YOGA INSTRUCTOR
Detective Grossman gazed beyond Cheryl, focusing on something in the distance, maybe
his retirement, and said “take me through the sequence one more time.”
Cheryl nodded, knowing she’d skip the first part of the sequence when she found the text on her husband’s phone from his high school sweetheart.
“Curt and I woke early and I helped him learn the Downward Dog (wink to Cam!) for an hour, then he drank a gallon of Gatorade before I left to teach my yoga class.”
Cheryl leaned back, knowing she also left out the last part of the sequence, when she poured the remainder of the Prestone into her car’s engine.
Grossman, thinking of his pension and not the new widow across the table, said, “But you didn’t find him till the next day in the laundry room?”
“Last place I looked – I didn’t think he even knew where the laundry room was.”
Six-sentence stories are my theme in the A to Z Blogging Challenge, each story featuring an occupation by letter. Y was the hardest yet. I tried two dozen different endings, and I was ultimately never pleased but at some point you have to cut the cord and move on. And sleep! Tomorrow is the finale with Z. Thank you for stopping by, I hope you’ve enjoyed a few of them.
JD Frain 
Still made me chuckle. I know there’s still one more letter, but I’m seriously impressed you made a six-word story for every letter that not only makes sense, but also is enjoyable to read. I’m glad I stumbled across this blog for the A to Z!
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I’m glad you stumbled over here too, Serena! Six sentences sounds simple, but the hard part is coming up with a new story EVERY night. Whew, it mentally exhausted me. Long about “N” or “O” I wasn’t sure I was gonna make it. But it’s feeling good now! Only Z to go.
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My mother in law has this sign in the laundry room at her house. It goes something like this, “Remove clothes, lift lid on hamper, drop clothes in, close lid, and *POOF* the magic laundry fairy will take care of the rest.”
🙂
So, GREAT ending! So funny. I agree with Serena. Very impressed you’ve done this for all letters, well, except Z, but ya know what I mean – and wrote such engaging stories to boot!
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Donna, thank you so much! And coming from a future NYTBA to boot.
That’s a classic sign. I was thinking about this last night when I was constructing the story. We had a magic fairy growing up and it, along with so many other things, was something I NEVER appreciated like I should have. I need to go back in time to say Thank You to a half-million people, and then Sorry to the other half-million. Why would anybody have liked me as a teenager? And I’m only being kind to myself that I stop in my teens.
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I have to worry about you, John. You come up with far too many ways for a wife to enjoy the single life again. So one more letter. Zookeeper maybe? And did you see what the shark did? Just as we thought we were free to edit our wee hearts out, she dangles another contest. And with new rules. See you back at the Reef.
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OMG! You’re the first I’ve heard, it’s been too busy to get to the reef.
And you have a point about coming up with a way for a wife to enjoy the single life again. I better do an alternate version of this for my wife so she doesn’t get any more ideas. I already give her the motivation on a daily basis, I sure don’t need to give her means and opportunity too. That’d make it all too easy on her.
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this was great. i had to laugh at the end. amazing what you can do in six sentences.
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Thank you, Djinnia. Nothing beats giving someone a laugh. I think the best laugh came in R, but I’m a bit biased since I wrote them all.
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That was funny (despite the murder lol). Zipper manufacturer?
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Thank you, Me. What I find funny sometimes is how a story forms in my head and then it comes out so different on paper. Here, for example, in my head she kills her worthless husband teaching him a yoga move and then she dies doing the same move at the end of the story. But I couldn’t fit that one into six sentences. So in the final version, she kinda gets away with it. The evolution is interesting for me.
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Wow! Nice job. And Cam gets her very first celebrity shout out! She will be so excited to find out when she wakes up. What will Z bring? A Zenographer, perhaps?
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She just called – you might want to check her room, I don’t think she’s sleeping anymore! Maybe one day it’ll be a retroactive celebrity shout out, but I don’t think it qualifies yet. Unfortunately.
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This was awesome. Once again there were many levels to the story, which makes it even better and incredibly hard to in a short span. One more day. I’ll be glad to be done. I may never blog again, but it was fun. I need to visit a lot more blogs, though. There are a lot of interesting ones I missed.
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Wonderful, as usual. I hope the detective gets his eyes off retirement long enough to figure out whodunnit.
Yikes, the new contest! Madame Shark loves to torment us so. I haven’t found my way into it yet. Quite a challenge!
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I have to agree–another creative murder. I’m sure your wife would never think of things like this. I hope. 😉 You’ve done well with the challenge, John. For those of us who have taken the 100 word challenge plenty of times, six sentences seems easy. After all, you can pack a lot of words into six sentences. But it’s not easy at all. You have to make those sentences coherent, and it’s hard to make a 50 word sentence coherent! So you end up crafting and making careful word choices just as much as you would with a 100-word limit.
One more to go! You’ve set the bar high. I look forward to seeing what you do with Z. Zoologist? Zen Master? Zebra Herder? Zealot? Though I don’t think you can be a professional zealot… or can you…? 🙂
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Must have been at my place… No one else here seems to know where the laundry room is. And it’s just a cupboard in the kitchen, so it’s hard to miss!
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Congratulations, John; 25 down, and just 1 left! And although that’s an easy sentence to write, there is so much encapsulated into that sentence. It blows my mind that you’ve written TWENTY-FIVE of these six-sentence stories. I couldn’t have done it! Not in six-sentences, anyway. Not and remain sane. So CONGRATULATIONS, John! You should be so incredibly proud of yourself.
And what on earth is this I’m reading about another contest over at the Reef? Like you, I’ll need to check this out. And I wonder if it’s in response to those of us who’ve been spending time A to Z blogging instead of writing / editing our own WIPs ? How scared should this little woodland creature be?
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