“Anniversary” or “The Mysterious Affair of Pansy’s Pearls”

Holy smokes, can you believe it? Tomorrow marks the one-year “annually recurring date of a past event, especially one of historical, national, or personal importance” of the Ever on Word blog! This time last year, I did not have a blog; and the next day, I did! Isn’t life nutty, like that?

And in that one year period, just look at what’s happened:

Counting today’s, 165 blog posts! (That was all me.)

5,308 views! (That was all you guys.)

120 followers! (Thank you so, so much!)

And those are just the numbers to be seen at a glance on my stats page. It doesn’t say anything about how many times I’ve giggled to myself over some silly thing I’ve typed into a to-be-published piece, or how special I’ve felt when people have said very nice things to me in the comments, or the good times I’ve had on other people’s blogs while trolling for attention. (;

How in the world to commemorate such an occasion? Well, according to The Wedding Anniversary Site.com, symbols for a first anniversary are…

Traditional = Paper

Modern = Clock

Flower = Pansy

Gemstone = Freshwater pearls

It is perfectly clear, then, what I must do: Write a speedy-quick short story incorporating all four elements!

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Once there was a writer, code-named Pansy. Yes, you read that correctly; Pansy was neither her real name nor a pen name, but a code name. Because you see, Pansy was no ordinary writer (an oxymoronic phrase, that, anyway): She was a writer slash spy. …slash background dancer, but that has little enough place in this story that you needn’t mind it.

Twice a day, without fail, when her broken clock was correct in announcing the hour as seven past eleven, Pansy would stand by a derelict gazebo making an eyesore of itself in the park. And there she would wait for about as long as it took to sing the first half of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”, always chuckling at the irony that her semidiurnal mission at the gazebo had nothing to do with diamonds, and everything to do with freshwater pearls.

Hmm… Mysterious Character in Tangerine looks suspiciously like a certain Ink Caster…

Three beats either side of the song’s halfway point, a mysterious figure in tangerine would appear. (No, not black. There’s nothing mysterious about a spy’s rendezvous with someone in black; you’d expect that. A figure attired head to heel in tangerine, on the other hand, raises any number of puzzling questions.) This tangerine-clad character would sidle up to Pansy, slip her a jewelry box, and continue on his, her, or its way as if no clandestine exchange had taken place – although of course we, with the advantage of the tale’s narration, know better.

Forth sallied Pansy, jewelry box in hand, to the deep, dark cellar that served as her photo-development studio. There, she withdrew from the box a chemically-treated pearl choker and placed it atop a sheet of also-but-differently-chemically-treated paper. Pearls and paper sat together, a marriage of words beginning with “P”, until the stroke of midnight (or that of noon, but barring a lawless Western shootout, that simply doesn’t have the weighty connotations of midnight). Then Pansy removed the choker from the paper, to see what the red light of the photo-development room revealed.

Five words had etched themselves onto the surface, this time: “Her blog’s first year ended…” Pansy nodded, disposed of the evidence, and went back to her super secret authorial laptop. She had her latest prompt. Time to write.

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Many thanks to all of you who have joined me during Ever On Word’s first year. Stick around for the second; I intend to make it at least as awesome. (: