My friend Jess, for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is regularly posting excerpts from novels she's not writing over at her website. They're great--have a look. Since I haven't written any fiction since my undergraduate "Stand By Me" rip-off fiasco, I decided to join her, if only for today:
*Warning: This excerpt is not from a children's novel that I'm not writing:
It’s true that she’d make a mess when she cooked. And it’s true that she had quit leaving notes around the house, true that she had just about stopped using words altogether. But c’mon, Ben thought, AC-cidentally leaving paprike on the nightstand?
“Better than someone else’s condom,” he said to himself, inventing extremes to justify his insecurity, as he had done most of his life, moreso the last few weeks. He didn’t need, now, to find a ticket stub or an overlarge rubber for confirmation.
At lunch the week before, Abel, whom he envied for getting the Peachtree Heights-Spiceland route, told him about this new movie Wonder Boys, about this one scene where this janitor is in the car with a professor. The janitor had seen a biography about Errol Flynn in the professor’s satchel, so he asked him whether it were really true that Flynn used to put cocaine on his penis to heighten the sensation, and the professor said oh, yeah, and paprika and ground lamb, too. Ben thought that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard, but he loved that he could tell that Abel, like the janitor, was hoping to find out if it really worked.
Ben loved that it was so easy for him to have caught his fiancee. She would be home in a few minutes, and he wanted to come up with the perfect question, just one simple sentence that would make her confess—first the pause, then the eyeballs fuzzing and refocusing, then the open jaw. He would stand up from the table, put his index finger over her mouth, and start laughing, then “Oh, my God, you freakin’ kill me . . .” as he walks out the door, “. . . papRIka on the nightstand! Oh, my G—”
She got home early. She opened the door and saw him at the table, smiling, then jump a bit, realizing she had just come in.
"What’s so funny?” she asked.
He grabbed the salt shaker, unscrewed the lid, and said, “Hey, try to spell ‘prophylactic.’”
see, i knew you had fiction within you! :)
Posted by: bobbie at November 13, 2004 05:09 AMVery nice. Too bad you're not writing that.
Posted by: whitey at November 15, 2004 08:39 AM