The word for today on my Forgotten English desk calendar is “gardyloo,” which apparently was “a common cry in former days of the dwellers in the high flats of Edinburgh, who were in the habit of throwing urine, slops, &c. out of the window; from the French gare l’eau, beware of the water.”
So I guess, if nothing else, we should be thankful we don’t live in the former days of Edinburgh.
I spent today mostly working on the Sunday crossword (which I haven’t completed) and watching a few episodes of Eureka and Breaking Bad. I also joined my writing group for our regular Sunday free-writing exercise in Huntington. The group is usually more of an idea factory for me than anything, but this week I managed to pull together something approaching a narrative. We had multiple prompts to get us started, but it mostly came down to a shared sentence, the first one in the paragraphs below:
When the clown lost his head, Sandra knew that the party was over. The piñata lay smashed against the ground, foil-wrapped candies spilling everywhere, to be trampled underfoot, the afternoon’s lunch of spaghetti and marinara still caked to the wall opposite, in a pattern all too reminiscent of the guts and brains that had so thoroughly failed to explode out from the faulty robot’s bursting head. Sandra wasn’t even sure where all of the children had run off to, although she was sure it was just to one of the other playrooms, to create additional destruction, to revisit one of the other full-service party droids that had somehow managed to escape their original warpath.
The party was an unmitigated disaster. She’d be lucky if MechaPlay, Incorporated, didn’t sue for damages; she could absolutely kiss her initial deposit goodbye. She only hoped her son had enjoyed himself. Kyle’s tenth birthday had probably just cost them his entire college fund.
She stared down at what was left of the clown, marveled again at the detailed realism of its features. If she didn’t know better, if she couldn’t now see the mess of wires erupting from its neck, she’d have sworn that it was an actual zombie. Certainly, when it had shambled into the room, with its blood-spattered pasty white skin and angry grunts, Sandra had been taken aback, suffered a moment of genuine fear. She knew that it was based on one of the video games Kyle and his friends liked to play — Bozo Ghoul or Deadly Chuckles or something like that — but it was still quite a shock to see it in the flesh, so to speak. She’d rehearsed the line that would cause the droid’s head to explode, had been assured by helpful techs that it would seem real, if perfectly harmless.
But, like so much else that afternoon, it had not gone according to plan.
It’s a goofy idea, and I don’t know if it’s a story that has any legs to it, but I had fun writing it. And it was sort of nice to have something to read, however, short, at the end of our forty minutes than just an overview of the story idea I’d come up with.
You just can’t go wrong with malfunctioning zombie robot clowns.