Community Prompt Sharing and Adapting

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dongregg
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Re: Community Prompt Sharing and Adapting

Post by dongregg » Mon Jun 10, 2019 11:06 pm

Sounds sinister. And will we find that Halima's "scheming" has an object beyond just making friends with the kids?

I just read Serendipity again from the top. You've created two vibrant new characters. And throughout, it's so easy read, as though written by the great writer that you are. :wub:
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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gkmoberg1
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Re: Community Prompt Sharing and Adapting

Post by gkmoberg1 » Tue Jun 11, 2019 2:02 am

[Sinister - I hope not! Wait... what another section so soon? Ugh, yes. One must write while the muse is present and the time is available.]

- - - - - - -

Ávila and Serhane sit together on the bus. The children bustle about in the seats in front of them. It seems that none of the three can remain in one spot for more than two minutes.

The two men discuss Serhane’s family import business and work out what each know in common about Barcelona. Ávila can see things had been changing while he had been gone for so many years in Sweden.

“How do you have the energy for it?” sighs Serhane as the kids exchanged seats for the fifteenth time as part of some game they had invented.

“They’re not always like this.” Ávila pauses then continues, “Actually, it nice to see this going on. Kids need to be kids.”

“Souad and I have ‘kids being kids’ night and day. You are saying yours are not like this?”

“No, they can be very much like little adults – a bit too much of the time some days.”

“Their pallor though. It is concerning. Is it?”

“It certainly is. And they are sensitive to it.”

“Can you explain it? If you don’t mind, of course. I don’t want to intrude.”

“It’s, well, an anemia,” says Ávila, working to fudge the facts, “and it takes a toll on them. Perhaps Halima has told you they do not get up until late in the day?”

“She has. That perhaps more than all else put the curiosity into her to find out more.”

“Yet Halima seems to have things well figured out for a new fifteen year old,” adds Ávila hoping to edge the conversation away from Eli and Oskar’s ‘illness’.

“Perhaps that is the scene you see. But you are not at home cleaning up!”

“Oh! I had no idea. Should we have ...”

“No, it is alright. But delight that you did not see what the whirlwind left behind today.”

Ávila listens as Serhane explains.

“Our daughter might be the master of organization, but in practice she can be a disaster in progress. The tea service and Rghaif she put together earlier, well, it was done at no expense to our household.” Serhane stops and laughs. “I came home to find Souad cleaning from top to bottom.”

“I apologize. I had no idea.”

“No, no,” says Serhane patting his hand, “don’t worry. It’s all in the day. We both say she’ll be wonderful if she ever takes to acting. She knows how to get it together for being on stage, while the mess off in the wings is, to her, the understandable preparations.”

“So, what amount of this, then, is her plan,” says Ávila as they watch Halima working on getting Oskar to keep up with Eli on a hand clapping & rhyme game.

“More than you realize,” says Serhane with a chuckle. “More likely than I do.”

- - - - - - -

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dongregg
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Re: Community Prompt Sharing and Adapting

Post by dongregg » Tue Jun 11, 2019 2:30 am

Oh my. The children and adults are so distinct in their playing and the adults talking.
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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Re: Community Prompt Sharing and Adapting

Post by gkmoberg1 » Wed Jun 12, 2019 5:02 pm

dongregg wrote:
Tue Jun 11, 2019 2:30 am
Oh my. The children and adults are so distinct in their playing and the adults talking.
You need to spend some time around 12 year olds! :) They will wear you out. Particularly if they've been pent up in a car camper for several days.

