Wednesday's Words on a Friday

On Wednesdays, Delores, from Under The Porch Light, has a meme which she calls

“Words for Wednesday”.

She puts up a selection of six words which we then use in a short story, or a poem.

I’m hopeless at poetry so I always do a story.

It’s a fun challenge…why not join in?

This week's words are:

1. sparkling

2. pudgy

3. goddess

4. surprising

5. wrinkled

6. talent

We also have a sentence, well, part of a sentence: "in darkest night, on silent wings of ice"

which I won't be using today.

Here is my story:

Renae stared at the image of herself in the mirror. She'd been pudgy as a toddler, (her mum called it "baby fat"), then pudgy as a child, her mum called it ("puppy fat"), but now she was fourteen and still pudgy. There was a roll of fat hanging over the waistband of her skirt.

She'd come to realise that pudginess would stay forever if she didn't do something about it. 

Taped to the top corner of her mirror was a photo of a former top model, Cindy Crawford. 

To Renae, Cindy was a goddess. There'd been  a story about Cindy in a recent gossip magazine, showing photos of Cindy in her heyday, Cindy as a child, Cindy as she was now. 

Still looking like a goddess, it was rumored Cindy had a little plastic surgery to stay looking as good as she did. 

Renae was sceptical. She'd seen pictures of women who'd had "procedures" done and they looked nothing like Cindy. Some of them had facelifts so tight, their eyebrows practically disappeared into their hairline, giving them a permanently startled look. Others had botoxed their lips so much they looked as if someone punched them in the mouth on a daily basis. 

Cindy didn't look like those ladies. Her face was smooth, but there were little laugh lines at the corners of her eyes, they wouldn't be there if she'd had plastic surgery surely?  And her neck was still wrinkle free too as if she'd never been fat and had to lose weight suddenly. Renae thought of their neighbour Mrs. Bethany, who had lost pounds and pounds last year and whose wrinkled neck now looked like a scrawny piece of chicken skin. 

Looking at her image, Renae decided that she wanted to look more like Cindy. She wanted to enter in the school talent show this year, but to stand out amongst all the other girls, Renae would have to lose at least fifteen pounds. She sighed as she thought about her mum's cooking. Her cakes and pastries were legendary throughout the town; Mrs Leibowitz regularly took the blue ribbon at the annual show. Renae had been eating those cakes and pastries all her life and had come to realise the so-called puppy fat was in actual fact pastry fat. 

She didn't want to hurt her mum's feelings, but she also didn't want to be pudgy all her life. There had been newspaper and television articles about the dramatic rise in numbers of diabetics lately, diet was suspected to be more than half the problem, with mention of sedentary lifestyles. Perhaps that was the key to talking with her mum. If she brought up the diabetic angle, maybe Renae could talk her mum out of the "croissants for breakfast, doughnuts for after school snack and chocolate cake for dessert" routine.

Renae sat on her new desk chair and planned the speech she was going to give her mum at dinner. In the meantime she munched on sliced apple and sipped at sparkling mineral water instead of her usual strawberry milk and doughnut. It was surprising just how good water tasted when it had a few bubbles in it. This could really work, she thought. I'll eat mum's dinners, but have smaller slices of cake and stick with apples and mineral water for after school. I wonder if mum will agree to eggs for breakfast instead of croissants with jam....I'll mention the eggs have protein which will keep me going until lunch, that should help.