This page features snippets written during January 2022 for the second chance at CWE#1 at Jix. The thirty-one snippets form one complete story (which finishes on the next page).

Please note that none of these have been edited.

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The Thirty-one Secrets

Day 1: Word prompt — Blush

Diana took a sip from her glass of rosé and sank back among the cushions of Honey’s sofa. She glanced around the room at her oldest friends and wondered, not for the first time, how she had gotten so lucky. On the evening of the first day of the new year, the seven of them had gathered to catch up, to laugh and to remember those teenage days, when they had been the Bob-Whites of the Glen.

“You’ve got that secret smile on your face again, Di,” Honey accused, from across the room. “What is it that you’re up to?”

It took Diana a moment to realise that she was the one being addressed. Her eyes widened. “Me? I’m not up to anything.”

“You can’t keep secrets from us,” Trixie added.

“Can’t I?” Diana set down her glass. “But I have. I’m sure we all have.”

“I haven’t,” Trixie shot back. Then she frowned. “Actually…”

Her brother Mart turned on her. “Aha! So, you have a secret from the rest of us, too.”

“And you don’t?” She smirked at his sudden discomfort. “That’s what I thought.”

Honey sighed. “There’s probably a secret for every day in the year.”

“Or, at least, one for every year that the Bob-Whites have been together,” Brian corrected, with a small smile. “I think I have one or two that I can tell.”

“So long as it’s not who you kissed in the clubhouse, or anything like that.” Trixie glanced around the room. “What do we think? Can we find thirty non-romantic secrets that won’t cause any punch-ups?”

“Thirty-one,” Jim corrected. “Four or five each.”

“I can think of about ten,” Dan quipped.

“Good.” Trixie shrugged. “I’m not sure I can go past two. We might need you to make up the difference.”

“It’s always the quiet ones.” Mart shook his head, pretending to be serious. “My life, for the most part, is an open book.”

“Then I’ll start,” Dan answered. “That time you all went to Happy Valley farm and I said I couldn’t go because I had to be tutored? Actually, it was because the thought of all those sheep had me breaking out in a sweat. I decided I’d rather stay home than face them.”

“Seriously?” Trixie demanded. “You – big, tough, ex-gang member – were afraid of sheep?”

He made a careless gesture. “I’d never even seen a sheep before. But I’ve since gotten over it.”

Day 2: Dialogue prompt — “And what do we have here?”

“Oh! I’ve got one,” Trixie blurted out, a moment later. She turned to Brian. “Can I tell it? About Sergeant Molinson and your first-ever traffic ticket?”

“Does this even count as your secret?” Dan asked.

“It will be, when you hear it,” Trixie promised. She turned back to Brian. “Can I?”

“If we’re going to get to thirty-one secrets, I think we’re going to need it,” he answered. “And you’re right: it is more your secret than mine.”

She nodded and took a moment to gather her thoughts. “It was while we were working on the antique show and one day after school, Brian and I went out to run some kind of errand, but we had to use Moms’ car for some reason. We were on our way home when we had to stop at a stop sign and out my window I saw an injured bird.”

Brian put his hand over his eyes. “To this day, I don’t know why I let you do what you did.”

“So, of course, I opened my door and got out and grabbed it,” Trixie continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “And I didn’t have a box, or a towel, or anything, so I just held it in my hands.”

“Which is exactly where everything went wrong,” Brian added.

“And I got back in the car and told Brian to drive to Dr. Samet’s – you remember? He was the veterinarian.” She shook her head at the memory. “But we hadn’t gone more than about a block when the bird bit me and I accidentally let it go.”

“Which is the point at which we discovered that the bird was not injured,” Brian put in.

“And it flapped all around the car and got in Brian’s lap, which made him stop looking at the road so that he could try to get rid of the bird. Only, by the time we had control of the bird, there were red and blue flashing lights behind us and we knew we were in trouble.”

“So, of course, I pulled over,” Brian continued. “And Trixie opened the door and let the bird out.”

“But Sergeant Molinson – who was the one pulling us over – didn’t see the bird. He only saw the dangerous driving. And even when we told him what had happened, I think he thought we’d made up the story and he actually blamed me for the whole thing.” She looked over to her brother. “And he made some remark about keeping better control of your passengers.”

