This week’s menu features a children’s short story.
I wrote it a few days back for a competition. 500 words was the maximum length. You had to include something that changes color. I chose a person’s face.
Hope you like it.
“Precious Menace to Torn Pocket. Do you read me? “
“I be readin’ you loud and clear boss.”
“You are go for entry Torn Pocket. I say again – you are go for entry.”
“Just a second. My shoelace has come undone.”
“Say again. You cut off. What’s not done?
“My shoelace. It’s come undone. Only take a minute.”
Mikala could feel the first pangs of annoyance rise up through her throat and begin to turn her face red. The freckle-faced schoolgirl, who packed a manipulative tool kit few would have imagined someone so young might be capable of, shifted her uncomfortable position on the second top concrete step outside Mr Fleckenstein’s 1st story classroom and squeezed the handset with added pressure.
“Listen to me cough drop. I haven’t spent two weeks planning this whole operation for you to foul it up now. Climb the stairs, look for the bag and place the note inside. Now!”
From her concealed position behind the playground bush closest to the junior school bubblers, Ruby reminded herself that making good on her pledge to accept and carry out this entry-grade prank would be looked on favorably from higher-ups within the organization known as The Silk Spiders.
Agent Mikayla was, after all, a low-level operative, barely above herself in ranking and importance. No one must have an inkling of her real ambitions. She would bypass the temper and stumble on.
“Roger that.”
Performing a hurried point-to-point scan for teachers while at the same time inserting the periwinkle-blue mini walkie-talkie deep inside her dress pocket, Ruby circled the garden bed of dirt and weeds and headed straight up the first flight of stairs at the other end of the balcony from where Mikayla was positioned.
It was at that moment her eyes began to glaze over and an expression other than boredom first began to take hold. The mischievous set-up note, fraudulently proclaiming undying love that had taken several days of practice to impersonate class captain Sarah Hornbuckle’s artful handwriting was ready.
It was her job to place it unseen in the outer pocket of blonde-haired Huey Waks’s school bag.
But which bag was it?
She’d been told his was navy blue with white trim and a miniature school crest label on the side. It was always placed at the end of the bag-rack on the middle wooden rung.
Yet in the midst of what was undeniably her very first ‘hot zone’, and her heart fully in car-alarm mode, the riddle now before her was this: three identical looking bags each staring back at her like innocent triplets laying in their crib.
Amid the sudden chime of the school bell and with no time left to ponder, Ruby quickly shoved the note inside the middle bag’s outer pocket and as calmly as she could, retreated back down the stairs. On cue, her walkie-talkie squawked to life.
“How’d you go sweetcakes?”
“Middling to good” Ruby shot back, the hint of a smile spreading across her unflushed face.
I love it, Glen. It’s so funny–just reading about the kids’ hijinks sort of made my stomach want to tense up, ’cause I was immediately thrown back in time to junior high, high school, and all the crap involved with being a kid–especially if YOU’RE the target of laughter or cruelty. Luckily, I wasn’t in the spotlight often. I was very quiet and shy, and if someone wanted to start something with me, I’d just stare at them silently. It really worked to intimidate and get kids to leave me alone, but it wasn’t on purpose. I’d be SO MORTIFIED that someone was putting me in the “spotlight” that I’d be mute with horror and rage, basically. But it worked! lol
At any rate, that was a good use of something turning a color, too, a face turning red.
But it’s a cliffhanger, right?! Whose bag did she actually put the note into?!
Your comments are always so AMAZING Stacey! Thankyou. Whose bag did the note end up in? I don’t even know myself!