As soon as the old woman hobbled out of her car and up to the gate, I knew this was not going to go down peacefully.
We hunkered behind the window blinds in the shadows, my hundred-pound killer dogs and me. When she rapped sharply on the door with her cane, the glint of a stiletto knife at its tip winked with evil intent in the watery sunlight.
I signaled the dogs to take up their places on either side of the door and I checked the charge in my taser. We wanted to take the old woman alive if possible, for she had top secret information in that briefcase that could make our restless nights much more comfortable.
As I activated the automatic door, it slowly creaked open.
"Helloooo?" she called. Her voice sounded high and a bit shaky. Just what you would expect of a woman with 120 years under the notches on her belt.
She took a step over the threshold and Big Killer #1 leaped from the landing, clamping his jaws over her hand that held the briefcase. In the meantime, Big Killer #2 grabbed the stiletto cane, snapping it with his jaws and reducing its size from a spear to a dagger.
The old woman struggled to hold onto the briefcase and, in the tussle, the latch came undone and papers scattered around the living room. The old woman shrieked and scrambled to gather her secret information. With a mighty "Woof!" medium-sized Killer gobbled one of the papers in his mouth.
"No!" the old woman started to charge him, but retreated fearfully when a dozen mini-Killers streamed from under the stairs and began nipping at her ankles.
The old woman hobbled out the door and down the walkway as quickly as a snail, flailing her mangled briefcase and shrieking, "Get away! Get away!"
The mini-Killers stopped at the gate and pushed it closed as she crawled into her car and finally drove away, checking her rearview mirror and using her blinker before pulling into the street.
Inside the house, medium-sized Killer spit the top secret information out of his mouth. We smoothed out the wrinkles and blotted off the saliva enough to decipher the secret to restful sleep.
As we curled up for a nap, the neighborhood kids discovered a flattened gray briefcase lying in the street. As they yelled and ran over it with their bikes and skateboards, a white powdery cloud began to swirl out of its depths, growing larger and larger…
***
Can your own mind drive you crazy? In my case, that may be true. A less-than-pleasant incident happened recently with a sales rep who came to my house and turned out to be a really old woman who did not like dogs and had a few other attitudes I did not appreciate. Well, my mind kept dredging up this incident over and over, replaying it and imagining all kinds of future "what if" scenarios.
To clear this incident from my mind, I decided to try a technique I learned the same day--isn't it great how the Universe provides answers? Very much simplified, the technique was to neutralize the situation and write a new story. Well, my writer's mind kicked in and I mutated this technique to write this over-the-top dramatization of the story.
Doing this not only neutralized the situation, it made me laugh and gave me a fun blog post. Hope you enjoy it!
Posted by: G.R. Gabriel
