bowl, you can't see the images of ladders in the glass, but you can see their shadows.

Glass makes both beautiful and colorful shadows.

(©2009, C.J. Peiffer)

ERASING THE PAST - short fiction

This short story is in response to

RAVEN’S SATURDAY

WORDZZLE CHALLENGE

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How it works: Raven supplies two sets of words (or phrases) to use in a piece of writing. One can choose the ten- or five-word challenge ---or combine both into a fifteen word mega-challenge.

Mega challenge:
Spam, perpetual motion, sprinkle, telephone pole, stains, alphabetical, surgery, flattery, liberty, preservation, shadows, singularity, Florida, caterpillars, copy

(Words from the challenge are in bold face in the story.)

After a morning filled with boring meetings, Ashley sat at her desk deleting hundreds of spam messages that had accumulated over her summer break. It was the first of three in-service days at the school where she had been teaching Social Studies for nearly three decades. A thousand human perpetual motion machines would show up on Thursday morning.
Ashley wasn’t sure she was ready for the preteens. The previous spring, her mother had died. Then she discovered that her brother, a financial planner, had embezzled everyone’s investments including her own and her mother’s, leaving Ashley and her sister to borrow money for the funeral. Over the summer, Ashley's landlord threw her out because she had left her tub overflow into his apartment. To make things worse, Ashley was going through menopause, which caused extreme crankiness. With those problems and her surgery in June, she didn’t feel like herself. But Ashley was determined to put all of that behind her.
Her sister Marilyn had suggested a sabbatical for Ashley to join her in Florida, but her older sister had never stopped bossing her around. Ashley preferred her liberty to a semester with an overbearing sibling. Besides, with no savings, she couldn’t afford a leave of absence. She was sure she could handle returning to work.
Once the junk mail had been deleted, Ashley popped a few aspirin, then found her printed class lists and began to copy students’ names into her electronic grade book in alphabetical order. She recognized family names of students she had taught in the past, some welcome and some sure to sprinkle her classes with a few troublemakers. Her right hand began to tremble as she typed the last of the names.
She attempted to deal with disruptive students with humor and flattery, or anything else that assured the preservation of her sanity, but she was not always successful. She believed in the singularity of each student and made a supreme effort not to force them all into the same mold, but there were always a few incorrigible ones who drove her crazy anyway. She dug in her purse for a valium.
When Ashley peered through the slats of the blinds on her classroom’s windows, she realized that shadows had grown long. It was time to go home.
Ever since the accident, she was leery of driving, especially after dark. In the evening dusk, Ashley’s car inched out of the parking lot as slowly as a caterpillar. A child on a bike pedaled past the school's driveway. With a piercing pain in her head, Ashley flashed back to that day in June.

On the last day of school in the spring, she had stayed late to make sure all grades were recorded and her classroom was ready for summer cleaning. After all her troubles, she felt as if she had just barely survived the last grueling days of the school year without falling apart. It was nearly dark as she left the building. When she drove from the school parking lot, she saw her nemesis Billy Brandoff on his bike. She had a nearly uncontrollable urge to run him down. She aimed for him and stepped on the gas.

At the last second, she had swerved to avoid hitting the boy. Instead, she ran head-on into a telephone pole, resulting in her fractured skull. Afterward, she claimed she had no memory of the event. No one suspected it was anything but a freak accident, so there was no stain on her driving record nor on her teaching credentials.

Ashley snapped back to the present. Billy was at the high school now and she hadn’t seen any Brandoffs on her class lists for this school year. Trying to control the tick in her left eye, Ashley vowed to drive home very carefully and slowly every day. She would attempt to control her temper.

And if she couldn’t, she’d just have to think of a better way of erasing her troublesome students.

(©2009, C.J. Peiffer)

FOR LOVE OR MONEY - Friday Flash 55

"MOOlah 2"

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original drawing in ink and colored pencil

by

C.J. Peiffer

This post is in response to

FRIDAY FLASH 55

The idea is to write a story in exactly 55 words.

Click on the yellow link above to join the fun or read others’ stories.

“The first time I married for love. This time I married for money,” Connie announced proudly.
“What happened to your first husband?” Serena asked.
“He’s in jail for fraud.”
“What did he do?”
“That S.O.B. forged checks and stole all my money.”
Serena thought about Connie’s second marriage for a second, then nodded. “Good move.”

(©2009, C.J. Peiffer)