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Re: Community Prompt Sharing and Adapting

Post by PeteMork » Thu Jun 13, 2019 3:54 am

gkmoberg1 wrote:
Wed Jun 12, 2019 5:02 pm
dongregg wrote:
Tue Jun 11, 2019 2:30 am
Oh my. The children and adults are so distinct in their playing and the adults talking.
You need to spend some time around 12 year olds! :) They will wear you out. Particularly if they've been pent up in a car camper for several days.
GK is good at this kid stuff; so good I've begun to wonder if he's actually a forever child trapped in a 45-year-old body. Like Tom Hanks in big. :D
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain. (Roberto Bolaño)

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Re: Community Prompt Sharing and Adapting

Post by gkmoberg1 » Sat Jul 27, 2019 3:41 am

“At the bus station” a scene from the ongoing adventures of Eli & Oskar
Saint-Dennis, France
Something like 7 o’clock in the evening.
The weather, by the way, is rather nice. It should be a good, warm, clear evening.


~oOo~ ~xXx~ ~oOo~

Oskar and Eli politely stand behind Mr. Ávila as he and the other grown up talk. Beside the man waits a girl, who they are hoping will turn out to be Halima. Yet for the moment, a slight hand signal to Oskar and Eli from Mr Ávila tells them they need to patiently wait.

Oskar ponders while he fidgets, chewing over a moment he had this afternoon with Eli. Oskar had not anticipated Eli’s reaction to finding out they would be on an adventure this evening with somebody new. Eli had dragged him into their caravan and had given him a substantial scrubbing. At first he had protested, not feeling he needed to be poked at when he could do it all himself. But somewhere during those minutes, perhaps it was when she was dramatically expressing dismay about the dirt layers she was reportedly finding behind his ears, he turned from being annoyed to starting to playing along. Eli was his best friend of all time. But for the last days she had been upset and quiet. Just before they had left their home in Malmö, he had easily overheard her side of a heart-to-heart talk she and Mr. Ávila had in her empty bedroom. Mr Ávila’s voice had been calm and steady and thus harder to pick up. But Eli’s voice and terror could have been heard from clear up in the attic room. For a couple minutes, Oskar’s stomach had been on the brink as he awaited Eli’s answer to whether she was even going to come along on their trip. What was going happen, he worried, if she didn’t some along? Would everything fall apart? How could he go if she didn’t come along? - But that of course had not happened. Mr. Ávila and Eli had come out of the bedroom holding hands, and she had soldiered on with the final steps of leaving Malmö. And Sweden. Yet the fear in his stomach was slow in leaving.

That night as he sat next to her in the car, making up rhymes and jokes, he was yet thinking about what would have happened. He loved Eli. But if she had not come along, then the trip would have been ruined. It wouldn’t have happened. Maybe even their family of three would have come undone. Forever. Then he thought about Mr. Ávila. This trip was happening only because of Mr. Ávila’s care. If he were to leave them, their little family would similarly be gone forever. Oskar and Eli would go back to the way their life had been before they had returned to Blackeberg and found Mr. Ávila. And then Oskar thought about what would happen if he were to disappear. That didn’t make sense; he was not about to disappear. But if he did, that too would be the end of their family. Eli would go back to the forests and Mr Ávila would go to Barcelona on his own. From all this, he could see that the three of them were a family that all needed each other. He embraced that and felt good about it as the three of them joked together as they drove along through the night, all lined up in the little car’s two front seats.

Within five minutes he had largely put aside all such deep thoughts.

Yet the fear of Eli saying No to all this crept back into his mind at the quiet moments, with the knot in his stomach threatening to come along.

In the ensuing days, all had seemed steadily better. Eli was reserved, but yet was herself. The little group had moved along to this car park and things were going well. The little adventures they had been on were fun. Eli, he found, was on equal footing with him: neither knew anything about where they were, and so were experiencing it first hand together. He liked that.