He smirked. “Which may have influenced some of my later behaviour.”

“Fortunately for both of us, Dad did believe the bird story and he paid the fine, otherwise we’d probably have spent a year trying to earn enough to pay it.”

Day 3: Picture prompt

“I have one,” Honey announced. “It must have happened a couple of years later than that, but it was every bit as embarrassing at the time and I vowed I would never, ever tell anyone about it.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t seem so bad any more; after all, there were loads of times that I lost my way in the Preserve and thought I’d never find my way out again, and it’s not like I had a reputation for having a good sense of direction – actually, I had the opposite of that, which you all already know, of course, so I’m not sure why I thought I needed to not say this–”

“Are you going to tell us what happened?” Trixie interrupted. “Or just why you didn’t tell us earlier?”

“You know, actually, it still is a bit embarrassing,” Honey mused. She took a deep breath. “So, I’d gone for a ride alone that day. It was spring, I think, or early summer, and it was one of those times when we were boarding someone else’s horses and one of them needed to be exercised, so I took her out and I don’t think I’d ever ridden that particular horse before, but it was such a lovely day and my mind kind of wandered and the next thing I know, I’m totally lost. And being on a new horse, I couldn’t expect her to find her way home again.”

Trixie frowned. “Are you sure we weren’t together, because this sounds awfully familiar.”

Her best friend of over thirty years laughed. “That’s because what I’ve told so far happened twice. In the same week.”

“Your legendary sense of direction,” Jim commented, his smile softening the words.

“Exactly.” Honey paused a moment. “So, I’m lost, on an unfamiliar horse, but the weather is lovely and I don’t have anywhere to be, so I just keep riding. I kept the horse to a walk and we just wandered through the Preserve until I started seeing a house through the trees – a completely new, unknown house that I didn’t even know was there – and, well, we’d been living in Manor House for a few years by then, so I was really surprised and I started wondering how I could have gone so far as to find this unfamiliar house, which I didn’t know, and wondering exactly where I could be. Only, then I rode out from between the trees and I knew.”

“Where were you?” Trixie demanded.

“At home,” Honey admitted. “The completely unknown, unfamiliar house I’d found was actually Manor House.”

Day 4: Word prompt — Volcanic

“I guess it’s my turn.” Jim ran a hand over his face. “This one is a little hard to admit.”

“Harder than Dan’s inexplicable ovinaphobia?” Mart enquired, with raised eyebrow.

Jim reddened. “Actually, it’s not all that far removed from that one. It’s about the thing that used to make me really angry.”

“When we put ourselves in danger.” Honey nodded. “Yes, I understand that a whole lot better now than I did at the time.”

“That’s not what I was thinking of.”

“Then, when I used to sign you up for things you didn’t want to do,” Trixie added.

“Used to?” Mart demanded. “You did that just last week!”

“Not that, either,” Jim answered quickly.

“Not being believed when you were telling the truth,” Di suggested.

“No.” Jim shook his head. “That wasn’t a secret.”

“Oh, then, it must be those times when we wriggled out of doing what we were supposed to be doing, so that we could do things that we weren’t supposed to be doing instead.” Honey sighed. “There were just so many of those times.”

“No.” Jim shook his head. “Those were all good reasons for anger. I was thinking of irrational anger.”

Diana frowned. “You mean, like when you were angry at Trixie for not knowing things she didn’t know?”

“It might be quicker if we just let him talk,” Brian suggested, with a shake of his head.

Dan turned to him. “I was going to let them keep going. They could easily make a list of thirty-one things that made Jim angry. And then they might forget about the secrets.”

Trixie’s eyes narrowed. “What are you hiding from us?”

Dan shrugged. “Heaps of things. But I thought we were hearing from Jim.”

“Oh! That’s right.” Honey turned to her brother. “What was it that made you irrationally angry?”

Jim took a breath. “Cake forks.”

Mart glared at him. “Typically, the presence of cake forks signifies that there will also be cake – a circumstance of which I heartily approve. What possible objection could you have to cake forks?”

