15 minute free write using this photo and the word “stew.”*
She’d been hitting the sauce quite a bit recently. Such a cute phrase for an unmanageable addiction to her beverage of choice – vodka. It wasn’t that she loved vodka all that much. But she loved getting sauced, and she loved the fact that vodka mixed with almost anything. It was perfect with juice for breakfast (screwdrivers! greyhounds!). She could mix it with her lunchtime tonic water, or add it into her dinner drink – if her husband didn’t insist on wine instead.
But there were signs that it wasn’t going so well, all this sauciness. For starters, her children had stopped asking her to help with school projects. In fact, they’d asked her not to volunteer for the school music show. Something about how last year they had too many volunteers, and how this year the school would be reaching out to let her know what else should could help with.
And her husband had begun to tell her to “Slow down, for Christ’s sake!” Just as he had the other day, when she’d picked him up from work. She hadn’t thought he’d be done so early, and she’d just finished her mid-afternoon pick-me-up, a vodka martini because, hey, why not? So she’d been running late, driving fast, and when he’d gotten in the car, she’d hit the gas the way she’d hit the vodka at lunch – slamming it down and looking forward to the ride.
But she hadn’t looked carefully and had jumped out into the middle of traffic and gotten broadsided by an oncoming car. Thankfully her husband, who had been on the passenger side, hadn’t been injured, but the door was crushed. And somehow she had sustained a broken wrist– from hitting the steering wheel? From trying to stop herself with her hands? She really had no recollection of the injury herself.
All she knew was that she was now a passenger, broken arm out the window, husband at the wheel. She was pickled, he was in a stew, and their relationship was simmering.
*Prompt by Leesa Dean, Selkirk College
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