20
“HAVE A TRY,” she said. “I have announcements for dozens of contests here. I don’t have time to enter them all. Why don’t you try some of them?”
She lifted some sheets from the stack of coupons and pages torn from magazines and placed them in front of me.
“And here are some cushions,” she added.
In the manner of the grabbing claw that picked a disappointing item from a heap of candy and cheap prizes in a mechanical game at the Dance Macabre Amusement Park in West Hargrove, she picked some of the snippets of paper from the pile.
“The familiar,” she said, releasing them and letting them flutter in front of me. “These are words I’ve found that everybody knows. Use them as you wish. For the shock of the new and the hope, you’re on your own.”
“I guess that’s what they mean when they say ‘in your own words,’” I said.
“Could be,” she said with a shrug.
I sat there, doing nothing. I think I was having the same sort of reaction to the task that I had whenever I thought of responding to a matchbook-cover challenge from the Past Masters school. I looked at a few of the snippets she had given me to work with:
so sweet and voluble
all new
the inaudible and noiseless foot of Time
ready in a jiffy
to walk on wings, and tread in air
fully assembled, not a kit
a breathing of the common wind
a dream come true
where the lemon trees bloom
in your spare time
“Go ahead,” she said. “Give it a try. No one is around but us. No one has to see what you do but me—not even me, if you want it that way.”
“Oh, well, I—”
“Of course, if you let me see, then I can teach you.”
“Sure.”
“And I won’t say anything to make you feel foolish.”
“Okay.”
“You can trust me. I wouldn’t make you look foolish when anyone was here, either, making you read what you wrote, or reading it to them myself, or anything like that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not like my mother. Or my father. Or my uncle.”
“No.”
“‘Uncle Pickle Nose,’ we called him.”
“Heh-heh.”
“They were all very fond of making a little girl look foolish and then laughing at her when she did, and then hugging her as if they never intended that she should look foolish, even though they knew quite well that she would and did, and then pinching her cheeks and exclaiming over her, as if she were fulfilling her destiny by playing the fool, as if she were a chubby toy put on this earth for their amusement.”
“Gee.”
“You’ll get none of that from me, I promise you.”
“Okay.”
“I will be honest with you, though, and tell you what I think.”
“Sure.”
“And I want you to be honest with me.”
“All right.”
“But not with them,” she said, indicating the coupons and clippings. “With them, you just give them what they want.”
[to be continued]
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🎧 829: “Have a try,” . . .