A Minor Irritation
I recently purchased Write Yourself Out of A Corner by Alice LaPlante. In it, she provides 100 exercises for unlocking creativity in writing. My intention is to use this book as a practice, which I want to share on here. Without further ado, exercise 1 of 100!
#1: A Minor Irritation
She jolted awake from a deep, throaty voice outside her window. As she fingered her blinds open, she saw two men pattering around her neighbor’s roof. She slipped bare feet into fur-filled slippers before creaking down the old splintering stairway. The main floor of her rental unit had warm sunlight peeking in, and she could see every impurity—cracks in sage colored paint, wooly dust between radiator coils, glimmering of a glass shard underneath the blue leathered couch. No matter how many times they swept up the glass, more broken pieces would somehow appear. Kneeling on wooden floorboards, paper bag crinkling in hand, she dropped what was hopefully the final shard inside. As she stood, long blonde hairs caught the sunlight. She took a moment to admire the thin, translucent fibers that rested in small curls on the ground. Then she got the vacuum. When was the last time she dusted? Or swept? Or mopped? The sudden awareness of hair and dander sloughed off the bodies of guests and residents inside the unit during the past month made her antsy. She hopped in place, shaking her head back and forth as though shimmying disgust away. Switched on, the vacuum’s mechanical hum filled the room. The droning sound was worth tolerating today, after all it was much quieter than the boxy beast her parents offered as a moving out gift. Just as the back-and-forth push-pull became rhythmic, the monitor flashed red. “Brush clogged?!” she shrieked. She went on like this, turning the vacuum on and rolling it as quickly as she could along the dusty floors before it would, inevitably, poop out. Since her roommate told her about this problem, she was sure a deep clean could fix it, but that doesn’t seem the case anymore. Last week she dissembled the entire vacuum to clean every filter and possible culprit piece. It wasn’t the bristles because it had no hair wrapped around them. The lint collector was emptied. So much for troubleshooting. She felt a swell of heat in her cheeks and dewiness in her armpits. She shoved the vacuum back into a shambolic closet housing three winter coats, two extra duvets, seven totes, and an entire stock of scarves. With some effort the door clicked shut and she clomped over the couch to fluff her favorite cream decorative pillow. Laying down and sinking into the cool leather she stretched her arm to grab the TV remote off a hand-me-down coffee table. Now, was a time for Rory and Lorelai Gilmore’s small-town troubles.
