Zero in on a detail and ask your imagination, what else could this be?
Sometimes it’s just one detail of a prompt that sends you on a far-flung imaginative excursion. Rupert was clearly inspired by the red and the cross-hatching, and came up with this extraordinary but utterly believable character and situation.
You can build entire stories around imaginative nuggets like this! The kind of girl who does one thing might also be the kind of girl who does another thing . . . and so on. Rupert ends this piece with a joke—but even that could be developed: a vegan butcher’s daughter. A vegan butcher, when she inherits the family business? Who knows—nobody right now! As you develop a fictional story, you are always to some degree writing what you don’t know.
The Butcher’s Daughter
The butcher’s daughter was mad into tennis. Lived for it. She’d be on the court any minute she had spare, hitting with whoever turned up, or just against a wall if no-one did. Frankly, no-one ever did ‘just turn up’ because tennis is not that sort of game. You really need to come with a partner to play with, as well as a racquet and balls. But she was a solitary girl, who had always preferred her own company, so hitting a ball against a wall — which was what she called tennis — suited her very well.
Her father had always found her something of an ‘odd duck’. Growing up, she had insisted that no part of her food be allowed to touch any other part: peas distinct from potatoes on the plate. This compulsion had developed into quite a debilitating OCD, which her father had worried about, until he sent her to a specialist. The specialist had decided the compulsion was an unexplored father/daughter complex, and had encouraged the butcher to allow his daughter to come to work with him. While he was grinding sausage meat and frenching lamb chops, she would find her way to the walk-in meat fridge and stand among the dead cows and pigs hanging there.
She did this now, lonely and without a tennis partner, gazing into the carcass of a large steer. Her father had only recently gutted it, and the offal lay on a scrubbed wooden table. She pressed the strings of her racquet into the lungs until the spongy meat splurged up, as if through a waffle iron. There was a feeling of control, and of life, and of death, that soothed her. The smell of iron and ammonia was comforting, and she wallowed in her nostalgic reverie.
Her father called down from the shop to tell her that lunch was ready, and the loneliness passed. She was fine with just the wall to play with — other people were so difficult to be around. And besides, they always teased her for being vegan.
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