Seven Lines

  Extreme time commitments over the last year in many directions, has caused me to lose touch with an activity that I had been cultivating over the last few years. That would be creative writing. With a little more time available lately, I began to write quick seven line stories each day, just to get my feet re-wet and to hopefully reestablish a habit that I enjoy. Here's one such seven line story. It's mundane, I admit it. But, consider trying this as a simple writing exercise, seven lines, keep it simple.

  His job was to retrieve the shopping carts out in the parking lot. It was a necessary job in 2026 and all preceding years, for as long as there have been supermarkets, shopping carts, and parking lots. Somewhere, an historian has calculated that x number of people have worked this particular job and out of those people, y number have successfully advanced on to higher paying work. But today he did this task in an unhurried and yet diligent way. Someone viewing some camera from somewhere was likely keeping an eye on him. As long as there were shopping carts in the store itself, management was happy enough. At three in the afternoon, he walked by a truck in the parking lot that had on the driver’s cab rear window glass, a bumper sticker that read “Bad Ass Girls - Bad Ass Toys”, and that sticker was the cause of an all too infrequent grin.