56: Jason's Pictures

Prompt #56 (out of order, I know) is to write about something good that becomes something bad.

Jason thought the happiest day of his life was when Shirley's agent agreed to let him photograph her. She was a professional model and also a contortionist. The first time Jason saw her portfolio on an online listing, his imagination filled with the possibilities.

Two weeks later, Jason thought the happiest day of his life was when Shirley and her boyfriend Jack came to his studio. She was a wonderful model. Her features could weave light and shadow. He had bought a dress for the shoot, and it folded and draped in just the way he envisioned it.

Shirley wasn't amazingly beautiful, but she could shape her body into the bizarre forms that filled Jason's imagination. Jason had waited all his life for the opportunity to capture on film some of his darkest, and, to Jason, most beautiful ideas, and now they were here, in his camera, on his disk, backed up four times so that he wouldn't lose them. He paid Shirley twice what they agreed on.

Jason thought the next day was the happiest day of his life when he went through the image files. He didn't know which one to work on first. They were all so wonderful. They looked like someone else had taken them, someone infinitely more capable and visionary than he. He worked on the images, cropping them and adjusting the color balance, fading some to gray, enhancing the color in others.

The happiest day of Jason's life (at least so far) was when he talked to his friend's aunt Carla and got her to agree to let him hang some of his photos in her restaurant for a share of any sales that resulted.

The next day, Jason arrived with his photos, each one carefully printed and lovingly framed.

Carla was the first person aside from Jason to see his masterworks in their finished form.

"Good Lord," Carla shouted, "get that ugly mess out of my business! I think I'm going to be sick!"

Jason saw the images as Carla saw them, and that was the saddest day of Jason's life.
 

Copyright 2012. Timothy H. Ruppel. All rights reserved.

This work by Timothy H. Ruppel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

68: What Gretel Saw

You remember Hansel and Gretel? The prompt is to start with the four words:

I thought I saw something in the old woman's eyes, heard something in her voice. It started to frighten me, but I fight fear these days. Maybe it worried me more.

She smiled at me. "You like candy, don't you, little girl?"

My brother was busy eating.

I was very hungry, but I didn't like what I saw.

She was still smiling. She was old, and she was offering us food.

To be honest, this was one of the only places we'd ever been where we've been welcome. At least since Mom died. I really hope Dad didn't know about Stella's repeated attempts to lose us in the woods, but I wasn't sure. Home wasn't for us now. We didn't fit in, Hansel and I.

And here this woman was asking us to join her, giving us sweet things to eat. I thought I was being too cautious.

I ate some candy. It was a big mistake.

When I awoke, Hansel was a prisoner, and I was a slave. 

What in the distant past broke this woman, this witch? What horrible thing made her this horrible thing?

I swore I'd fight anything like that trying to damage me. 

I did my work.

Hansel was under a spell to eat and eat, but he was smart enough to trick the old woman. For a while, anyway.

I don't want to talk about what happened at the oven. I can't stop hearing her screams.

I am a murderer. She was hurting us, would have killed us, and I'm not at all sorry. But still...

When I looked in a mirror just now, I think I saw something in my eyes.

Copyright 2012. Timothy H. Ruppel. All rights reserved.

This work by Timothy H. Ruppel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

67: Thou Art a Hypocrite

It's October, and today's prompt is to write 300 words about deceit. I love Halloween.

Sincerity, I have learned, is difficult. It is also greatly unappreciated. It matters not if you are a small child, an awkward adolescent, a young theologian, and old professor, or a man on a pension. Sincerity is difficult.

Do you really believe in your garden, or are you deceiving yourself and others? As you work the soil with your hands, water them, clear out weeds, are you committed to the act, honest to your core, or does insincerity fold itself into the dirt, trickle into the roots, feed like a fungus upon the stems?

Truth can be hard to grasp. When someone who idolizes you joins you as you wait, are you waiting for Him, or for her? Do you believe, or do you want to look like you believe?

I used to think that once belief was easy, when we, like little girls, always believed everything we were told,  innocent and trusting. Ah, well, as I've been told, "Welcome to the twentieth century!"

I stood firm while my friends mocked me. I sacrificed the rewards of the materialism and appetites of today. All that courage and loss has taught me is that it is not enough. That before the judgement of the Impartial, I am not sincere. I am a duplicitous fraud.

Yet, I keep trying, and this year, as every other year before, I sit in this pumpkin patch, now an old man, and await the One who rises out of the pumpkin patch that He thinks is the most sincere. Even though I should know better, I don't see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there's not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.

Oh, Great Pumpkin, where are you?

If you don't get the reference, I'm not advocating worship of gourds. The story is told from the point of view of an aging Linus van Pelt in the context of the television show It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown .

If you'd like a different, darker take on the same subject, check out Escape Pod Episode 25: The Great Old Pumpkin by John Aegard. It's rated PG, for "dark imagery and terrifying fruit."

Copyright 2012. Timothy H. Ruppel. All rights reserved.

This work by Timothy H. Ruppel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.