Saturday Wordzzle Challenge: Week 26

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This is week 26 of the Saturday Wordzzle Challenge. Anyone new to the process can refer back here to find out how it works. Thanks again to Jeff B for supplying this week's words/phrases. I continue to enjoy the break from making them up myself.

I had a hard time this with this week's words. Hemoglobin, Jeff? What were you thinking?

The words for this week's ten word challenge were: exponentially, Nightshade, braces, impossibility, the beginning of time, barracuda, playful banter, delve, automatic, bewildered And for the Mini Challenge: fragment, hemoglobin, insipid, flourish, juxtapose

Here's my ten-word offering for this week.

Marybeth sat bewildered looking in the mirror. Much as it had seemed an impossibility to her that she could look any uglier than she had since the beginning of time, the braces, besides being uncomfortable, made her feel exponentially more hideous. They gave her, she believed, the look of a chubby barracuda. She could hear the so-called playful banter of her family as they delved ever more deeply into the heart of her pain, twisting a thousand knives and making jokes at her expense. But she would show them. She would kill herself with nightshade also known as bella dona or beautiful woman. How better to kill her ugliness? Her pain would be gone and others would suffer. They would never be able to mock her ugliness again.

And here's my mini challenge:

Lance Langmulchen waved away the last fragment of his fear with an insipid flourish of the wrist. Meredith needed hemoglobin and he would supply her with as much blood as he could, no matter what it cost him in anxiety. Juxtaposed against the possibility of losing her, his terror of needles and tubes was nothing. “Proceed,” he whispered to the nurse, “I do this for my Meredith,” and promptly fainted.

For the mega challenge: I went with a poem on this one. And I repeat. Hemoglobin, Jeff? Hemoglobin?

The Broken Heart

Sweet Nightshade I call you
You are poison to me
Still
I have loved you
Since the beginning of time
Bewildered by the depth of it
Ashamed and confused
I brace against each pathetic, insipid flourish
Of attention I instinctively - automatically -
Direct to you
Although the impossibility of us -
Of you and me -
Becomes exponentially more clear
With the passing of each breath,
Each day, each week, each year
Juxtaposed against my agonized love
Your playful banter,
Not meant to be unkind
Delves deep
Like a savage barracuda
And chews on the fragments
Of my broken heart
Oblivious - which makes it so much more cruel -
You suck the hemoglobin from my blood
And my iron will melts to nothing
Sweet Nightshade
Your poison is in my blood and I cannot resist
I can't stop loving you while there is any hope
Yet even rejection would be better
Than being so unseen.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

This week's vanity wordzzle used the words: mush, ping, kaleidoscope, software, pillbox hat, parquet floor, skinny woman, Venus flytrap

Ruth Jones felt like she had mush for brains and hoped that booting up the computer would ground her and bring her back to center. She felt comforted by the pings and beeps and grunting start-up noises as the software (or hardware - she was never sure which was which) brought the screen to light. From the other room she heard a thump, followed by hissing, followed by the thundering sound of cats-paws on her beautiful parquet floor and then her usually agile and well-behaved cats came tearing into the room knocking over a small shelf which held a large violet, two Venus fly-traps, and her brand new kaleidoscope, all of which crashed to the floor in a jumbled mess of leaves, glass and dirt. As if that weren't enough, the doorbell rang. Ruth frowned. "What now," and peeking through the eye-hole on her door saw with dread, a skinny woman in a pink Chanel suit and matching pillbox hat, and of course WHITE GLOVES. "I am in Hell," she sighed, forced her mouth into a smile and opened the door. "Mother! What a lovely surprise."

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Special thanks to Jeff B for this week’s words and phrases (hemoglobin!????) and the following for next week. (By the way, Jeff... just kidding. I love a challenge.)

Next Week's Ten Word Challenge will be: tiramisu, transfixed, evacuation, Queen of the Nile, pillowcase, grammatical, voice inflection, pacified, microclimate, swami

And for the Mini Challenge: maggots, thermal pocket, industrial, bovine, feminized

Thanks for playing. For those who are new, here are some guidelines to make the process more fun.

Enjoy! See you next week.

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Mr. Linky has been known to play hide and seek on occasion. On the off chance that all you see is a little square instead of the Mr. Linky logo, just click on the square. The little guy should be there. I don't have sufficient cyber skills to know why this has been happening. And maybe it's only happening on my computer which has been acting very odd of late.