2024 Reading Challenge

2024 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 1 book toward her goal of 285 books.
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2023 Reading Challenge

2023 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 5 books toward her goal of 265 books.
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Homework Assignment Seven: Pacing

Continuing the series of writing exercises inspired by Susan Breen’s The Fiction Class, today we are moving on to pacing.  For more information on the book and this series of posts, please check out the original book review here.

Pacing: Imagine a moment of crisis: someone shooting a bullet into you, someone about to be hung, someone going under anesthesia, someone falling in love at first sight across a crowded room. Write a few paragraphs describing the crisis, trying to expand time as you write so the moment becomes as tense as possible.

This is ridiculous. Two days ago I was perfectly fine, getting ready to go to lunch with Julie, like I always do on Tuesdays, and thinking about which bathing suits to pack for the trip and whether I should download new e-books now or just wait until I got to the airport to see what I felt like reading. One day ago I was also perfectly fine, pulling travel-sized toothpaste and shampoo together, making sure I had the passports ready to go, checking flight times and figuring out when we had to leave for the airport.

Then BAM – this morning, out of the blue, it hit me. Pain. Great yellow and green starburts of pain. Pain that dropped me like third period French (as my daughter would say). Cartoon character, drop-an-anvil-on-your-head pain. Pain that ballooned in my head and throbbed so insistently that it threatened to blow a vein right out of my forehead.

It hit me as I was walking back to the closet to grab a different sweatshirt. Fortunately I was next to the bed so I had something to fall on other than the floor. As I sat there, struggling to remember how to breathe, all I could think of was toast. Burnt toast. The smell you’re supposed to smell when you’re having a stroke. The smell I was suddenly noticing all around me.

“Oh my god,” I thought, “this is it, I’m having a stroke.”

With large, wild, panic-riddled eyes I looked around my bedroom, trying to focus on the pictures of the kids and Ron that were scattered around the room. Oh God, the kids – the twins Emma and Molly and their older brother Davis – my greatest accomplishments, the reasons I was put on this earth, how could I leave the kids? And Ron – the love of my life, my partner, my friend, my husband of twenty years – what would this do to Ron? My Ron, who was waiting for me in the kitchen, waiting to drive me to the airport for our anniversary get-away together. My Ron, who I was going to leave behind to raise our kids alone, as I sat here on his side of the bed quietly having a stroke while he paced downstairs, checking his watch and muttering under his breath about how I am always late. My Ron, who was oblivious to the neurological supernova unfolding in his wife’s head thirty feet away.

My Ron, who burned his bagel in the toaster oven at breakfast, not fifteen minutes ago.

“Well,” I thought, “at least that explains the toast.”

4 comments to Homework Assignment Seven: Pacing

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