At the first Writer's Ink meeting, we played a writing game called "Pass the Buck." This game is a classic and produces some very interesting short stories. Every person is given a paper with a story starter, and they have five minutes to write the beginning. Every five minutes, the papers are rotated until each story has parts written by all of the participants. The end result is a mishmash of everyone's writing styles! Anyway, here is one of the stories:
Emmett was sitting on the couch, eating a load of junk food. He had soda, chips, fries, and cheeseburgers. There was a mess of trash on the floor and his mom was going to be home soon. Thankfully, he could clean it up really fast, easy as pie. “Mmmm, pie,” he thought. He ran and got the trash bags and vacuum cleaner. He piled everything into the bags and vacuumed up the floor. “Oh, crap!” he said, because he had forgotten to take the bags outside. His mom would be home any second. He looked around to find a place to hide them.
Just then, the lock on the door clicked and it opened. But instead of his mother, there stood and angry man with a large bag. He glared at Emmett and said, “You, sir, are much too wasteful.” The man became increasingly enraged at Emmett’s quizzical gaze and practically screamed, “My name is Mr. Eisenhower Jones, of the Bureau of Green Development, and YOU ARE MUCH TOO WASTEFUL!”
Emmett glanced around. What was this man doing? Emmett knew he threw trash away, but was he really that wasteful? Any why was this man barging into his house? “What are you doing here? Leave right this minute or I will tell the FBI that you are going through our trash! My dad just happens to be the chief.” It was true that his dad worked for the FBI, but he wasn’t the chief…he was the chef. He spent most of his time at FBI headquarters flipping burgers.
“Look, kid, you can’t fool me. I’m FBI, and I know your dad from the lunchroom. Kid, you need to go green; it’ll be better for you.”
“What I need is for you to leave, you psychotic weirdo. You can’t just come into people’s houses like that, even if you are the FBI. And since when does the government care about being green? That BP oil spill doesn’t help your reputation much.”
Mr. Jones didn’t really know what to say. “Perhaps you are right, kid, but we are trying to fix our mistakes. Don’t you think it’s time to fix yours?”
Emmett thought about his wastefulness, the food he threw away, the sodas he didn’t finish. Wow, he thought, I’m a mess. I’m hurting this planet. But it’s not like I could destroy the whole Earth by myself, right? What does one kid’s wastefulness really matter? There are plenty of more important things to worry about—the oil spill, war, the genocide in Darfur. What does it matter if I’m a little wasteful? I suppose I could try to be more environmentally friendly.
“Even if I am a mess, I expect you to leave this instant! I don’t believe you are even from the FBI. I have seen you before. You are from that reality TV show Save My Earth!” Emmett exclaimed.
“Well, you figured me out, kid. But I want to show you something before I leave.” Suddenly, a computer appeared and there was chart on the screen. Mr. Jones pointed at the data. “This is how wasteful you are, and this over here is how the world would be affected if everyone was as wasteful as you.”
Emmett was flabbergasted. He didn’t realize he wasted that much. Mr. Jones showed him a picture of Earth from space, and it was all grey from trash. From then on, Emmett decided to save the planet by only eating junk food that came in recyclable wrapping.
No comments:
Post a Comment