Note: Well, I haven't been keeping up with my 2026 Writing Challenge, but I promise I will keep trying/writing. Last night, Write On - my local writing group - had our Writing Workout session. I provided each person with a blank shopping list. Each person created a character name and then a list of things that person needed or wanted. The curveball was that I then had each person fold the list and place it in a hat. We then did a blind draw and had to write a story about the character and list we received. I recieved the list in the picture and below is the story I started. I think it could be a fun one to finish.
Gotta Have It!
Day 1
The studio apartment was Evelyn’s dream. High ceilings with skylights. A bay window overlooking the village square. A refrigerator, a cute retro looking oven colored sky blue, a microwave, and dining table. It was walking distance to her new office job, and down the street from the corner grocery. Best of all, it was above a book store. A book store! She couldn’t believe it? She was mere feet from thousands of books and magazines.
She danced around the wood floors in her bare feet, doing pirouettes she learned in ballet when she was four. She needed no music, as the sun set over the small town. Her new home. Home. She had finally found one.
It was getting late, all the stores were closed, and she had so little. Just the suitcase, three pairs of dress slacks, tennis shoes, her two favorite blouses, and the framed picture of her parents. The one in front of the farm house taken in 82. Mother in her flowered dress, short and stout and scowling, father in his bibs, wearing a goofy grin and the one hair that always pointed straight up.
“If only they could see me now!” She sang, and then thought. I need some things.
She went to the stainless-steel fridge door, stuck to it was a note pad with the word “Gotta Have It!” in green letters across the top and below a series of green lines spaced just far enough apart to add words.
On the first line she wrote: A mattress and a dresser.
She knew there had to be more, but she didn’t really know how she was going to buy those. Hopefully, she could find cheap ones at a garage sale in the coming days and weeks.
Day 2
Evelyn woke with a start and a cramp in her neck. She’d slept on the floor below the bay window, using the suitcase as a pillow. The room was covered in shadows, a gray morning light spilled across the floor. She thought she had been dreaming about Charles, the version of Charles before the war. The Charles who wrote her fun, but sometimes raunchy sonnets. The Charles, who loved to run and make things with his hands. The Charles she wanted to pluck from her dreams and bring into life, casting the post-war Charles into some nightmare to stay.
She sat up, raising her arms to the air, her elbow popped. It had never healed properly. How could it? She hadn’t been allowed to see a doctor about it. Before she stood, something caught her eye.
Jutting from the corner of the room was a mattress, next to it a wooden dresser with four drawers.
Day 3
The bowl of berries was on the counter. They were plump, red, in-season berries, even though the season was well-passed. She had taken the berries from the fridge after returning from work. The same fridge with the note pad that said “Gotta Have It!” in green letters on top. The same notepad she had written berries on before leaving this morning below her first request of a mattress and a dresser.
She had spent the day before pacing the apartment, racking her brain on how someone had snuck a mattress and a dresser in while she had slept. It didn’t make sense. Sleeping on a cold wood floor with a suitcase as a pillow didn’t lend itself to deep sleep. It couldn’t be the case.
It had frightened her so much that she had left the apartment in a hurry for work and then used some of her precious money to stay in a motel that night. The whole time telling herself she was being silly or perhaps going crazy.
So, she returned to the apartment early on the third day, expecting that the mattress and the dresser had been an illusion, a figment of hope carried to her by the delirium of leaving Charles and finding a nice secluded town with a perfect studio apartment to start again.
But, they had been there. A sheet over the mattress, the dresser standing beside like a dependable sentry.
What was she to do? She switched her slacks and blouse and before going off to her second day of work, she scribbled berries on the list.
Charles had hated berries, forbidding them from their house.
Day 4
She asked Joanie, her broad-shouldered cubicle mate, if the village had a welcoming committee or something. One of those groups, maybe a church group, that delivered goods to new members of the community. An act of good faith, type thing.
“Maybe forty years ago, we did.” Joanie rummaged into her purse for a pack of Slims. “You want one?”
Evelyn shook her head. On the way home, Evelyn realized she knew very little about this village, or even how big it was. It was too late to venture out at this point, but she was eager to find a way to survey her surroundings.
The first thing she did when she entered the apartment was go to the fridge, grab the pen, and write “a bicycle” on the third line.
That night, she gave up on the hard floor, and tried the mattress. What’s the worse thing a mattress could do? She sat on the corner for a long time, like sitting on the edge of a pool dipping her toes into the water. This is silly, she told herself, the darkness looming around her. She sank back and waited a long time before closing her eyes.
It was like being embraced by a cloud, she thought, as she drifted to sleep. She dreamt of Charles dancing at their wedding. He was wearing a dark tux, with a gray bowtie, and his hair was neatly parted.
In the morning, a yellow bicycle was standing next to her door.
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