Writing for Fun
February 2017
SHLOP - Maureen Rampersaud
They had a special induction policy for school leavers at Brown’s, they threw you in and watched to see if you could swim, or were bored to death. There wasn’t much in the way of career choices in my dead end town, so as all the old codgers said as they wagged their finger at me, ‘You’re very lucky, my girl, in my day...’
The end bit varied from, ‘I had to pick the crops from dawn till dusk’ to ‘I walked five miles a day for work, there and back’.
They all seemed pretty flush now though, going on cruises every five minutes, on their pensions.
I was sent down to Brown’s basement with a stack of photocopying. It was a bit spooky down there, but at least it was peaceful. I turned the photocopier on and opened the top and SHLOP, I was running for my life in the Amazonian jungle with several loin-clothed, fiercely-painted Indians on my tail. I kept changing direction in an effort to dodge the reign of curare spiked darts that were whizzing past my ears.
‘Ow!’ one got me in the back of the neck, and I fell SHLOP . . . back to my pile of photocopying. Carrying on with my mindless task allowed me to analyze what had just happened. Had I been hallucinating? It couldn’t have really happened, could it?
Attempting to photocopy the next day, SHLOP, I was running through the mysterious streets of Moscow in torrential rain. My trench coat collar was up but rivulets of water had managed to infiltrate and were running down my back. I slid into a doorway, to check that I’d actually evaded him, then headed down the nearest alleyway, straight into a gigantic gorilla of a man with gold teeth, who was pointing a gun at me.
‘You didn’t think you could get away, did you?’
I turned and ran, heard an explosion, which seemed to come from my chest, and I fell SHLOP, back to the boring basement of Brown’s.
‘Mr. Brown wants to see you in his office,’ came the high-pitched, weedy voice of Nigel, the office creep.
Mr. Brown told me I was fired, which made me giggle, in view of what had just happened to me in the mean streets of Moscow. He didn’t find it funny, he said, and that in all his years at Brown’s, no-one had ever taken so long photocopying.
When I got home, I started writing about my adventures through the photocopier and I made up many more. That is how I hit the big time as an author. Now my dead end town celebrates my success by coining in money, arranging excursions past my house and to Brown’s ‘where it all started’. It’s true what they say, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’.