After reading yesterday’s tale of laundry day, SueP wrote to ask for “The Rest of the Story.”
I suppose the request makes sense. After all, the tale ends almost as soon as it starts. There’s a brief explanation of why water doesn’t burn, followed by the revelation of a washing machine full of clothes and water with smoke coming out of it.
Clearly the water is on fire! Given that this takes place at Blair’s house, you know there must be a story behind it. Maybe the inhabitants of Pluto, enraged at losing their status as a planet have declared war and set fire to the laundry as a first strike? Or maybe it’s something more mundane after all, but with all that setup, surely there’s at least a half-dozen fire trucks!
This is exciting! Sue was doubtless looking forward to reading the next paragraph (both my other readers probably were too), and when she scrolled down a little further, there it was: Nothing. Nothing at all.
With that lead-in, you can’t help wondering, what’s going on? How can he stop there?
It’s simple really. It’s not that I didn’t want to write more, it’s just that “the Rest of the Story” is quite anti-climatic.
My best guess is that I just overloaded the washing machine. Once I realized where the smoke was coming from, I took the sheets out and washed them along with a shirt and some towels that had been previously overlooked.
That’s pretty much it. No spaceship battles for Terry. Wylie didn’t get to fulfil his dream of riding in a fire truck. Nothing dramatic at all. I didn’t even get to write about the smoke detector going off!
Leaving it with smoke coming out was just more interesting.