Snippet 002: the pickle jar.

Wake up Writing prompt: Your protagonist is at the grocery store buying basic food items. They pick up a jar of pickles by the lid, the lid comes off and the jar plus pickles end up on the floor. What happens next?
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She was mortified. It happened just like all the books said it would if you were particularly worried about embarrassment: out of the blue, at the most inopportune time, in public. The books also said that embarrassment shouldn’t be a factor, to remain calm and simply do what needed to be done. But those folks clearly weren’t here, right now, standing in a growing puddle of pickle juice.

Her mother had told her, you see, that it’d be much less mortifying if her water broke at the store to break a jar quickly and play it off as an accident, rather than have them realize it was the onset of labor, and have the clerks suddenly panic that she would deliver in the Pickle Aisle as well. What mom forgot was the obviousness of the spreading stain in her white slacks. There’s no way anyone is going to believe that is pickle juice – none at all.

With a sigh, she wrapped her hand under gravid belly, hoping to ease some of the intensified discomfort, just as she heard it over the intercom: Cleanup in aisle 5. It was time. Time to grab the cell phone, time to call in reinforcements, time to waddle her way to the parking lot and then to the hospital, where – in the greatest irony of all – she’ll sign in under her married name.

Vlasic.

Tags: Adri made me do it!