4. He used a dirty hand…
Today’s Prompt
4. He used a dirty hand to push his hair away from his face and it left a smear of mud on his cheek.
400 Creative Writing Prompts Workbook Story Prompts for Journaling, Blogging, and Overcoming Writer’s Block Compiled by Debra Chapoton All rights reserved Copyright © 2020 by Debra Chapoton
Response
Oh God, how I needed this, Jerome thought, as he weaved his way through the underbrush, carefully keeping his head on a swivel in case one of the other team happened to come upon him from the side or behind. I can’t remember the last time I had fun. How sad is that?
Jerome was a serious guy. As an investment banker who wanted to rise through the ranks far and fast enough to be comfortably wealthy by the time he was forty, and able to retire if he so chose at fifty, he had to be serious. Finance was a cut throat business, everyone competing for clients and advantage, looking for any quick gain or shortcut to success. So far, Jerome had done well for himself by not falling for the traps of fast money, but staying the course by guiding his clients through the ebbs and flows of market whimsy with a solid combination of a base of low risk guaranteed return, a substantial enough portion of medium risk to see good growth in enough money that clients felt their paying him was worth it, and then placing higher risk bets with a small enough amount that when they won it was celebrated but when they lost (and Jerome was wise enough to know that everyone lost some times) it wasn’t catastrophic or felt too deeply, so clients remained loyal. Jerome had seen too many colleagues drummed out of the industry because they bet too much money on too much risk and lost not only the client but their careers. Jerome wasn’t going to make that mistake.
But he had fallen into the danger of letting the work consume him. Sixty to seventy hour weeks were too common. And despite his hard and fast commitment to being prudent, the pressure to perform and the temptation to stray led to a seriousness that had begun to infect every aspect of his life. When Cheryl moved out, he was stunned and shaken. Jerome thought Cheryl was going to be the one to stick with, the one to marry and be his companion through the journey he’d so carefully mapped. And so, when Josh, his oldest buddy from college, called him up out of the blue and asked if he could come on a paint ball adventure weekend, Jerome thought, why not? Maybe it’s what I need.
And boy, was I right! Jerome now thinks as he used a dirty hand to push his hair away from his face, leaving a smear of mud on his cheek. He grinned at the thought of what he must look like, covered in dirt, mud, twigs stuck to him from when he did that dive into the ravine to avoid the red team who thankfully stumbled into the clearing he was on the edge of without seeing him. Josh demanded they be on the blue team, since he had it in his head from before their arrival to refer to their group as the ‘Blue Ball Boys’ since everyone on the trip had also done at least one of the Polar Plunge challenges hosted at their alma mater. While the name made Jerome uncomfortable at first, feeling his dignity maligned, by this point he didn’t care anymore, having let go of propriety in favor of the competitive spirit of just wanting to wipe the smug grins from the red team’s faces.
