Rewriting

Week 5- The exercise was to vamp up a piece of flat prose. you could take any scene from any book and decide which are the important elements. Then do a rewrite under 300 words.

The Queen of Baked Alaska

A shadow eclipses the wedding shot of Lady Reece Beverly to Squire George Winthrop. Maisie Taylor clicks her tongue and swivels her head to view the orbiting source of this hiatus in her perusal of last month’s copy of Hello. Ethel Stillman’s frame fills the doorway of Dr Henry’s surgery and from behind her, a quart to her pint-size, her husband Arlen Stillman emerges hugging a crooked shoulder.

No caps tip to Her Highness today. Most of the patients are blow-in yokels who don’t know that Mrs Stillman has aspirations. Aspirations and one seat to share with the quart-size. Maisie watches the sixty-plus matron scope out the territory before directing her foot soldier to the three-legged stool at the end of the corridor that passes for a rural doctor’s waiting room.

Her elastic smile belies the eruption flaring across Ethel’s neck and the lour that follows her sighting of Albert Sweeney sprawled across the battered two-seater, eyes fastened to the Dandy. It’s few Dandys that lad ever sees in his piggery, so not even a cosmic event like Ethel is likely to scupper his gaze.

Maisie strokes the feather in her lapel, abandons the newly wed royals, happy to forgo the fopperies of Hello would-be celebs for the foibles of a local one.  For Ethel, resident queen of the County Fair Baked Alaska Competition, is her arch rival and Maisie knows something that Ethel doesn’t.

Quietly steaming as the matron is now, fur rising on her faux-fox collar, hackles will soon eject at high speed. For Maisie Taylor is advised to keep her varicosed legs raised at hip level, and when Joe Carbery beside her goes in to get his weekly blood check, she plans to moor her right calf to the next available chair.

295 words

Copyright with Cathy leonard 2019