The red tinge to Jim’s face deepened. “It seems such an overly-specialised thing…”

“But you don’t have to use cake forks for cake,” Honey replied. “You could also use them for… pickles, maybe?”

“Or olives,” Di added.

“Fresh fruit,” Mart suggested. “Cheese. Oysters.”

Trixie screwed up her nose. “No, thanks.”

“But why specifically cake forks?” Honey wondered. “Why not fish knives? Those are a lot less useful.”

“Unless you’re Mart. I saw him using a fish knife on his bread roll, once.” Trixie laughed. “Though, why he chose that particular knife when he had three to choose from, I don’t know.”

“I liked its little pointy end,” Mart answered.

“I didn’t mean it quite so literally,” Jim explained. “My anger was directed at all kinds of specialised eating implements. They made life difficult those first few months until I learned what they all were.”

Day 5: Music prompt — Heavy in Your Arms by Florence and the Machine

Di screwed up her nose. “That reminds me of the suitcase. Miss Trask never told, but now…”

“You mean, that very first time you came to stay with me?” Honey asked.

Di nodded. “I was so mortified by the things in it.”

“The fancy dresses,” Trixie remembered. “I never did see them ever again.”

“That’s because Honey’s mother convinced my mother to get rid of them,” Di answered, with a grateful look to Honey. “The bigger problem was the things I was supposed to wear under them. I didn’t put them on, because I couldn’t even figure out what they were supposed to do, but there were old-fashioned stockings in that horrible suitcase.”

“You’re kidding,” Trixie almost gasped, while Brian and Mart exchanged confused looks. “Not pantihose, but actual stockings, with a garter belt and suspenders?”

Di nodded.

“You were thirteen!” Honey shook her head. “Looking back on it, I’m more glad now than I was at the time that Trixie figured out that that wasn’t the real Uncle Monty.”

“My whole family is very grateful,” Di agreed. “Especially the real Uncle Monty.”

Day 6: Dialogue prompt — “It still looks crooked.”

“Mine – or, rather, my first one,” Mart corrected himself, “is a little more recent.”

“It would be pretty hard for it to be less recent,” Trixie pointed out.

Her brother smiled. “True. But I was using understatement as a linguistic device.”

“If you’re going to admit to eating the last cinnamon roll this morning, we all already know it was you,” Brian quipped.

“Not quite that recent.” Mart frowned and shook his head. “It must be about two years ago, I would guess. We were having one of these gatherings in the home of my esteemed elder brother–”

“In which case, it was three years ago,” Trixie interrupted. “I hosted two years ago.”

“No matter.” Mart frowned at her. “The exact date is not especially relevant; I was simply setting the scene.”

“Well, you’ve set it, now. Go on and admit what you did,” Dan snapped at him.

Five pairs of eyes shifted from Mart to Dan and back again.

“Ah. Perhaps it’s not such a secret after all.” He straightened his shoulders. “And it seems that my actions have caused some friction.”

“Friction?” Dan demanded. “What friction? When have I ever brought this up? Or commented on it? Or held it against you?”

“Yes, but what did Mart do?” Di wondered.

“I went to the store to pick up some milk, after someone used more than his fair share,” Dan told them. “When I got there, a delivery truck was angled across the parking lot. I was only going to be a minute, so I pulled in next to him. I went inside to get the milk. When I came out, the delivery truck was gone but someone had drawn chalk lines both sides of my car and written ‘FIXED IT’ at the end.”

“What does this have to do with Mart?” Honey asked.

“Ah. Well, you see, I had a craving for caramel-bacon-peanut popcorn and I couldn’t find any bacon bits–”

“Bacon bits?” Brian repeated, in horror. “That’s not an actual food, Mart. It’s 100% artificial everything.”

“–and so, I popped out to pick some up. During which time, I noticed Mangan’s attempt at parking and utilised the chalk I used to keep in the glove box for just such an occasion.”

“One day, someone will deck you for doing that,” Dan warned, with a deep frown.

“Hence my saying that I used to keep it there,” Mart answered. “One day, someone very nearly did, which is why I don’t do that any more.”

