This week I am going to lighten things up a bit. Following is a short story I wrote as an entry in a Creative Writing competition at Goodreads that I just recently won.
The challenge was to pick one of the following prompts. I picked Prompt # 2 and Prompt #5, because I felt industrious.
This time you're allowed to base your story on anything you'd like, so long as you somehow incorporate these things in!! The things incorporated can either be just on the side and only mentioned once, or they can be the main parts of the story. You choose!
Please let me know which prompt you choose. Make sure to use all of them listed after whatever prompt you choose.
Prompt 1) A blue rabbit, a slice of cheese, and fifteen quarters
Prompt 2) An old man, a chocolate cake, and a love letter
Prompt 3) A caterpillar, a crumpled note, and the color orange
Prompt 4) A woman named Ruth, a comic strip, and a bowl of guacamole
Prompt 5) A stray dog, a suitcase, and a train station
It is followed by one of my recipes from Laura-Lee's Family Kitchen for Chocolate Cake. Hope you like it.
Laura-Lee
Chocolate Cake and Julia
A man carrying a small, shabby suitcase walked into the nearly deserted train station. Since the weather was pleasant, once he bought his ticket from the lone employee in the small building, he decided to go right through and sit outside on the platform while waiting for his train. Apparently it could arrive at any time within the next six hours. Because of his failing health he didn’t get out of his cramped apartment very often and he wanted to make the most of being out in the beauty of nature while he could.
As he sat down on a bench and put his suitcase next to him he realized that there was absolutely nobody outside at all. He was all by himself, which is what he was used to. He lived alone, his wife had died almost twenty years previously, they had never been blessed with children and his few friends had died long ago. That’s what happens when you survive to the age of seventy-eight.
He reached into his deep coat pocket and pulled out two things, the piece of chocolate cake he had wrapped up and brought for this particular moment and the old letter that he had been carrying with him for the past three years. It was this letter that coaxed him out of his small home and getting ready to take a train in the middle of the night. As he started to eat the cake directly from the plastic wrap, his eyes scanned the words of the letter again, although by this time he knew it by heart.
“Dear Malcolm,
I just heard about the passing of your wife. I know it happened many years ago, but I still wanted to convey my condolences. I never got married and I know how difficult it can be sometimes to live alone. Especially when one was married as long as you and Jean. I pray that you will find the comfort and peace that can be found in the presence of Jesus.
Most sincerely, Julia”
He finished the letter and looked up and into the sky as his memory once again relived the moment when he first met Julia. They were in grade 4 and he was the new kid in the very small town his family had moved to. Julia, being the epitome of kindness, came over to introduce herself and welcome him. She was a rather plain looking little girl, but her sweetness was evident from her first words. These past years since he had received the letter from her he could barely think of anything else.
The two of them had gone through all of school together as good friends and on the day of their graduation she had confessed her love for him. But he “just wasn’t there yet” as he had phrased it to her in expressing his feelings. In his mind he was destined for great things or at least better things. Better than spending the remainder of his life in this small, hick town married to a plain-jane who would spend her life popping out a bustle of kids. Sure he might have broken her heart, but she was young and would get over it and someday she would marry someone who was content to live the life that she had envisioned. Although he had never actually asked Julia what kind of life she had envisioned.
As these memories flooded over him, his tears flooded over him. He put the unfinished piece of cake on the bench next to him and started feeling around in his pocket for a handkerchief. Suddenly the cake was snatched away.
“Hey! Give that back!” Malcolm yelled at the dog who had taken it. But when he saw how thin and mangy the animal was he decided to let the issue and his piece of cake go. He finished mopping up the wet all over his face that the streaming tears had left behind.
“Not very nice of you to take advantage of a person when they are in the midst of a personal crisis.” he said jokingly to the stray mutt.
“Julia would have never done such a thing.”
Julia again. He just couldn’t get her out of his mind. Even when he had left his small town and gone off to university it had taken more of an effort than he had anticipated to forget about her. After all, they had grown up together. But once the excitement of university and dorm living took a hold of his life and he started dating a “better class of woman” he was able to completely erase Julia from his mind. What a fool he had been. A God-forsaken fool!
He was a wiz at business management and the woman he had married had a chain of clothing boutiques. She also had a chain of other lovers. It didn’t take him long to discover them, because she was much too arrogant to even try and hide the fact. And when he had threatened to find other women, Jean simply didn’t care. A total sham of a marriage. She was much too busy being a career woman to ever have a child and as time progressed and their marriage got worse, he was very glad they had never brought children into their home. It had never been a home. Just a very large, fancy, stylish building for two strangers to live in.
When Jean had died suddenly in a car accident, it was four days before he even found out about it, because they had been living such separate lives. The little bit of his heart that was still alive at that moment died as he stood over her grave. Ever since, he had been dead inside as much as the wife he had buried. That was, until he received the letter of sympathy from Julia.
