The rules are simple: Search your work in progress for the first use of “look”. Copy and paste that paragraph and the ones immediately before/after into a blog post. Then tag five other authors.
This is from a short I've been working on, a twisted lil' tale of Southern horror tentatively titled "SLIT".
As always, it was me and Shelly who was given the task of findin’ Granpappy. I guess it never occurred to either Mama or Daddy that we was just a couple o’ rube kids, barely outta elementary school. If we did find Granpappy and he didn’t wanna come back home it wasn’t like we could make him. There wasn’t any guarantee that he’d even know who the hell we was.
But he came. He always did. Like a scolded puppy, he’d follow us back home, and sit there while Daddy chewed him out. The look he’d get on his face when we did find him (usually he’d be just a few hundred yards from our back door, just walkin’ through the woods, lookin’ up at the birds in the trees or maybe sniffin’ some wild forest flower), it used to break my heart. He’d sit on his bed with tears in his eyes while Daddy hollered at him: “I mean, for Chrissake, Pop, what if you wandered off too far and we never did find you? What do you think we’d do then? You’d be dead, and I might even end up in prison. You think I wanna go to prison ‘cause of you?”
Granpappy’s lip would quiver, and judgin’ by the expression on his wrinkled old face he woulda liked that just fine. He woulda preferred to be dead. He didn’t know much, but he had to know that nobody really wanted him around.
It was damned pitiful. And I guess that’s what made him walk off in the first place. Not his feeble old brain. But a brain that knew that he’d be better off someplace else, where he wasn’t a nuisance to anyone.
Now it's your turn -- I'm tagging you, Ray Garton, Mark Gunnells, Sheri White, Jason Brannon, and Ron Kelly. :)
Have fun!
