*Every*thing is a writing prompt

Absolutely anything can work as a writing prompt.

Grind Writer, Malcolm van Delst (DoThe Wrong Thing) proved this at our last meeting. 

In a box of writing prompts she found an old bottle of Beaver® brand sweet hot mustard full of sand. It was a jury-rigged thing I had made to weigh down the bottle which in turn held a sign at the writing table, and it got left in the prompts box.

Intrigued by this anomalous 3D object, she chose it as a writing prompt. And look what she created out of that! It goes to show that when you allow yourself to just write, when you let your mind free-wheel and say its piece through your pen, you always come up with creative stuff.

If you want to hear this piece below in her voice, watch this video of Malcolm reading at her Do The Wrong Thing book launch first.
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Cat Litter in a Beaver Brand Sweet Hot Mustard/Moutard Sucree Forte Bottle, Gold Medal Winner, 360 ml

A free-wheeling free-write by Malcolm van Delst

All right, it’s poem time! Poem, pome, mome. Mome-me. I can bring my mother into anything.

All right, it’s poem time! Let’s get rid of her—the Mother, I mean—or, I don’t mean—literally, I mean—Jesus Christ, can you not bring her into something just this once?

She didn’t like mustard or cats. She holds more than 360 ml of anything. She IS red and yellow—oh, damn, look—I said I wasn’t going to bring her into this and here she is: The Mother. All Hail the Red and Yellow Mother!

Gold. Medal. Winner. Every mother is a Gold Medal Winner, it’s baked into the role. To every child, their mother is the absolute best, the center, the beginning the life force the giver the taker the One and Only.

Yeah, it’s happening: Mom took this over. Whatever, Ma, you can have me. You got me. You ol’ goat.

                                                     
There. I insulted her and now, a short reprieve, reader, which I’ve indicated with a double space.

Gold. Medal. Winner. Ma. Mom. Monster. That movie starring Charlize Theron. There’s a mother if ever there was one! “Mother.” In the sense of “heavy,” “large,” “deserving of respect,” even if not love or admiration. Respect for the audacity and evil. What kind of mother makes a mother like Elaine W—I’ll have to look up her name afterwards, the real woman Charlize’s character is based on in the movie, Monster?

There are ways to win medals—scratch that—there are ways to win fame that aren’t based on being liked. Take this cat litter in the mustard bottle. Weird, singular—what if the person who made this bottle left the remaining mustard in before pouring in the litter? That would add to the je ne sais quoi.

What if a monster mother was thrown into this bottle, where she couldn’t mother monster, monster mother? Bottled. Jailed—that would be it: what we do to our criminals.

I like to think of a tiny monster mother bottled in the Beaver Brand Sweet Hot Mustard bottle with the “Gold Medal Winner” sash on the bottom. I bet the monster mother would like that, too. The sash, I mean, she wouldn’t like being bottled, though really, that she is: bottled up—all that hate, anger and anguish with nowhere to go, exploding. Like yellow mustard in a bottle on a hot window ledge in the sun.
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©2019 Malcolm van Delst