As he pondered Julia and their years of friendship when they were still just a boy and girl, he recalled what had made her so sweet and stand out from all the other people he knew. It was because of that Bible she carried everywhere. He was sure it was that. So it had motivated him to go and get the Bible that she had given him the day he got on a train at this very train station and headed off to university and out of her life. She had obviously been sad, but what he couldn’t get over was her lack of anger. Her lack of bitterness for the way he had just tossed her love aside. There was no way he could do that with Jean and all her affairs. The only way Malcolm knew that he still had a heart at all was because it was filled with hatred. He kept telling himself that Jean was dead. There was nothing to be done about it and he would have to find some way to put all that hate aside or it would destroy him.
So eventually he had headed for the Bible. As all desperate men do. But in his case, he found the answer he was looking for. And the greatest shock and wonderful surprise was that the “answer” was a person. A person who had lived two thousand years before Malcolm was ever born. Jesus. Still the answer. As if He had been waiting all this time for Malcolm to discover Him.
And through the years Malcolm had come to realize that the only thing that kept him away from Julia was his own stubborn pride. At first, Malcolm wanted to seek out Julia because he was lonely. Then he wanted to see her because he wanted her forgiveness for the way he had dumped her. Then he decided to stop wanting to see her for what he could get from her, but for what he could give to her. Because when all was said and done, she needed an apology from him simply because she deserved it.
Once he came to that conclusion, he sent her an email and told her he would be coming to see her. Now they were both old people, she had never been married and had created a charity that sheltered abused women and their children. A house-mother to generations of people in need of her gentle, wise, loving ways. He suddenly realized that the dog had gotten onto the bench beside him and Malcolm was absent-mindedly stroking him while he was deep in thought. He looked eye to eye at the dog and burst out laughing. Almost the dog’s entire face was covered with the chocolate from the cake he had stolen and eaten. It was good to have something to relieve the days of tension inside of him, because Malcolm had never been so fearful of doing anything as he was of facing Julia. And he still had to wait for the train and the four hour journey that would take him to the city where Julia now lived.
He turned suddenly when he heard a familiar voice say,
“I see you still have a way of making new friends.”
He looked up into the face of Julia. He knew her instantly. Even with all her grey hair and wrinkles he would have known her anywhere. But he had forgotten how beautiful she was.
“What are you doing here?” Malcolm asked with amazement.
“I’ve waited for you for sixty years. I just couldn’t wait any longer.”
The two of them smiled at each other and in a fraction of a moment, perhaps the same measure of time as a “twinkling of an eye”, the bitterness in his heart melted in the warmth of a new and true love. A love that endured. A love that waited. A love that would never fail.
by Laura-Lee Rahn
"4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails." 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 NIV
Laura-Lee’s Family Kitchen: Chocolate Cake
INGREDIENTS (* Anything in Brackets has been Laura-Leed - meaning the way I do it.)
{Metric conversion. Approximate}
1-¾ {440 ml} Cups Flour (All Purpose)
¼ tsp Baking Soda
1-½ tsps Baking Powder
½ tsp Salt
½ Cup {125 ml} Shortening (Margarine)
1-¼ cups {315 ml} Sugar
2 Eggs
2 (3) Squares UNSweetened Chocolate
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 Cup {240 ml} Milk (2%)
HOW TO:
Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour 2-8” round pans. (Trace pan on parchment paper. Cut out 2 to put in bottom of pans)
Put Flour, Baking Soda, Baking Powder and Salt in a big bowl together. Stir it up.
In a different bowl add the sugar to the margarine gradually. Make it nice and smooth and creamy.
Add the eggs one at a time. (*ALWAYS break your eggs into a little cup first. -easier to dig out a piece of shell)
Into this creamy mixture add the dry ingredients and milk alternately. (I start with a little milk first).
Then the Vanilla.
Melt the chocolate in the microwave. (HINT: take out the chocolate while still lumpy and stir. The heat will melt the remainder. If you completely NUKE it, the chocolate burns and tastes Yucky.)
Add the chocolate and mix it up well.
Pour (mostly) equal amounts in each pan. (HINT: I make the top layer a little bit smaller but not too much or they won’t bake evenly)
30 -35 minutes for the layer cake pans
(50 - 60 min for 1 square/rectangle pan. 20-25 min for cupcakes)
Lick bowls, beaters, spatula.
How to Laura-Leeize it? (Def. Do something small, cheap and easy to create the “Ooooo” factor)
When icing it put Strawberry Jam in the middle OR Icing AND Strawberry Jam in the middle.
After icing it, make lacey paper cut out with parchment paper, lay on top of cake and sprinkle icing sugar over it. Remove parchment. “Ta-Da”!
Consume with large glass of milk while reading amazing blog posts at
