Sunday, January 27, 2013

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

For my Creative Writing course assignment, we were asked to write a short scene on this cartoon---



After two weeks of looking for a new place to rent, I finally saw a to-let board outside a quaint looking little house.
A hefty woman with an exasperated expression opened the door.
“Ah, the room..” she said after I stated my purpose of visit.
“C’mon in boy, I’ll tell you more about the place.”

I was seated on a tattered sofa held together with what looked like medical adhesive and soon a cup of muddy brown liquid found its way into my hands.
I looked around, trying to grasp the strange details of the room around me and thought it was safer to simply start some conversation “What does Mr.Dumpty do?”
“Sigh…Mr.Dumpty, what can I say. He runs a little shop down the lane. But does he stay there you ask me? Oh no, he doesn’t.
He has to go about the town, doing the things that ‘make him happy’ as he says…and Ah how mad they make me.”

I could see where she was headed, so I said “We could see the room now may be?”
“The room! No boy, there is no room. You see, Mr.Dumpty, he is the rough kinds; he can’t sit cooped up in one place. He sure loves some adventure.
I’ve seen almost all his bones break and heal in the 20 years of our marriage. And last week he came home in one of his usual disarrayed states. He fell off a wall he said. A wall boy! But I wasn’t surprised, the man is an adrenaline junkie, he has to do everything he can to fall off places and put me through hell.”

Now I was beginning to lose my patience, “So what about the room?”
“Oh yes the room. Now I have permanently converted it into Mr.Dumpty’s own hospital room. And he keeps it occupied a fair amount of time and you know what….”


I looked at the board again on my way out, and grabbed it and threw it in the trash, to save some other unsuspecting soul from a ruined afternoon.

1 comment:

Abha said...

Chavi! I am proud of you.. :) I can actually visualize it like some sitcom episode! :D