Weekly Wordzzle 128

Finally reached the end of a busy week and the good news is I've got a whole week off work next week.


Didn't have as much trouble as I expected with the words, I did manage to get them used up.  The mini was fairly easy to do.  However, the award for Most Contrived Coversation Written Purely to Dispose of Wordzzle Words goes to....me, for my effort in the 10-worder this week. 


Anyway, for next week's challenge and this week's players, go to Raven's Nest.


The Mini (drab, dutiful, dusty, delicatessen, dart board)


“Greta!” yelled Mr Litowski, “Get your fat lazy ass out here, woman! We got customers!” If he shouted that once in a day, he must have shouted it a hundred times, and Mrs L, a tiny brown mouse of a woman, would come scuttling out from the back room.

I had been calling at Litowski’s Delicatessen for my morning bagel every day for twenty years and in all that time, I can honestly say I had never once heard Mr L utter a sentence to his wife that did not contain an insult of some kind. The Delicatessen itself was a timeless kind of place, hardly changed since that day back in 1962 when the Litowskis - hopeful young newlyweds then – first opened its doors. Although it was kept spotless by the eternally scrubbing Mrs L, the faded paintwork and worn counters made the place seem drab and dusty somehow. Outwardly, Mrs L herself was not much different from the Deli – drab and dusty-looking. Drab, dusty, and every inch the dutiful wife, wilted from years of shouted abuse.


One day, when she was on her own in the shop, I asked Mrs L how on earth she put up with her husband’s yelling all these years. She smiled and whispered, “Don’t tell anyone, but every day I go into the attic - Jan cannot manage the stairs so good, you know, so he never goes up there. I play darts for one whole hour. I go up sad, I come down happy.” Seeing my look of incomprehension, she gave me a conspiratorial wink. “Guess whose picture is stuck to the dart board.”


The 10-Worder (English, edible, eagerly, elves, eulogy, estimable, entrance, education, extra-special, Energizer Bunny)
 

New to Harold? The story so far is here.


Agents Mercury, Othello and Prada, along with Harold and Teatime stood outside the entrance to Mr Teeth’s palatial home. India had gone over to the ornamental pool to fish for the keys.


“Who would have thought Mr Jackson would have such refined tastes,” said Othello, casting an appreciative eye over the bold pink lines of the house with its randomly placed circular Swiss-cheese-hole windows. “If I’m not mistaken, this is the work of Nina Roden.”


“Who?” asked Prada.


“Nina Roden,” replied Othello, “An English architect, she worked out of Los Angeles. She liked to design buildings that look ‘edible’. She did the McCleod Higher Education Centre .”


“I don’t think I know it,” said Prada,


“The Chocolate Bar?” Othello prompted.


“Oh, right! That one!” laughed Prada, “I’d say she succeeded there – it really does look kind of yummy.”


“Yeah,” sighed Othello, “Pity she didn’t live to see it finished. She died of a brain tumour a couple of years back. Nobody even knew she had it: one day she was running round like the Energizer Bunny, the next – “ he made a gesture of hopelessness. “She left a lot of really exciting buildings behind, though. I guess they’re her eulogy in a way.”


“It must be nice to leave behind something lasting.” Said Prada, thoughtfully, “I wonder what people’ll say about me when I’m gone, nothing extra-special, I bet. My parents think I’m in the noble and estimable profession of Day Trading , for goodness sake! Hardly the stuff of legend!”


“You’ve never told them what you do?” said Othello.


“Are you kidding?” laughed Prada, “They’d freak out. They don’t believe in demons or anything like that. Listen, when all my kindergarten friends were getting bedtime stories full of magic elves, dragons and princesses, my dad would send me off to sleep with the Wall Street Journal!”


“That must have been awful,” said Mercury, appalled.


“Oh, I don’t know,” said Prada brightly, “I made my first million on the stock exchange before I was eighteen.”


Just then, India returned with a dripping plastic bag containing the house keys. She stopped in her tracks at the sight of the stunned looks on the faces of everyone but Prada, who was grinning like a Cheshire cat.


“OK,” she said eagerly, “What’d I miss?”