She Said, He Said…

Overheard in a supermarket recently;

‘..so I told him straight, I wasn’t putting it anywhere near him…’

Fret not dear reader, I resisted the urge the hurl my trolley round the corner and follow the orator stealthily through the salad aisle in the hope of discovering what it was she wasn’t going to put anywhere near him, but I can tell you, the urge was incredibly strong. Instead, I distracted myself with the lack of cucumbers and pondered instead on what she could possibly have been talking about and how I could fit it into a short story. Was she reassuring him that she wasn’t putting the crocodile/the broken bottle/it anywhere near him, or was she refusing to put the crocodile/broken bottle/it anywhere near him? Alas it will always be a mystery to me as she disappeared down the cheese aisle still chatting on her phone and by the time I caught up with her in the bread aisle the call was complete. I had no way of knowing. Her poker face offered nothing. Brown or white bread seemed to be her only concern.  We parted ways in the rice and bean aisle and by the time I got to the wine aisle a story had formed.  The next hurdle was remembering it without writing it down.  Well you can imagine what the outcome of that was.

Needless to say I returned to my office later that day and set about dismembering my 500 word short story which has been slowly growing and transmogrifying into a completely different story to the one I originally started writing. Gone were two of the main characters and in their place was a soldier and a man who might turn into a milkman at any given moment. I think I may have lost the plot temporarily. I was keen, you see, to implant, somewhere, my newly over-heard dialogue. The fact that it didn’t fit in to any of the story didn’t faze me. It should have done of course as I wasted another two and half hours trying to insert a sentence into a story that had about as much right to be there as a spider in a fridge.

You can imagine how it all ended. The short story was re-written for the 110^th time and the sentence only made it as far as this blog. Well, as a fan of recycling and reusing, I can’t see any problem with that. But even so, I wish I knew what she’d been talking about…