Two angels soared through the clouds. The first angel, called Felix, looked arrogant and severe as he sailed through the ocean of white foam with his nose in the air. The other angel, Oscar, back-stroked and belted out Bob Marley with the sunlight glinting off his aviator sunglasses. The air rang with the sound of, “I want to love you. I want to love and treat you, love and treat you right. . .”
At first, Felix ignored him. But slowly, his annoyance grew like the buildup of lava in a volcano. His reaction started as a little tremble and then morphed into an all out explosion. Finally, Felix shouted, “Will you SHUT UP! I have had to listen to your senseless, off-key warbling for over TWO THOUSAND YEARS now, and I am sick of it. I’ve known sloths that have a better work ethic than you. If you had a brain, it would be so small that not even the largest microscope in the world would be able to find it!”
For a moment both angels stayed suspended in the clouds entirely shocked into silence. Suddenly, the aviators plummeted to the ground. Oscar followed with his wings fluttering along behind him as he crash landed in suburbia.
A girl sat reading on a lawn chair and looked up as Oscar flopped into her pool. She saw the angel struggling to get out of the water.
“Can you give me a hand?” Oscar implored her.
She simply remarked, “That pool is too shallow for diving.” Then she put down Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
She thought to herself, “Just when I thought that I could call myself an atheist, God chucks an angel out of the sky and into the pool.”
Sighing, she grasped the angel’s fingers with her own.
The hardest thing about writing the story in 300 words was that I had to cut out another scene that I would have liked to put in my story. Having the extra scene with the angels pulling pranks would have made showing readers that Felix was cruel and Oscar was feckless so much easier.
ReplyDeleteNicely done, Halie. You set yourself an interesting task with just the two scenes. So you might try and find a solution that allows you to rethink how you use your current materials to illustrate the traits, feckless and cruel. Further, you want to assign these traits to the angels, but what if your third character, the girl, demonstrates on or the other of these instead, or as well. I actually like the juxtaposition of the two scenes, I just think you could make the exchange between the angels do a bit more, to take on maybe a less absurd tone and move more toward demonstrating, say, fecklessness. Speaking of absurd, however, I love the includion of Newton here. And the cruelty: what if the angel can't swim and the girl ignores him because she refuses to believe?
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