Summer break is here, which means it’s also time for a break from pontificating, so I’ll look to my creative writing pen for a time. Some of my students gave me the first and last lines of a potential story; my job is to fill in the middle! This week’s inspiration comes from Jackson Woodham.
One day I woke up to the scintillating sounds of Hank Willimas, Jr., on my radio. Yes, I’m old enough to still use a radio alarm to wake up instead of using the ubiquitous cell phone. As I rolled over to hit the snooze, I felt my cat, Miss Fury, leap off the bed and prance toward the door, expecting me to follow her.
I groaned and flopped back onto my pillow. I had gotten home late from the lab where I worked the previous night. I was a chemist, working with others to create a formula to easily remove fat globules that caused bumps in people’s skin. Many people tended to panic when they had a bump, and we hoped our creation would save money on doctor visits.
It was then that I was reminded how my cat got her name. Miss Fury did not like to be ignored, and she demanded that I arise at my first alarm each morning, no snooze button for this guy. She showed her displeasure at my continued presence on my pillow by springing back up and nudging me toward the side of the bed.
“Okay, okay, I’m moving,” I grumbled as I flopped my feet to the floor and hoisted myself to go meet the day.
Miss Fury guided me through my morning routine of shower, dress, breakfast, and, most importantly, fill her food bowl. Once that was all done, I was allowed to leave for work at Thompson Labratories.
When I arrived, it appeared I wasn’t the only one who was tired. Ginger and Beck, my co-workers, looked just as thrilled to have heard their alarms as I was.
We took the first half hour to review where we had left off the previous evening. Since we had been bleary-eyed at 9 p.m., we knew how important it was to double-check any progress we thought we had made. After all, when mixing chemicals, one can never be too safe. With three of us checking our numbers, we rarely had to start over from scratch.
We did disagree at times, though. Beck was really unsure of the direction we were heading. He thought we were relying too much on a chemical compound with which he had had a bad experience on another project. Plus, he had always been a bit of a pejorist.
However, Ginger and I both thought this was the right direction for the experiment. And when Ginger tossed her long, brunette hair, Beck tended to melt a bit. I just rolled my eyes, glad we didn’t have to argue anymore and that Ginger’s wily ways got us moving in the direction I had envisioned.
But dissension arose again later that day. We had just come back from lunch and were looking, once again, at our numbers. We had also left part of our formula to cook a bit while we were out of the lab for an hour. We got different readings from the concoction on the second try as opposed to the first. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to be concerning.
We decided to make two more mixtures and check them against the original. This was something we would do anyway, but since the current combo was fluctuating, it was more important than ever.
After an hour of cooking, we took some fresh readings and found that both of the new ones were identical to the first reading of the original batch. Just on a whim, Beck took a third reading on the first concoction. This was different from the first two. This strengthened his argument that we were headed down the wrong path.
But I was stubborn, convinced that we were moving in the right direction. When the two afternoon formulas followed the same pattern as the morning one, I thought that proved my point. But at this point, even Ginger looked unsure.
The other two left the lab before me after we agreed that we’d take a fresh look in the morning. I glanced back at the stoppered vials on the counter, hesitated, then grabbed one and put it in my jacket.
I was confident that the formula wasn’t dangerous. I knew we just needed to test it on a human subject. As I took my jacket off at home, I glanced at a tiny bump on my arm.
I was just going to do it. I would down the mixture and see if it impacted that fat bump. If there was anything bad, the amount I had would be too little to do much in the way of side effects.
However, before I could do the deed, Miss Fury was weaving in and out of my legs, demanding her supper. She really loved some lickable bisque packets I had purchased, especially the tuna and shrimp mixture. I set the vial on the counter, grabbed a bowl and a serving of the bisque, and set her feast before her.
As Miss Fury lunged toward the bowl, she tripped me up a bit. I grabbed for purchase on the counter and knocked the stopper off the vial from the lab, watching helplessly as the mixture dripped down into the bisque just as my cat started to eat.
Needless to say, that chemical concoction was not the correct form for what we were hoping. But that is how my cat’s tongue turned purple.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is pejorist, which means a person who believes the world is getting worse, as in, “Chicken Little was an example of a pejorist, always saying the sky was falling.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!