Saturday Wordzzle Challenge: Week 43

This is week 43 of the Saturday Wordzzle Challenge. Anyone new to the process can refer back here to find out how it works. Despite how difficult this week's words were, I had a lot of fun doing it this week. This may be because I did it on Wednesday morning instead of waiting until late Friday afternoon when the pressure to get them posted feels overwhelming. Hope you all had fun.

The words for this week's ten word challenge were: Horny as a toad, Frankenstein’s sister, Greeks bearing gifts, Holiday, Cheese grater, Gridlock, Drip dry, Coffin maker, movie mogul, Turkish coffee Mini Challenge: prenuptial agreement, The purple cow just hated the orange cat, potato chips, sari, Hammer and nails

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

Being a coffin maker was not exactly the most alluring profession in the world. Unlike being a movie mogul or some other romantic profession, it did not make you a chick magnet. Magnus Gridlock was bored, depressed and horny as a toad. He was tired of measuring bodies and wearing drip dry shirts and being polite and careful. So when his cousin Dimitri suggested an all expense paid holiday in Istanbul, he completely forgot the old adage to beware of Greeks bearing gifts (to which his mother had always added the codicil, “especially if they are your cousin Dimitri”). You would think that by now he would have learned. One minute he had been eating Backlava and sipping some very fine Turkish coffee and then suddenly his cousin was nowhere to be seen and a woman who could only be described as Frankenstein’s sister was coming after him waving something that looked like a cheese grater. She seemed to be under impression that he was going to marry her as did a collection of equally large and menacing family members and a small trembling person who appeared to be a priest. As he unhappily became the groom of Frankenstein, Magnus knew whose coffin he would be making next. Dimitri’s days were numbered.

And here's my mini challenge:

“Hammers and nails, hammers and nails… I will thump the bastard on the head with hammers and nails” Chandra muttered angrily as she read through the prenuptial agreement her once beloved fiancé had presented her with only a day earlier. Cramming a handful of potato chips into her mouth without tasting them, she neither noticed nor cared about the large grease stain on her beautiful sari. “Pah!” she muttered angrily. “He is not the man I thought he was. And his mother… that woman – I call her the purple cow - just hated the orange cat, but who would have thought he would let her make getting rid of my beloved Mandrake part of the wedding agreement. Anything else, I could have forgiven, but not that. He can have that mean-spirited purple cow of a mother. I will find love elsewhere. Husbands come and go, but the love of a good kitty is irreplaceable.”

And for the mega challenge:

On holiday in Crete, Frankenstein’s sister (Pasha knew that was what her beloved Gridkins called her, but she didn’t care since while it had initially been intended pejoratively, he now said it with deep love and affection) sat sipping a cup of Turkish coffee and nibbling some greasy potato chips. She was thinking longingly of her beloved Magnus Gridlock, the former coffin maker. He had married her against his will, muttering under his breath something about Greeks bearing gifts and cheese graters. After the initial shock, things had gone well, though, and they had even grown to love each other. It had helped that they had both been (as Americans put it) as horny as toads, and, as it turned out very sexually compatible. From the very start, she had loved watching him work on the coffins, loved the way his hands held the hammer and nails and created beautiful wooden boxes in which to put the dead. Coffin making had seemed a waste of his talents and she knew he was bored and unfulfilled, so she had spoken to a movie mogul friend of her family and had gotten him a job working as a set designer in Hollywood. He had never been happier and had taken to it like a duck to water. He had been nominated for an Oscar for sets he created for his first film which had the odd name The Purple Cow Just Hated the Orange Cat. It was the story of a poor young Indian woman who had foregone marriage to a wealthy man because she loved her cat but who had then met and fallen in love with a veterinarian from and even wealthier family and had lived happily ever after. Chandra, the author and star of the film had taken to Magnus and Pasha and had shown them the wonders of her native India, even teaching Pasha to wear a sari and weaning Magnus of his addiction to drip dry shirts. Unfortunately, while in India Magnus fallen under the sway of a guru there and between movie assignments, spent much of his time at the ashram. Pasha had no desire to follow this path and deeply missed the simpler days when Magnus was a poor and not so happy coffin maker. It was too late, she sighed, for a prenuptial agreement… and probably this turn of events could not have been predicted in any case.

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This week's vanity wordzzle used the words: beads, shadow, magazine, guard, memory, heart, poultice, half moon, sound of surf, tummy

Sitting in shadow under the canopy of her cottage's small porch, Melinda rocked quietly, lulled by the sound of the surf and the beauty of gulls silhouetted against the rich blue sky, floating between the white half moon and the dark, diamond-studded waves. She fingered the small beads of her necklace as though it were a rosary. She must not let the beauty lull her too far. She must guard her heart and mind against memory. She had thought coming here would help, but it had not. She held an unread magazine against her empty, childless tummy like a poultice. Why had God done this to her, taken both Evan and their unborn child? The loss was too much to bear and all this beauty seemed an insult to her grief.

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Next Week's Ten Word Challenge will be: When pigs have wings, Moonlight, Mystery, Tower of Babel, Butterflies, Bread and butter, Beef barley soup, Charley horse, Novelty, Cold shoulder

Mini Challenge: Software, Lottery, Newspaper, Mailman, Ringo Starr’s drum

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

Enjoy! See you next week.

DON'T FORGET TO ADD YOUR NAME TO MR. LINKY!!!!!