‘Cling,’ the message notification jolted me from my sleep. Rummaging through the bedsheets I found my handset under a heap.
‘Have you started writing for quintale-51?’
I muttered under my breath, ‘Instead of me why couldn’t she ask someone?’
My ego stopped me from uttering the truth. I fervently typed, ‘I am almost done, Mrs.Ruth.’
There was a lull for a while. Either she had gone to the washroom or turned senile. For her self-esteem would have burst. She was the one in the writing group to submit stories first.
‘This is going to be a tough one for her,’ I grinned. The prompt being confusing the chances of her submitting must have thinned.
The prompt setters had pronounced the submission deadline, giving no time for self-remorse. They avered that consecutive lines in the story should rhyme at the end, and the piece should not sound like poetry but prose!!!
A smile adorned my face. I thought Mrs. Ruth would not be in this month’s writing race. I had been judgemental about her potential in writing anything rhyming. I concluded that she was too old for grooming.
But my myth got shattered into pieces. She got back to messaging after a short recess.
‘I have finished writing,’ she declared.
The words hit me hard I got scared.
I inserted some smiley emoticons, nevertheless.
‘That is great Mrs. Ruth,’ I managed to type, camouflaging my distress.
She continued nagging me to hear her plot and began typing the first line.
I tossed and turned to rack my brain to come up with something if she enquires about mine.
Her story looked perfect with a plot, prose, and rhyme.
I excused myself as I (thankfully) heard the doorbell chime.
Under the pretext of answering it, I moved away from my phone. Seconds later I was with my laptop in my comfort zone.
Mrs. Ruth would be at the church till noon. My head had to come up with a plot soon. It needed time to think of rhyming words that sounded good. I declared that today there would be no food.
‘What the hell?’ screamed the spouse.
I screamed back, ‘Why don’t you cook, it is after all your house?’
He moaned and groaned but I warned him that I was ‘seeking’ something. He peered at the laptop screen but found nothing.
Meanwhile, post noon, Mrs. Ruth’s calls, I had to decline. Since I was meticulously writing rhyming consecutive sentences, with a storyline.
By evening it was almost done. The whole experience had been no fun.
I had managed to write something which I thought read great. But it would be the judges who would decide my fate.
My sincere request to the jury is to grace me. In front of Mrs. Ruth I want to save my face you see. Yet one more request would be to keep me in a spot above Mrs. Ruth. Winning over her at least once has been my goal, that is the eternal truth!!!
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