If you don't like it, then go read something else today.
This was a fun one. We all wrote a profession on one note card and an odd mannerism on another. It's fun to play with other's language and ideas. Mine were:
Priest
eyes wide, wide, wide like a visual yawn.
Here's what I came up with:
Father Paul had this odd way of opening his eyes wide, wide, wide, as if in a visual yawn, that made Tom feel as if everything he was saying to his middle-aged priest was either hugely surprising or hugely boring.
It was odd to think of the man as never having had sex.
“I mean,” Tom said to his fiancé. “What in God's name do they do?”
“Do?” asked Mary Jo, who’d been Catholic all her life and, like so many Catholics, took her salvation so for granted that the actual practice toward its guarantee required little to no thought, and an even littler amount of time.
“Yeah, do? Like does he beat off or--“
“Christ on a raft, Tom, do we have to talk about this now? The man is coming to dinner at Mom’s tonight!”
“Yeah? And why is that? He’s coming to check me out, isn’t he? To make sure I’m at least purgatory material?”
Mary Jo giggled. “Purgatory material.”
Why did everyone laugh at him when he was trying to be serious? Mary Jo knew him well enough to know his moods, and she read his expression perfectly in the mirror.
“Oh, Jesus, Tom. It’s no big deal. You’ve already finished your conversion classes.” Mary Jo leaned forward and flicked her pinky across her eyelashes to remove any extra mascara that had globbed. Mary Jo had fine eyelashes; wonderful eyelashes that didn’t need mascara. At least Tom thought so. But she hadn’t wanted to talk about her eyelashes any more than she’d wanted to talk about Father Tom’s sexual practices, or the lack thereof.
“Maybe he’s one of those priests,” he said, trying to make his tone sound as dark as he could and only succeeding in sounding like he had a mild cold.
Mary Jo didn’t play dumb this time. “Enough. I’ve known the man since I was six years old. Jesus, let it go.” Then she turned to him, her own eyes pulled wide by the mascara and eyelash curler, but not as wide as Father Paul’s. “You’re having doubts, aren’t you? About the Catholicism.”
“After all that, I’m Catholic whether I marry you or not,” thought Tom. But what he said was, “Don’t be ridiculous. Can we go?”
“How do I look?”
“Beautiful.”
“Do these pants make my ass look big?”
“Jesus, Mary Jo. No, of course not.”
“You didn’t even look.”
He hadn’t looked, because to look would have meant he’d had to lie. He didn’t want to have to confess to Father Tom tomorrow that he’d lied to his fiancé about her fat ass the night before he swore his faith to God and Jesus and Mother Mary and all the saints and whoever else the old wide-eyed priest could dream up.
That would probably be frowned upon.
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