Write the following:
- A noun
- A proper noun
- An adjective
- A verb
- A brief line of dialogue
Then write a one-page story that incorporates your list of words/phrases into a coherent narrative (I would like to see both the list and the story if you pick this option).
- A Noun: Shoes
- Proper Noun: Coca Cola
- Adjective: Zeroadic
- Verb: Uglify
- A Brief line of dialogue: “Six is luckier than seven.”
Latiff only wore the glasses for a week before folding them up neatly and setting them back in the box to be returned to the store.
“They make you look dignified,” his mother said.
“They make you look like a punk ass,” His girlfriend said.
In the end neither was entirely right. They didn’t uglify him the way she said, but they did have another effect that made him want to keep wearing them. When he realized how much he enjoyed it, he knew immediately he’d need to return them.
The first time it happened he was walking down Farmer Street, south of Clinton past the place where Mabel used to work before the accident. It was called Tommies back then, but now it had one of those vaguely British sounding names, Pomp & Spice. He could smell the latter from the sidewalk. The glasses, black-rimmed and elegant, felt heavy on his nose. He didn’t know if it was the added weight of the dot-sized cameras embedded in the endpieces, the twin slim batteries, or the odd speakers lining the temples, so small he could hardly see them. Latiff could hear them.
It was the first time the glasses ever made a sound. It emerged, completely zeroadic, as though it would have happened even if he weren’t wearing them.
“Six is luckier than seven,” The glasses crooned lowly into his ears.
He stopped dead in his tracks. He looked around, forgetting for a moment that he was even wearing glasses. He looked for who could have made the odd statement and found himself alone on the street save for a woman far ahead of him, her head tilted back as she greedily gulped a Coca Cola.
Latiff said, “Who said that?”
When nobody answered he scratched his head looking about the empty street. A moment later the glasses spoke again, “You’re going to need new shoes in under a month. The pair you have on possesses a defect.”
He blinked twice. “What the–”
A man stepped out of the store that had been Tommies. He was looking down at his purchase and not paying attention. He was holding a bag full of small glass spice containers in one hand and examining a single container in his other. The man slammed into him, dropping the spice he’d been holding. It fell all over his blue shoes, leaving a spray of brown like dirt mixing with the slim shards of glass.
The man growled angrily, “You made me drop my spice!”
Latiff opened his mouth to respond, the words that came out felt more predicted than rehearsed. He said, “six is much luckier than seven.”