- Story title
- A character name
- An object
- A line of dialogue
Using the above, I will attempt to craft a (probably very) short story to be posted here on this very blog (and not necessarily in the order they were suggested!). The first attempt is courtesy of a prompt from Jodie - I’ll reveal the requirements at the end…
Bam!
Angel Delight stared at the screen. Still empty. Just the one word typed there in Verdana (one of her two favoured fonts, along with Calibri).
“Bam!”
The exclamation mark was important. Marketing was all about impact so the exclamation mark had to stay. The word was good. That wasn’t the problem. It was everything else that followed it that was the tricky bit.
Angel looked at the clock. 2:46 p.m. One hour and twenty four minutes to not only come up with something but also massage it into a winning presentation. Normally this was where she thrived. Give her the pressure of a deadline and she could pull the goods out of the bag at the last minute. She remembered that one time at university where she’d started an essay with four hours to go before the 9 a.m. deadline, delivered it with minutes to spare and still got a first for it (much to the disgust of most of her friends).
Of course, she hadn’t been Angel Delight back then. Just plain old Mary Matthews with a major in Communications and a minor in Psychology. That dream team combination that guaranteed you dynamite employment straight out of graduation. Then came the day that Mary Matthews (following a twelve hour bender in the student union bar followed by another four hours sinking cheap bottles of beer at student night in Glitzy’s (the local nightclub) which lead on to an indeterminate amount of time in parts unknown) fell in with the art crowd and Mary Matthews was no more. The day and night had taken on the hazy aspect of legend in her mind. The words “snogging competition” lurked in there ominously. The sound of mass breakage loomed large in her memory. There’d been something about climbing in or out of a window at one point. She awoke the next morning to find that, legally, she was now Angel Delight (with the remains of both a kebab and a chicken burger forming a trail from the front door to her bed). Once the initial horror had faded, Mary-now-Angel saw this as an opportunity. They said that going to university was a chance to reinvent yourself. Well, what better way than to literally change who you were.
There’d been some fraught conversations with her parents, with the words “betrayal” (from her mother) and “disown” (from her father) left hanging in the air. The “disown” part had never fully materialised but the “betrayal” part definitely still seemed to be lingering. Still, Angel had no regrets. Mary Matthews, Communications major, would be unlikely to be an executive at one of the funkiest marketing agencies in the country. Angel Delight, on the other hand…
Angel snapped back out of her reverie and looked at the screen. 3:18 p.m. Still blank. She stared at the humorous message on her now slightly chipped coffee cup. No help there either. It also didn't help that the product itself was so vague. All she could get out of the client was that it was a “lifestyle app”. Suitably vague and meaningless. She’d sat through a two hour pitch session with them and was half convinced that they didn't even know what it was either.
“Still struggling away that whole ‘Bam!’ thing, Angel?”
Angel looked up to see the smirking face of Alan Rossiter, the nearest thing to competition that she had here. At best of times, she struggled not to want to punch him in his insufferably smug face and this was not the best of times.
“Don’t judge me, Alan!”, she snarled in such a tone as to wipe the smirk off his face and leave him scuttling for the kitchen accompanied by a barely audible mumble of an excuse. Angel sighed. She was probably going to pay for that one later but she couldn’t worry about that now.
Think, think, think. You need to pull this out of the bag. “Lifestyle” adverts are always so bland and anodyne and toothless. This product was “Bam!” It needed something bold and in your face and out of the box and disruptive and… Angel had run out of buzzwords by this point but she had an inkling. She knew where she was going. She thought back to that day, that day when Mary departed and Angel arrived and she knew what she had to do. She closed her eyes and dredged. She brought up things from that day that she never thought were even in there and, as she cast herself back to that transformative moment, her fingers began to fly across the keyboard. This was it. This was the one. This was so far outside the box that they wouldn't even know that there had been a box to begin with. Oh yes, this was the one.
-------------
It was just over ninety minutes later that Angel Delight found herself clearing out her desk under the watchful eye of Hester the security guard. Maybe, she reflected, the box was there for a reason. Maybe you should still be somewhere in the vicinity of the box so that people know that you’re outside of it. Maybe she shouldn't have stood on the table at one point and mimed urinating over the clients. That might have been a step too far. And maybe it was time for Mary Matthews to make her comeback and show the world just what she, Mary, was capable of.
That said, she’d always quite liked the name Swifty Frisko....
The Prompt
Here is what I had to work with courtesy of Jodie:-
Title - Bam!
Character - Angel Delight
Object - Coffee cup
Line of dialogue - “Don’t judge me, Alan!”
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