Day 7: Word prompt — Infatuation

“I suppose it’s my turn.” Brian’s expression turned thoughtful. “I could tell you about my first love.”

“I thought we agreed to non-romantic secrets,” Trixie objected.

Dan snorted. “This is a non-romantic secret.”

Brian nodded. “She was a Jaguar.”

“I thought an older woman was usually referred to as a cougar, but your choice,” Mart teased.

“I’m talking about a car!” Brian answered.

His brother smirked. “I know.”

“See, this is why you keep nearly getting decked,” Dan observed. “And how about if you let him talk, otherwise the next secret I share might be–”

“No, no,” Mart interrupted. “Go ahead, Brian, and tell us all about it.”

“I will.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “She was a 1959 Jaguar XK150 convertible in British Racing Green, restored to pristine condition. Her owner was one of my teachers at high school and I used to stay after class sometimes and talk to her about her car.”

Mart’s face lit up. “Aha! I knew there was a cougar involved.”

Jim laughed. “Mrs. Wallace? I don’t think so.”

“Wasn’t she a grey-haired old lady type?” Di asked Honey, as the two shared a confused look. “I can’t imagine her driving a sports car.”

“But she did. And I wanted one just the same,” Brian continued. “So, once I could afford it, I bought one.”

“Hold on. How long ago was this?” asked Trixie.

“Decades.” Brian shrugged. “The one I bought wasn’t in great condition and I didn’t want anyone to see it until it had been properly restored… but, it turns out, parts for classic British racing cars are hard to come by. And I didn’t have the time to devote to it, so I eventually sold it again.”

“Without ever telling us,” his sister noted.

Brian smiled. “Until now.”

Day 8: Poetry prompt — From On Self Knowledge, by Khalil Gibran
Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”

“We’ve shared one secret each, now,” Honey noted. “Do we need to go in the same order again, so we don’t forget where we’re up to?”

Jim shook his head. “I’m keeping track. Otherwise, we’ll lose count for sure.”

“So long as someone’s keeping count, I’ll go next.” Di took a deep breath. “During college, I spent an entire semester completely convinced that I was going to pursue a career as…” She shook her head. “I can’t say it.”

“Sure, you can.” Dan smiled at her. “What could be worse than being afraid of sheep?”

“Or not knowing your own house when you saw it?” Honey added.

“This isn’t like either of those. You’re all going to laugh at me.”

Mart looked sidelong at Dan. “Not so much as we’ll laugh at some other people. I’m already thinking about how I can borrow a certain animal.”

“I don’t care,” Dan answered. “I already told you I’d gotten over it.”

“Fine. I’ll tell you. I wanted to be a marine biologist and live on a Caribbean island and study seahorses.”

No one laughed.

“Well, what’s wrong with that?” Brian asked, at last. “It sounds very interesting, if a little different from what we thought you were studying.”

“But I didn’t study anything like that,” she answered. “I planned out the whole thing – of how I was going to change schools and majors and everything, and I filled out all the applications… and then, I didn’t get in. They rejected me and I didn’t ever say anything about it, even though I was horribly disappointed.”

“Are you happy with the career you actually have?” Trixie asked.

Di nodded. “Completely. And I don’t think marine biology was really for me at all; I get seasick too easily and when I actually tried scuba diving, I didn’t like it all that much.”

“Then it all worked out for the best,” Trixie replied.

Honey nodded. “And this has given me a great idea for your next birthday present.”

Day 9: Picture prompt

“Who’s next?” Jim asked, after a silence fell. “We haven’t run out of secrets already, have we?”

Honey shook her head. “I’ve thought of another. It happened when I was about fourteen – or, at least, the first part of it happened then and the second part happened much later, after Grandmother died… but I’m getting ahead of myself.”

Her brother smiled. “It might be helpful if you started at the beginning of the story, rather than the end.”

“You know, I’m a bit of a fan of unconventional storytelling,” Dan commented. “Maybe it would be more interesting in reverse.”

Honey laughed. “Maybe. But I’m not going to try it. It all started when I got summoned to a meeting at Grandmother’s house, with Mother and Aunt Delia – we were all Hart women, you understand – on the very same weekend that Trixie and Diana and I had planned a sleepover at my house and all kinds of things connected to some project we had going, I forget which one, but whatever it was, it seemed very important at the time.”

