Prompt: Choose one of your titles from the day before and make it the starting place for a story (or essay, parable, parody, monologue, etc.)
Squeezed Watermelon
My feet stood on the edge of the fountain at Seattle Catholic University. No idea how I had ended up here; Belltown had morphed into Capital Hill, which merged into a campus littered with recycling receptacles emblazoned with “SCU” and statues of Jesus scattered amongst wilted flowers, looking just as dead in their crucified neighbor in the hot, dry August noon.
Sweat soaked through my deep V-neck, staining the pink fabric of the armpits and pectoral areas a wet, darker pink. Shoot – my body was producing more wetness during this trip than was the famous Pacific Northwest rain, which apparently was on holiday. That the visit had failed to live up to Katie’s promises was not so surprising; her lawyerly trade had lately transformed her into quite the pronouncer. But this – Katie’s “unexpected” 12-hour shifts on the Pepsi case that had been running for ten months now, my resultant aimless wandering around an unknown city full of granola people and biofeul ads for the last four days – this was shit. Seattle was devoid of big-city charms, I said to myself. Even the homeless people were uncreative; the sign “give me money so I can buy beer” is just so 2009. The buildings were generic, the environmentalists were annoying, and the cultural legacy was lagging (it used to be a logging town).
Grumpily mumbling my way into an SCU parking lot, I saw a reflective metal food truck glaring in the sun. The Seattle Skillet. “Give me your special,” I sighed as I reached the counter, expecting another organic, bland, hippie concoction. Instead, the pigtailed woman placed into my hands a cup of squeezed watermelon juice. I stepped away from the truck in awe. The juice was the same color of my shirt’s wet pink armpits. Watermelon juice was so the new thing. Maybe the west coast had something to offer.
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