And Now the Aforementioned Sentence
But first some background info so it isn’t totally without context. My protagonist of sorts is a middle-aged man, tentatively named Gary, who is going ‘church shopping.’ On his way home from one particularly disorienting sermon, he nearly collides with a young boy who calls him an asshole; this event causes Gary to throw up a bit of Egg McMuffin. But he has a problem: Gary doesn’t believe that certain foods, especially breakfast foods, should be consumed after certain times. And it is 10:45, too close to lunch in Gary’s mind. He has nowhere to spit the food out, but he is mostly concerned with how people will look at him if he swallows his own vomit. So now the sentence, which has grown in length since the last post:
Maude, the old, blue-haired lady who worked in the stockroom at Gary’s store, would be the first to know-she’d just know by the tang and sweetness of Gary’s guilty breath- and she would tell Ruby, who would tell her grandson, Curtis, who would act out his dramatic interpretation of the scene beneath the domed monkey bars in front of an intimate audience of Michael, Austin, and Annabelle Brizzell, who, directly after Curtis took his final bow, would walk home together, accept crustless PB&J’s from their mother, Candie (short for Candace), and then part ways at the top of the stairs; Michael would slam his door and play the opening riff from “Smoke on the Water” for the one-hundred-and-fifty-eighth through one-hundred-and-seventy-third time; Annabelle, age nine, would pinch the skin above her still-androgenous hips and wonder if that meant she was fat; And Austin would reread “Helm’s Deep,” his favorite chapter in The Two Towers, and then write in his journal about Curtis’ performance with the added personal commentary of, ”I will never look at Mr. Gary the same way,” which would soon be read by his father, Bobby, who had recently lost his job at the base and had taken to wandering aimlessly around the house while the kids were at school and Candie was out doing what she does; And Bobby would post-coitally tell Gary’s ex-wife, Cheryl, with whom Bobby had been sleeping since last Christmas at the “Annual Ballard Non-Denominational, Non-Discriminatory, Holiday Party,” where Cheryl drank too much of what she thought was alcoholic eggnog and didn’t notice, or didn’t care, that when she bent down to pick up an errant pig-in-a-blanket, the back of her sweater dress slid up to reveal a pair of red and green panties that had “Ho Ho Ho” stitched in sequins across her buttocks- Bobby saw this, as did Gary; one of them was intrigued and made a gurgling growl and the other sputtered cranberry juice down the front of his best Land’s End sweater.
Three-hundred-and-thirty-three words. There’s something refreshing about seeing a huge chunk of unbroken text. I’m sure there’s a few grammar issues here and there, but you can just shut up about that. Stupidheads.