“They always did,” Trixie remembered, fondly. “I think I remember that. Di and I had the sleepover at my place instead and we had another one with you the following weekend.”

Honey nodded. “Probably. To be fair, we had something vitally important planned for every single weekend in those days.” She smiled, stopping to think about it for a moment. “Anyway, I had to go, even though I tried very hard to get out of it, and it was just as dull as I’d feared. Which is why I did the thing that I did.”

“Which was?” Di prompted.

Honey pursed her lips for a moment. “I graffiti’d Grandmother’s house.”

“You what?” Jim asked, laughing. “That beautiful house?”

His sister nodded, shame-faced. “It wasn’t anywhere obvious. In fact, it was so not obvious that apparently no one noticed until years and years later.”

“But what did you do?” asked Trixie. “Did you write something?”

“I wrote B.W.G. Or, actually, I scratched it into some plaster.” Her face tinted. “Anyway, I forgot all about it and no one ever brought it up. Then, after Grandmother died, the house was sold. About four or five years later, Mother got a call from the new owners. They were redecorating the house and they’d found my B.W.G. and they were trying to figure out who that might have been, so they were looking for some famous or prominent person with those initials. Mother, of course, knew right away, but she didn’t tell them. Which might not have been such a good idea.”

“Why not?” Mart wondered.

“Because they put around a story that it was scratched there by a house guest in 1860-something and they said it was Prince… I forget, exactly. Maybe Prince Bernhard Wilhelm Gunther of Schwartzburg.”

Brian frowned. “Wouldn’t that be B.W.G.S.?”

“I don’t know,” Honey replied. “But I think it was pretty hard to find anyone of those initials, so I think they just went with that. And it got written up in a magazine article, about my grandmother’s family hosting European royalty, which, as far as I can find out, is completely untrue.”

Trixie smiled. “And all because you resented being dragged away from our sleepover.”

Day 10: Word prompt — Posies

“It reminds me of something that happened at my grandmother’s.” Di smiled. “I guess this counts as a secret, too, so I’ll share it, if no one minds me having another turn so soon.”

Dan waved her on. “The more secrets you share, the less the rest of us have to, so go right ahead.”

“He’s got a point,” Brian added. “What happened at your grandmother’s place, Di?”

“Well, it seemed, when I was thirteen or fourteen, that I was always being dragged off somewhere while the rest of you were doing something fun.” She frowned for a moment. “I think the rest of you were taking a trip somewhere, that particular time… or I might be mixing it up with something else. Anyway, I thought I was missing out on something.”

“It’s hard to be that age,” Honey agreed. “Everything seems so incredibly important.”

Di nodded. “So, you all were off doing something together and I was trying to keep my brothers and sisters out of mischief – which, at the time, was a really big job. I had my brothers playing some kind of game and my sisters were picking flowers in the garden and bringing little bunches of them to Grandma so that she could put them in vases, which she spread out all over the house.”

Honey smiled. “That’s sweet. If I’m ever a grandmother, I’d like to do that!”

“Yes, yes. But what’s the secret?” Trixie asked.

“Impatient, much?” Mart teased.

“I was getting to that.” Di frowned. “It’s not an earth-shattering secret, really. It’s not embarrassing or shocking; I just never told anyone.”

“I don’t see that that matters.” Jim smiled at her encouragingly. “I’m pretty sure we can’t think of thirty-one shocking secrets between us.”

Mart opened his mouth to disagree, then shut it again, the words unsaid.

“So, I was trying to watch all four kids at once,” Di continued. “And my sisters were arranging their latest lot of flowers when I went to check on the boys. And they didn’t notice me coming, so I heard some of their game, which, as it happens was a game of Bob-Whites.”

“They pretended to be us?” Trixie asked, delighted.

Di nodded. “Larry was Dan, I think, and Terry was Brian – or maybe the other way around – and Bobby was apparently Mart, even though he wasn’t even there; I don’t know who they were thinking of for Jim. And they were pretending that the twins were Honey and Trixie and I was me and the three of us were getting into trouble and they were about to rescue us from certain death.”

