Free write - Sausage House

 

 

 D-L's Free Write

Tara put the finishing touches  on her Sausage House. Her handmade spinach and cheese raviolis were ready to boil and her Nonna's sauce was in a pot on the stove.

The house was spotless.

She had switched shifts at the hospital to prepare a perfect dinner for Tom's boss and his wife.

"Don't shame me tonight," Tom said when he left that morning. At times Tara felt she could do nothing right. At work she was the golden-haired girl. Maybe I'm schizophrenic, she thought. 

She double checked the table setting to make sure everything was aligned. A single pink rose matching the color of one of the sausages was in silver vases at each plate.

It was time to shower and change.

The meal went well with ohs and ahs over the sausage house.  

As Tom had instructed, she spoke only when she was spoken to.  Tara obliged except the boss's wife had had chemo in Tara's hospital and she wanted to know how the other nurses she knew were doing.

After they left and Tara was stacking the dishwasher, Tom listed all the things Tara had done wrong especially the "stupid" sausage house. 

"They loved," she said,

"They were only being polite," Tom said

Tara didn't answer. What she was thinking was that it was stupid staying married. If she could build a successful stupid sausage house, she could build a successful stupid life. 

Rick's Free Write 

It was advertised as a “Tapas Supreme” party, and Marilyn spent all afternoon preparing her centrepiece – a gingerbread-style cottage, except this was made of cheese, ham, chorizo, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, broccoli and twisted pretzels. She had seen something like it online, then she created an AI image to serve as a model, inserting each of the ingredients in the prompt.

When Stan breezed through the kitchen and tried to steal a tomato, she slapped him on the wrist. “Not yet!” she snapped.

After setting the dining table with the Tapas Cottage – exactly in the centre – she cleaned up the kitchen and went upstairs to shower and dress for the party.

“Oh, Stan,” she called out, “put the dog away so he doesn’t try to eat the tapas.”

Spoken too late. Scruggles, at that moment, had jumped up on a chair, and had his front paws on the tablecloth, stretching to reach the nearest chorizo.

“Scruggles, NO!” Stan yelled, which caused the dog to scrabble to get away, snagging a toenail and dragging the tablecloth – and centrepiece – onto the floor.

As the guests began to arrive, Stan was still cleaning up. Marilyn was in the bathroom crying. Scruggles was munching on a cheese ‘door frame.’

Julia's Free Write

He’d shown them!

Danny had grown up in a conservative, tightly knit family.

The youngest, a boy with three older sisters, he was not a stranger to having to fight, not only to be heard, but to try and have his say.

His father was an easy-going man, used to being catered to by his wife and daughters.

Defending his son’s right to be different wasn’t going to happen.

Danny loved baking. It started, like most passions, small. All his mud pies were a cake or pastry of some form.

Young, his mom and sisters let him play at helping make cookies, even going so far as to letting him stir the batter.

But actually bake a cake – no, that just wasn’t possible.

It was “oh Danny, you should be out playing football, tennis, whatever, not inside cooking”, or “Danny that’s not male” or, even worse “Danny, boys don’t bake”.

OK, so he’d had to turn his imagination and creativity elsewhere.

When his sausage house won the County Fair’s prize, they had finally realized that, indeed, he had talent!

About the Free Writers 

Rick Adams is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices.com, a weekly newsletter reporting the airline industry  top stories . He is the author of The Robot in the Simulator. AI in Aviation Training.  

Visit D-L.'s website  https://dlnelsonwriter.com, She is the author of 15 fiction and three non fiction books. Her 300 Unsung Women, bios of women who battled gender limitations, can be purchased  at https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/300-unsung-women-d-l-nelson/1147305797?ean=9798990385504 

Visit Julia's blog. She has written and taken photos and loves syncing up with friends.  Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/