The Weekly LitWit Challenge 6.4: Cheese and Sensibility
Thanks to everyone who participated in LitWit Challenge 6.3: Letters to your ex, part 2. A few amateur observations:
1. Some of you are still bitter and angry. Usually if you wish them dead it means you are not over them.
2. If you wrote really long letters to them it could mean you are still explaining the breakup to yourself because you are not over them.
3. If you wrote maudlin, self-pitying letters to them, we have a pretty good idea why they left.
4. Yes, they were shits. Ask yourself why you were attracted to a shit. When you’ve figured it out, forgive yourself and resolve not to do it again.
5. My druid told me that the real reason we embark on relationships is to discover things about ourselves that we wouldn’t have discovered on our own. Think about that the next time you complain that you gave everything or did all the work.
The winner of the Weekly LitWit Challenge 6.3: Letters to your ex, part is. . .tudor for the letter in the form of a delivery list. To be so mad as to attack your Macbook Air with stiletto heels—that’s fury. The penicillin bit is hilarious.
tudor and angus25 (winner of the previous challenge), your prizes await you at the Customer Service desk, National Bookstore, Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati. Telephone (02)8974562.
This week’s LitWit Challenge is sort of related to last week’s, minus the anger. You are called upon to test your skill in a genre we regularly mock, deride, and wouldn’t be caught dead in: romance fiction. Or as we call it, the fantasy love story, and by that we don’t mean your romantic weekend getaway in the Eyrie with Tyrion Lannister, on the Wall with Jon Snow, or Vaes Dothrak with the dothraki. We mean fantasy as in “totally unrelated to the practical concerns of real life.”
Your story must be not more than 1,000 words long, its protagonist must be fabulously beautiful and hysterically in love, the language must be lush, mushy and cheesy. In short it is a story you should be embarrassed to be seen reading, much less writing. And it must be set in Venice, just because we were organizing our photo albums and found these. You’ve never been to Venice? No problem at all, just invent it.
Your deadline: Saturday, 16 July 2011 at 11.59pm. The prize: The Collected Stories of Guy de Maupassant.
Begin the eyelash-batting and heavy breathing.
The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 11th, 2011 at 19:10
Venetian Bird Chase
Alicia Del Toro was beautiful.
No, that is an understatement. With her dark blue violet eyes, skin like clotted cream, sooty black lashes that bought to mind unblinking ivory saints, and a tiny hand span waist; it almost hurt to look at her for more than two minutes. Men had a tendency to pinch themselves in her presence, and children always trailed her, believing that she was some fairy or angelic being in the flesh.
But she had a massive setback, and as massive setbacks normally are a fairly tragic lot. She was as dumb as a doornail. She had been abandoned at birth, however, her unusual loveliness made sure that she only lasted a few months there. A couple eagerly took her in, misled by her large dark lavender eyes. They thought they could marry her off to a rich handsome man, and share in the wealth by association; now they could only hope for someone who would not hurt her. Who would marry a woman, who even though as lovely as a blue moon on a spring night echoing with the songs of nightingales, could barely string through a passable sentence?Now, at the behest of a rich maiden aunt, she was to go to the city of Venice. She was so hopelessly idiotic that she failed all the college exams, and had only managed to pass high school since she had agreed to represent the school in a beauty pageant.
Venice, Venice, the name alone evoked images of lovers and palazzos sparkling silver in the afternoon sun. Visions of singing gondoliers and marble pathways filled her beloved parents’ heads. If she could not find a suitable man there, they had no choice but to turn her in a nunnery.
But she was nonplussed.
She wrinkled her perfect button shaped nose and remarked in her monotonic voice, “Smell like canals.
Heavens alive!! Bad smell.” She covered her nose as daintily and tried not to ignore the looks of passersby. She looked like spring in the flesh, with her peach colored ensemble, her lace trimmed dress, her sun hat a frothy concoction, even her kitten heeled pumps were all delightful to view. She fumbled with her white leather watch. Why did even they bother to give her one? The Roman numerals confused her terribly. There was supposed to be a tour group. Her aunt was supposed to with the tour group. She was supposed to be with them.
But she had a horrible knack for directions. She had even managed to get lost in restaurants looking for rest rooms. Her mother had ingeniously solved the problem by outfitting her adult diapers whenever they were going out. They gave her an annoying rash though.
A flock of pigeons flew out of her path.
She was about to give chase when a tall man blocked her path. A lace trimmed hanky flew out of her pocket.
He was dressed in a crisp white long sleeved tailored shirt, belted trousers and shiny leather shoes. He had curly blonde hair, icy gray eyes and large well sculpted hands. He was stepping on her hanky.
“Such a lovelys lady should not be about chasing pigeons.”
His voice was gorgeous as his face.
But Alicia was oblivious.
She was more concerned about the hanky beneath his shoe. And where it could be convenient to keep a pigeon inside her stinky hotel room. Perhaps the mini fridge would do. She would just have to drink all the soda inside. His long tapered hands covered hers in a warm embrace.
The light filtered through his breathtaking features. A few tourists snapped pictures, amazed at the moment when two people who could have posed for magazine covers were in an obviously intimate moment. Alicia cleared her throat and asked, “Get me your birdie…please?”
July 12th, 2011 at 00:30
Good effort at awfulness, but not runny Camembert enough. More Roquefort!
July 14th, 2011 at 15:01
Natalie Montpelier initially wanted to behold the Campanile de San Marco. Instead, she found herself staring at a bespectacled man who was seated near the Procuratie Vecchie reading a book.
Sensing her ‘Attractometer’ going haywire, she casually beheld the man. She wondered how intellectual that man could be and what would he do to her once they become friends. Would he challenge her in a debate? Would they visit countless museums and libraries? The prospect of making love in the library made her nerves scream with glee.
Natalie has been with many men but she did not have an intellectual lover. All her past lovers were sex-starved boring men who frequently ask for ‘bedroom gymnastics’. If Natalie had not undergone the obligatory ballet and gymnastics class when she was a child, she could have been paralyzed now.
Her first lover was their family’s gardener who taught her the pleasure of gyrating intertwined bodies. Her successive lovers were either married men longing for sexual creativity, single men trying to master the art of proper lovemaking, or geriatric men revisiting their younger days.
The Venetian air was filled with an aromatic fusion of jasmine and plumeria. Natalie wondered if a perfume factory went kaput and distilled all the chemicals on the city’s canals. Eyeing the man in the distance,
July 14th, 2011 at 15:13
continuation….
Eying the man in the distance, she tried to visualize herself marrying him. How lovely their kids will look like! Her internal organs are having a smorgasbord due to her overflowing emotions.
When the man suddenly closed the book he was reading and stood up, Natalie took this as the chance of a lifetime. She could finally settle down and build a family. She would stop doing the flexible bedroom moves. She could be prim and proper!
The man strode away and Natalie caught up with him. Breathing heavily, she faced him and savored his face. ooh, the perfect nose! The perfectly sculpted face! All of him was perfect!
The man was obviously taken aback by her sudden movements. She proceeded to kiss him but then a sudden explosion disjointed the serenity of the air.
Death hang like a mist on Venice. No one gets to live happily ever after.
July 14th, 2011 at 22:08
Could someone please write something hysterical? Hysterical because earnest. No attempt at irony. Commit to the genre!