“Like we ever needed rescuing from certain death!” Trixie shook her head.

“Riverboat,” Jim coughed.

“Sinking car,” Brian added.

Trixie bristled at that. “We rescued ourselves, that time, thank you very much!”

“Anyway,” Di went on, “if it was just that much, I would have told you all, because it was cute. Only, then, they started talking about what they would do when they’d rescued us, which was to hand us over to Jim to guard in a tower, where we couldn’t escape to get into trouble, while they built a proper prison for us, where we could live forever.”

“There might have been some merit in that idea,” Mart commented. “It could have saved everyone a lot of worry.”

Di laughed. “Which is why I never said a word!”

Day 11: Music prompt — Just One Kiss by Raphael Saadiq, ft. Joss Stone

“Ah, the innocence of children,” Mart commented. “You know, I also overheard an exchange where Diana’s younger siblings pretended to be us. It rather amused me at the time.”

“Then why didn’t you tell anyone?” his sister demanded. “Why is this the first I’m hearing about it?”

He laughed. “Because I was embarrassed. You see, our younger brother was present on that occasion and he had taken the role of pretending to be me. Mandy and Sandy were playing Diana and Honey, in some order.”

“What did they do?” Honey asked, as Mart shook his head at the memory. “You can’t just stop there.”

He took a deep breath. “Bobby declared, in sickeningly sappy tones, ‘Oh, Diana! You are the light of my life. Kiss me, before I just die!’ – in the last part of which, I thought he had confused me with my almost-twin – and he grabbed one of the twins and kissed her, right on the mouth.”

“What did she do?” Diana wondered, with a hint of trepidation in her voice.

“She yelled, ‘I’m Honey, you idiot!’ and slapped him across the face.”

Day 12: Dialogue prompt — “Are you certain?”

“Continuing on the younger sibling theme, Bobby once told me something about Brian that I found kind of alarming.” Trixie grinned. “Brian would have, too, if I’d told him.”

“I’m feeling a certain amount of misapprehension,” he admitted. “But go on.”

“So, this one time when Bobby was maybe eight or nine, he asked me, ‘What’s perforatious?’ and I told him that the closest word I knew to that was ‘perforated’, which meant something with lots of holes in it.”

“What did he say then?” Honey wondered.

Trixie clutched at her curls, in an imitation of her little brother. “Oh, no! I just heard Brian say he was perforatious. What can we do? He can’t be full of holes! He’s my favourite oldest brother!”

“I certainly don’t remember being full of holes,” Brian quipped. “Presumably, I’d said some other word, but I can’t think what it could have been.”

“No suggestions from the floor,” Trixie chided, pointing her finger at Mart, whose mouth was open and ready to put in his two cents’ worth. “So, I calmed him down and we went and got the dictionary, to try to figure it out.”

“Easier said than done,” Dan noted.

Trixie nodded. “You’re telling me. But, eventually, Bobby remembered that Brian had been talking to Mart at the time and that the topic of conversation was being understood.”

Enlightenment dawned on Brian’s face. “Perspicuous. Easily understood.”

“Close, but not quite.” Trixie grinned. “Perspicacious – which basically means having the brains to understand something. I don’t know what Mart said that day, but Brian’s reply went something along the lines of, ‘As it happens, I am perspicacious enough to comprehend and I’ll thank you to keep such opinions to yourself!’”

Day 13: Picture prompt

Dan’s expression changed. “I’ve got one, but it doesn’t have anything to do with kids, or elderly relatives, or Mart’s vocabulary.”

“Just as well,” Mart answered. “I’m not sure I came out well from that last one.”

“It’s from the first summer I was in Sleepyside.” He shook his head. “I don’t think any of you understood just how strange I found everything about Sleepyside, that first year. There were so many things I’d never seen or done before.”

“You hid it too well for us to guess,” Di commented. “You didn’t want us to know. Not that I blame you for that – I hid things, too.”

“And so did I,” Jim admitted. “There were plenty of things I didn’t want the rest of you to know. I wanted to protect you from the knowledge.”

“Well, this wasn’t one of those secrets.” Dan grimaced. “This was the kind where I didn’t want you to know the things I’d missed out on.”

