Today is my fortieth birthday: I am 40 today!
In honor of such, I revive (by actual reader request) I Remember MrsDarwin, these four years extinct, to make a birthday request of all of you: a piece of flash fiction. As I toil for your reading enjoyment, don't let me toil alone! Brighten my journey into the darkness of middle age with the spark of your creativity.
Write me a little story, or a poem, or a six-word memoir ("For sale: baby shoes. Never worn."), or, if the spirit moves you, follow the actual rules of the game:
If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL MEMORY OF YOU AND ME.
It can be anything you want--good or bad--BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.
When you're finished, post this paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you.
You can find all sorts of mendacity of this sort in past installments of I Remember MrsDarwin.
A haiku for you:
ReplyDeleteI had no clue this
was your blog when you friended
me on Facebook. LOL!
50% off day at Goodwill on my 40.5 birthday was a great time and place to meet a similarly thrifty woman determined to outfit herself for next Halloween in July....we’ve been thrift-shopping ninja sisters ever since.
ReplyDeleteI didn't mean to get you in so much trouble the night we met. My only excuse can be: I didn't know the dean was loaded.
ReplyDeleteI never knew someone could love ‘Twilight’ any more than myself, but there we were, fighting over the last book at The Beehive.
ReplyDeleteThis is Mary Paulus, by the way! I don’t think I’ve ever commented, so I don’t know how to make my name show up! Ha!
DeleteThe life of a Weird Al groupie is no Amish Paradise, but we were always there for each other, Mrs. D. You always brought a smile to my face, and nobody could play air squeezebox quite like you!
ReplyDeleteI'm forever grateful to you for the kindness you showed me at the Parents of Estranged Furrbabies support group. I could tell you truly cared about how hard it was for me when Fluffy left home. Wishing you all the best in your career as a domestic animal therapist!
ReplyDeleteForty is ruby so but something red.
ReplyDeleteOf course you remember that day when you turned 30 and we bumped heads during Christmas choir rehearsal as we both dropped our sheet music. What I didn’t share with you was that since then I cannot bring myself to sit next to an alto ever again.
ReplyDeleteActually, one of my first memories is of you. I was visiting Franciscan with my parents and older brother when I was one year old (we were visiting Ohio, I remember the trip clearly) and my mama was carrying me up the stairs in the JC and I kicked her and she accidentally dropped me over the railing.* Fortunately you caught me, or at least, broke my fall.** I know it was you because nobody else has such a unique hairstyle, one that has lasted to this day.
ReplyDelete*Now that I'm an adult, let me once again assert that it was entirely her fault.
**My apologies for the broken nose.
It was an ill day for me when I laid eyes on the Thanatogony of St. John Kakokalos.
ReplyDeleteClutching the baneful volume to my affrighted breast I shudderingly made my way through gambrel-haunted Arkham to legend-haunted Miskatonic University. Crossing the coed-haunted campus, I entered the shadow-haunted library and approached the demon-haunted circulation desk. There I was confronted by Mrs. Darwin.
She loomed over me, huge and implacable, as though carven from a Cyclopean block of diorite by some ghoul-inspired craftsman of ancient and rumoured Sarkomand.
An icy chill shot through every fibre of my being as I presented the tome of archaic lore to her. Outside the library the whippoorwills commenced to chatter rhythmically in time with my breathing. The sun was momentarily obscured by some vast shape and I heard the loathsome tittering of the fabled Shantak-bird wax and wane as it swooped ominously about the cupola of the titan spire that soared blasphemously above the library.
Then Mrs. Darwin spoke, her voice deep and reverberant, as though the words issued not from her lips but from some tenebrous unhallowed cavern an unimaginable distance below.
"This book is a week overdue! You shall be cast into the nethermost infinity where the blind idiot-god Azathoth blasphemes and bubbles to the nauseous piping of daemonic flute-players. There shall your miserable soul be devoured in torment for all eternity."
Yet even as she raised her hand to wreak the doom she had pronounced, I drew forth from my bosom a star-stone of ancient Mnar, inscribed with the Elder Sign, and defying the eldritch runes above setting forth the dread warning "Silence Please" I pronounced the chant of Ibn Xichuatlatlatl. As the sonorous syllables rolled forth, lightning flashed from the cloudless sky, the earth trembled, and an unnamable foetor pervaded the library. Before my eyes Mrs. Darwin writhed and dwindled.
Into the unfathomable and all-encompassing silence which followed came the words, "Very well, then, the fine is a dollar."
As I stumbled forth, there passed by me with squelching step a being whose disquieting outline was imperfectly concealed beneath a voluminous cloak and whose face was hidden by a waxen mask.
I madly fled as from behind me echoed that ghastly, soul-shattering voice.
"Mr. Cthulhu! This book is three billion years overdue! And it's waterstained!"
Save the three years spent gaining my sword, no event has so impacted my practice of sword-magic as the all-night bender at the Fool's Rush Inn with Mrs. Darwin, for she is the one who taught me then and there that glory, reknown, and admiration are the product of properly pursuing the Dancer's Discipline, rather than its proper end, which is in fact to provide thrilling drama which inspires others to challenge their difficulties, rather than hide from them.
ReplyDeleteMy brood and I were walking down the shoulder of a country road, clutching our MetroCards in confusion and wondering how we would ever get back to New York. To lift their spirits my girls began to sing, "Look around, look around, how lucky we are to be alive right now!" A passing SUV pulled quickly to the side of the road, and you popped your head out and giddily joined in. We sang the entire soundtrack to Hamilton during the ride you gave us to the airport. My kids still talk about the miracle of your appearance out of nowhere, and the fact that you knew every word to every song.
ReplyDelete