I am an ass

I woke up randomly at 4 AM with this idea in my head. It's for my fiction class. I guess my motto is "If you can't join 'em, beat 'em." Either that or "If you can't beat 'em, beat yourself."

The Fiction Mine

The walls were thick with mealy-mouthed adjectives. We’d jumped into this dank dark pit together, though certainly not as one, our leader crying, “See the stars and count them! We’ll all go on three! Ready? One…two…three!” I plummeted in with the group, though I’d only counted one star - it was noon and the sun was blazing. It was bright and real and obvious, not to mention the center of my universe, so perhaps that was worth triple.

The pit itself was shallow, an easy downward fall, though too steep to climb back out. Before my eyes had time to adjust to the darkness, my comrades had already started grabbing slimy, scaly fistfuls of adjectives from the walls and stuffed them into their sacks. I felt for my sack. It was full of words I’d brought from home, but apparently the wrong kind. Everyone else seemed too busy with their own harvests to notice, but I tried to squish my personal stash into something that resembled what I thought the walls must look like. The adjectives hissed and gnarled and gnashed their teeth, and a few even sang out in song. I could hear them oozing through the fingers of the others, and their muffled cries as they were forced down indiscriminately into sacks.

I crawled on my hands and knees over to the wall. Maybe I just was being stubborn; maybe I didn’t want to get dirty. I reached out and plucked a single adjective. It was already dead and not going anywhere, so I rolled it around in my hand. It reminded me of the caterpillars that took over one summer at camp. The caterpillars were
non-indigenous parasites and I had a vegetarian biology-nut friend who took every opportunity to kill them with her shower shoes. They weren’t very colorful on the outside, but when you squished them they made a popping sound and oozed magenta and bright green like the aliens they were. Now, I squeezed my caterpillar adjective, and POP! There it went, swirling colors and all.

“Time’s up, everybody!” bubbled our leader, setting up a ladder for us to re-ascend. “Now take out your adjectives and sort through them.”

I looked down at my deformed words from home and the red-green stain on my hand, hung my head, and cried.