Then had come this afternoon’s scrubbing. At the point when the caravan’s door opened and Mr Ávila handed in a requested damp wash cloth and she had turned to continue work on him, he had about had it. But just as she reached forward, the fading light from outside danced across her face and he saw the impishness in her eyes. She opened up her free palm in front of his face. “These things, lice, I’ve been pulling from your hair,” she said a bit loudly. He looked, but her hand was empty. The door behind her clicked shut. She put the washcloth solidly across this face. “Oh no,” she exclaimed again a bit too loudly, “he’s eating the soap. No Oskar!” He bit his lip so as not to giggle and then relaxed. What she was saying was that she was back. Not that she had gone somewhere, but that he knew she felt it was her duty to protect him. He didn’t necessarily want that; they had been over that. Yet, he knew that’s how she felt deep down inside: she wanted to protect him. She might be pinning him down and, okay, using the washcloth unnecessarily hard to clean his forehead but what she was saying was that she felt better. And so he felt better too. Her washing him was her being in control. “Here,” he said, sticking his tongue out at her and so thereby only barely being able to continue, “Dirt spot. Here,” and he pointed with a finger at the edge of his tongue. And the washcloth pounced. And her eyes continued their impish delight.

Of course, within five minutes he had put all these heavy thoughts behind him. The knot was gone. Eli was with them, really with them.

Eli poked him again. He put aside his chewing over this afternoon’s moments, came back to being at the bus station, and poked her back. It looked like Mr Ávila and the man were winding up their endless discussion. The girl was holding up bus tickets, five of them, and urging the “dad”s that it was time to go.

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dongregg
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Re: Community Prompt Sharing and Adapting

Post by dongregg » Sat Jul 27, 2019 3:50 am

GK, it brings me so much pleasure to read about Halima and about how Eli, especially, has reclaimed her usual spirits and confidence.
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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Re: Community Prompt Sharing and Adapting

Post by PeteMork » Sat Jul 27, 2019 1:31 pm

Hey GK! Good stuff. Love Oskar's angst, and Eli's "showing rather than telling." :wub:
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain. (Roberto Bolaño)

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Re: Community Prompt Sharing and Adapting

Post by gkmoberg1 » Sat Oct 05, 2019 3:02 pm

Filmed on location in front of a live audience, Camera Position #4
Bus noises by Phil, who turned 41 and then 42 whilst awaiting posting of this segment.


Halima had her hands full, even before she left the family flat with her father. She knew he was determined to meet the family she had encountered, say ‘hello’ and then say ‘good-bye’ as quickly, yet politely, as possible. That she had sneaked over and bought bus tickets for all of them was a huge risk. She knew her parents were going to disapprove. Yet she wanted to have an angle with which to move things along, if it could possibly come to pass that they might head off together to the city.

Her mother had made sure she was properly dressed for a young woman. Halima would be fifteen in only a few more days. Her mother and father had been catching on recently as to how much flitting about she had been up to on her own, and so were using the event – her birthday – to assert that she needed to bear the responsibilities of a young woman and no longer the light ones of a child. First off: there was to be no more heading out on her own.

Given she was going out this evening with her father, she needed to be dressed accordingly. Her father always dressed for being in public. And so, from head to foot, her hair cleaned and put up, then everything checked over, including the glasses she thoroughly disliked, she was made ready to go. Finally cleared from her mother’s attention, she yet managed to get dad out of the house on the timetable she had worked out.

They had walked straight to the bus station and waited. Sitting on the bench at the station had been painful. Her father was tense and she had passed the time by fiddling with the edge of the tickets she had been hiding in her hands. Because of the choices she and her mother had agreed upon, there was nowhere for her to stash the tickets except in her hands. It was only because of her father’s focus on moving things along that he had not noticed what she was holding.

Finally the nice Mr. Ávila and his children had arrived. But then she had been told to wait whilst her dad approached Mr. Ávila and their discussion played out. When it became clear the two men might end up standing there all night and that a suitable bus was soon to leave without them, she had nudged her way into their conversation and forced a decision on whether to go. She played her cards, literally (she thought that was funny when she reflected on it later), and somehow it had worked out. Perhaps it was the luck that comes with birthdays. Perhaps it was simply a lucky moment, one that seemed to fit rather well in with all things that seemed to concern this family from the car park. Or perhaps it was simply a nice night and her dad and Mr Avila were unexpectedly getting along.

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Re: Community Prompt Sharing and Adapting

Post by dongregg » Sat Oct 05, 2019 5:50 pm

I wait with bated breath as to how the lovely evening will play out. :D
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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