Galumphing

Bill sat in the dirt and stared at the ring in his hand. It was a beautiful wedding ring he had purchased over a year ago, but there it was in his hand instead of on the finger it was intended for. He once felt like his life was poised at the edge of perfection: he had money, he was good-looking and in great shape, he found a great girl. He had not ever considered that it could all change so drastically for him in just one year. Bill lost the girl, who apparently had never considered him to be “husband material.” Her response to his proposal sounded something like,“I won’t spend the rest of my life with a car salesman”. He lost most of his money when he started spending more time in his bed hungover than he did at his job. He had paid three thousand dollars for the ring, and refused to consider selling it for less than two. He was never offered more than a thousand, so he kept it. He stood up. He was on the bank of the lake where they spent so many weekends together. “I don’t even like the outdoors!” she had screamed during their last fight. He dropped the ring in the water. It didn’t deserve a place in the middle of the crystal blue lake, it belonged in the shallow muddy water on the banks.

…This was a story i created during a writing class that i took recently. Here is how i came up with it:

Pick a three digit number between 000 and 999. Write it down on a scrap of paper. Now pick the word out of the following three columns that corresponds to each of the digits in the number you wrote down. For example, for 632, the words are:
radio, foot doctor, and grocery store.

Your task is to write one paragraph using the item from column 1, the character from column 2, and the place mentioned in column 3. You are galumphing, so feel free to have fun. Be profligate, excessive, exaggerated, and uneconomical.

The numbers i chose for my short story were 357.

try this out for fun… post your story in the comments section below.