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RE: In a Pig's Ear - Day 478: 5 Minute Freewrite: Sunday - Prompt: pig's ear
Mmm....you're getting dark! Did...did the dog survive, at least?
Mmm....you're getting dark! Did...did the dog survive, at least?
Nope. Rocko is dead. Did I need to spell that out.... no wonder the daughters tell me my writing is obscure and hard to follow.
Thanks for reading - and commenting!
Hmm, now that you mention it, how could I not have Rocko survive with no more than a broken leg? How totally not like me it is to have Rocko AND the husband dead! What was I thinking?? I also avoided describing the broken dog in the ditch by focusing instead on a detail that haunted me when a mother of seven ran a stop sign, and hit a Lifts bus and killed a granda or two, and both kids in the back seat died along with the mom (the other kids were in school), and some dumb reporter had to mention the ziplock bag of home-baked chocolate chip cookies that flew out the window, the last cookies that woman would ever bake. -_- HAUNTED by a bag of cookies!
I was sure you had an explanation for a way the dog survived. It wasn't explicitly clear the dog didn't make it, so I'm going to say they never found his body...because he ran off into the night and discovered his true inner self and joined a pack of wolves and and helped bring down a bear that was threatening his new pack and eventually hooked up with a very cute little female wolf and they had a pack of seven pups and Rocko raised them the way he was raised: to enjoy life and chew on pig ears every once in a while.
Awwww!!!!
That sounds positively Jack London-ish. Buck, haunting humans for generations beyond the life span of a mortal dog in "Call of the Wild" - I should re-read that, and White Fang! Those books were too brutal for our daughter. She can't even handle Watership Down. I raised wimps!!
Terrifically great, except for; "There went a brilliant brain surgeon and a good dog. Gone! In the wink of an eye!"
Personally, I thought that was succinct and to the point, leaving little room for misunderstanding, that neither husband nor dog survived the wreck. Nothing obscure and hard to follow from my end.
That said, I like @negativer's end as well, being a closet optimist despite my veneer of realism, and hope Rocko adjusted well to pack life. ;-)
As for the books of that type, "Silver Chief - Dog of the North" was a favorite of mine as a kid, which my grandmother had when I visited, and I re-read several times.
And it made me want to visit the Badlands.
LOL! To be fair, I edited this after @negativer's astute observation that Rocko was not officially declared dead.
I must read "Silver Chief - Dog of the North" !
Funny: I finally kill some protagonists, and readers plead for the life of the dog. :) Ha! I feel vindicated!! *The Dog Must Live! I purposely did not describe the dog much, hoping readers would fill in the blanks with their own most-beloved dogs. Then I went back in and made Rocko part cattle dog. But I left out his most endearing traits. Ted the Red Heeler was a devious dog, too smart for anyone's own good. He could confiscate chocolate bars from the countertop - and eat them - and not get sick. He'd eat baby diapers after pilfering the trash can. For 16 years he was fed the cheapest dog food, Sam's. Yes, he was our neighbor's dog, but he spent so much time at our house we regarded it as Joint Custody.
Now I'm thinking about that "Gone! In the wink of an eye!" bit of purple prose. The ending, I thought, was too understated, and it seems some are misreading it as her missing the dog but not the husband. I almost had her fill up the farmhouse with rescue dogs (@tarc, @rhondak came to mind!), but I remembered Sam Bellotto's comments on her Space Horses story - that less is more - that a short story crystallizes one moment. I'm always guilty of trying to pack too much in. Lighten the load. I know, I know. And trust the reader to get understatement - never mind that my daughters to this day do not get it, not in my writing.
Thanks @crescendoofpeace for the many thoughtful comments!
Lolol . . . I remember when I saw Jaws for the first time, being perfectly okay with the shark eating a plethora of beachgoers, but I still root to this day for Babette the black lab to somehow survive.
Of course, being an avowed shark nut from way back, I rooted for the shark through most of the film.
He did piss me off when he ate Quint though. Robert Shaw was always a favorite of mine. Bad Bruce.
Can't bitch too much, though, as in the book, Richard Dreyfuss' character Matt Hooper also bit the dust, so I far preferred the ending in the film.
Of course, Jaws stands out for me as one of the few films that was better than the book, which was also true of The Deep, which came out a couple of years later, was also written by Peter Benchley, and also starred Robert Shaw. Really good film, with great underwater footage, and no CGI.
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I'll have to watch The Deep - the only thing I remember about **Jaws is that my mean sister Lori was the ONLY ONE in the theater who laughed when heads bobbed on the water. Everyone else was screaming. "Bad Bruce" - there's another one I should make sure I don't miss. I don't even remember the classic road movies with Paul Newman and McQueen. None of the best stuff is on NetFlix. Gotta dig deeper to find online movie rentals. LOL - I'm not surprised you'd side with the shark! I always felt bad for grizzly bears getting gunned down in movies even if they did kill people first.
I fixed that line -
A bag of pig’s ears had flown out the window along with Rocko. Some idiot news reporter photographed that “telling detail,” with lame-ass quotes from the blonde at Register Six. “Layne was a regular,” brimming with life, and who could have imagined that it would all end a few minutes after she rang up the bag of pig’s ears for Layne Davis and his cute little dog. Some 30-year-old man had been texting as he rear-ended the Silverado. There went a brilliant brain surgeon and a good dog. “Gone! In the wink of an eye!” she said, feeding the media with the nauseating cliches they sought.
Now I'm wondering if I should bother to edit the Steemit post one more time, or just let my wordpress blog post serve as the most recent version.
https://carolkean.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/in-a-pigs-ear-steemit-freewrite/
Only if you have some extra time and feel like doing so.
I thought it was pretty clear from the start, but then I read a lot by fairly subtle authors, so I'm used to paying attention to such things.
I prefer writing that isn't too obvious, and doesn't telegraph every minor detail. And I really liked this piece.
Now I need to get off my duff and do some real writing myself.
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