“The river of cake batter was a nuisance,” Officer Blando grumbled sarcastically to himself.”
He continued mumbling as he drove away from the house, shaking his head. He knew that the river of lava was well beyond being a nuisance. It was an outright danger, and those new immigrants just didn’t understand that they needed to obey the evacuation order pronto. They thought they were far enough away from the molten rock. Akamenabar had told Officer Blando that they’d leave the following day. His family was still working on cleaning up the river of cake batter.
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Commentary: This came from two sets of prompts. On March 3, 2017, we had “nuisance, river, cake.” I usually don’t do the homework for my writing group. Most of they are retired and have more time. But that day I felt smug, as I had immediately written “The river of cake batter was a nuisance.” There the sentence stood, in its loneliness, on March 22, the next time I could attend, when the prompt was a photo of a lava flow. When I read the story, one of the listeners said she saw The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. That’s what I like about creative writing. It’s a new story in every reader’s mind.
Interestingly, coincidentally, NPR’s RadioLab episode for today, April 2, 2017, is about translation. The first piece is about a writer who ended up with a 700 page book that resulted from multiple translations of a 28 line poem, that had only 3 syllables per line. Check it out. https://www.wnyc.org/radio/#/ondemand/745884