“Specifically, in this case?” Mart prompted, when the information failed to materialise.

“That I couldn’t swim.”

“What?” Trixie shook her head. “Of course you can swim. I’ve seen you lots of times.”

“I can, now. But then? No, I couldn’t. But I didn’t want all of you to know that. Especially with Miss Wonder Swimmer in attendance,” he added, with a nod to Honey

A tiny pucker creased her brow. “I wouldn’t have laughed or anything. I would have helped you, if I could.”

“I know,” he answered. “But I didn’t want to be helped. I was busy pretending to be super-cool.”

“Pretending?” Brian shook his head. “I’m pretty sure you actually were super-cool.”

“Then? Not really.” Dan waved the suggestion away. “Now? Sure, I am.”

Day 14: Word prompt — Misinterpret

“Are you feeling up to being talked about further?” Brian asked his brother. “Because you play a major role in the next one I’ve thought of.”

Mart adopted a long-suffering attitude. “If you must, I will bear it with fortitude.”

“Good.” Brian paused to gather his thoughts. “One day, I arrived home to find the house empty and a note for me on the kitchen table. I read it and thought that Mart had said that I had to clean the kitchen chairs for him before Moms got home and to make a salad for dinner. And that seemed kind of odd, but I got started on that right away.”

“Clean the kitchen chairs?” Trixie asked. “Why would you need to do that?”

Her eldest brother shrugged. “I didn’t know. They didn’t look dirty, or feel sticky, but I wiped them all down – and the table as well, while I was at it – and started looking for salad ingredients. Which is where I ran into difficulties. We just didn’t seem to have much to make a salad out of.”

“What did you do then?” Di wondered.

“I was still poking around, looking for vegetables, when Moms got home carrying a big bag with a head of lettuce poking out of the top.” He glanced over at his brother. “She was confused by what I was doing, to say the least, but I showed her Mart’s note.”

“Which certainly should have cleared everything up,” Mart added.

Brian shook his head. “Should have, but did not. Moms hadn’t asked for the chairs to be cleaned, or a salad to be made. In fact, she had gone out to pick up ingredients for dinner, due to the poor yield the vegetable garden was giving at the time. But she read Mart’s note more carefully and made a discovery: the thing I had read as ‘chairs’ actually said ‘stairs’.”

“But that doesn’t help! The kitchen at Crabapple Farm doesn’t have any stairs,” Honey objected.

“True,” Brian answered, with a glance at his brother. “But what Moms had asked Mart was to sweep the kitchen floor, the back porch and the stairs down into the back yard while she went and got some salad ingredients to go with dinner. Except that Mart was too busy thinking about a certain person that he wanted to visit and he wasn’t listening properly. And so, instead of doing the work himself, he wrote an inaccurate and misleading note for me, so that I could do it instead.”

Day 15: Music prompt — Dark Blue, by Jack’s Mannequin
“This flood (this flood) is slowly rising up swallowing the ground”

Jim looked over at Mart’s reddened face. “But not everything you did as a teenager was wrong,” he told him. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as glad to hear anything as I was when I heard your voice calling us, while we huddled on top of a barn roof surrounded by water.”

“Yes, but that’s no secret,” Honey pointed out. “We all told Mart that at the time – over and over again, probably.”

“True.” Jim shrugged. “But I never told anyone the thought that popped into my head.”

“I had a lot of strange thoughts that night, which I’ve never told anyone,” Trixie admitted, while Honey nodded in agreement.

“As did I. And some of those are going to stay unsaid,” Jim answered. “But the thing I’m thinking of now is different. I heard Mart’s voice through the megaphone and it reminded me of Fozzie Bear.”

“Fozzie Bear?” Trixie repeated, incredulously.

“From The Muppet Show,” Jim added.

“Yes, I know who Fozzie Bear is,” Trixie replied. “I just don’t see what made you think of him.”

“Especially since I didn’t make any bad jokes.” Mart frowned a little. “I think I just called your names.”

Jim nodded. “The megaphone distorted your voice. And all I could think of was Fozzie Bear, calling ‘Kermit!’”

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