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:
Jacques was walking around in his attic, when he came across and unusual book. It was lying open, and it showed a town of clocks. He bent down and attempted to pick up the book, but suddenly he was inside of it! He was confused and intrigued by how that was even possible.
He then decided it would be best to take a look around. There were many broken clocks and some others that were working. The ticking was all at different times. Some of the clocks were tiny and loud while others were huge with long, swinging pendulums. Jacques looked up and found that the room he was in stretched higher than a skyscraper.
He began to feel rather frightened that one of the clocks near the ceiling would fall on him, bonking him violently on the head. Also, the ticking noise was driving him positively batty. He was scared to even move, lest he cause any of the clocks to fall.
Just then the door opened, causing Jacques to nearly jump out of his skin. An old man entered, bent over with age and wearing spectacles. He was carrying yet another clock. The man hadn’t noticed him yet. Jacques suspected the old man would be adding this one to the odd collection of clocks.
“Sir? Are these all your clocks?” Jacques asked, stepping closer into the light.
“Arrggarraa!!” The elderly man stumbled back. “Yo-yo-you shouldn’t be here! You should be in clockin’ school!”
“But , sir, what is clocking school?”
“It’s CLOCKIN’ you dimwit, and it’s the school all the kids go to. Every student has to learn about the clocks from the past and the clocks of today and tomorrow. Where are your parents, boy?”
“Uh, right now, in this universe, I have none.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, I fell from this book that I found in my attic. This is all so confusing! I want to go home.”
The man did not answer, but turned and went about his business with an angry, disappointed face. Jacques started to walk away from the old man. Out of the corner of his eye, Jacques saw him drop a piece of paper to the floor. It said that he had to make all the clocks tick at the same time to get home.
Jacques sighed. It looked like he’d be here for a long, long time…
No comments:
Post a Comment