[Marion Shore]

Bob, that's funny! Are all those Tuesdays historically accurate? Your piece hits all too close to home for me-- not the part about murder-- the part about not knowing what day it is!

[Roger Slater]

The only ones that I know were Tuesdays were the elections days. The rest I just made up, being too lazy to research. I wonder if it matters?

Thanks for the interesting tidbit on the origin of the presumption of innocence!

[Janet Kenny]

Anna tried not to watch while Joe sprinkled cheese on his tagliatelle al caviale. She saw two waiters sniggering in the corner. “Tell me when she comes into the room” she hissed. Her linguine di pappagallo al sugo di razzo was mediocre but tonight she didn’t care. She narrowed her eyes above her glass of over-chilled Lambrusco. Could she be that woman in last year’s Armani? Or the redhead in a Benetton teeshirt and pearls?
Joe said: “You want I should rub her out?” Shit, there he was. There they were! She shrank behind the potted Euphorbia. Her wig and dark glasses now seemed conspicuous. “Both of them” she said. The woman was wearing an identical wig and Ray Bans but her watch was not a Rolex.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Jill was sitting on the window seat of her bay window at 50 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, reading a bodice-ripping romance. The magnolias were blossoming and her cat had died two years earlier. She liked her book well enough, but half-wished it was a gripping thriller instead. College students roller skating outside were wearing shorts and sunglasses. Charlie, the bodice-ripping protagonist of the paperback that Jill had bought at Walgreen’s when she went for her blood-pressure medication, was halfway into another bodice--this time it was Cynthia’s, the poor unsuspecting girl. Charlie and Cynthia were at Big Sur, where the waves were crashing like something out of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Charlie’s red 1970 Malibu convertible was parked atop the cliff that was chiseled like Charlie’s handsome face. Jill had never seen the Hokusai's woodblock print, so she planned to Google it later on.

[FOsen]

He’d gone— she knew it the moment she turned the brushed pewter venetian styled doorknob atop the escutcheon designed in early William Morris mortise handleset style. As the two-panel door of Burmese teak with triple glazed glass panels swung silently open on extruded hinges featuring satin-nickel, acorn-shaped finials, she marveled that a fortnightly rubdown with mineral oil purchased from the clinically obese Salvadoran woman at the Thursday afternoon jumble sale, kept the 3x4 hinges as silent as had the mysterious and expensive goo purchased from the young girl whom Scott had brought home, claiming her to be a Swedish refugee from Au-Pairs-Without-Borders. Sure enough, there was no one in the apartment, which, she realized, had technically been a condominium since that 503 to 108 vote last June. She felt the sudden ache one experiences swallowing a very slushy margarita or double dip French vanilla swirl in a sugar cone.

Frank

[Janet Kenny]

How many entries are we allowed for each competition? Are we limited to one entry?

[Janet Kenny]

As usual she stirred thallium into his tea while he talked contemptuously of Charles Jennens’ Biblical compilation of the libretto of Handel’s “Messiah”. He sipped his tea as he held forth upon Congreve’s patchy “Semele” and contrasted it with Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast”. She poured his second cup and he prattled of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the author of texts for many of Bach's church cantatas. He clutched his stomach but continued talking, talking, talking. She was pleased to notice that his hair was thinning. He asked for aspirin. She gave him two with another cup of tea to wash it down.
“Funny” he said. “I can’t feel the cup”. He said that tax collectors nowadays would benefit from a “Peasant Cantata” like that written for the Leipzig chamberlain Carl Heinrich von Dieskau. He fainted.

[A. E. Stallings]

Ha! These are delightful.

To add to your Tuesdays... Tuesday is the bad luck day in Greece (as opposed to Friday), because it was a Tuesday in 1204 that Constantinople fell in the Fourth Crusade...

[Marion Shore]

Hey folks,
Check out my revised title for "Presumed Innocent..." I thought it should be in the spirit of the piece. What'd'ya think?

[Petra Norr]

It's a tickle, Marion. I love the toilet.
Here's my own, just for the thread:


...“Forty-three minutes ago you were a beautiful stranger," said Adam. "Now you make the ten trillion cells in my body sing. And I still don’t know your name.”
...“It’s Hortense,” she told him, ”the 377th most popular girl’s name in 1903.”
...“But it’s 2009, and I’d rather call you Eve.” He raised a hand and touched her cheek. “Here on this deserted beach in Sheboygan, where bratwurst is king, it’s as if we’re the first two creatures to walk the earth.”
...“Lucy was first,” she corrected him. “She’s the Australopithecus discovered by Donald Johanson in 1974.”
...“I know you’re intelligent, dear, but who cares about an old monkey?” His fingers strayed to the ruffles of her bodice. “I’d rather know what parachutists say when they bail.”
...She smiled. “Let `er rip!”
.