Trifecta-Week One Hundred Five – Pluck

Monday morning at 10 AM we get another prompt from Trifecta. You don’t know who Trifecta is? It is a group that provides two prompts each week, on Monday and Friday for your fiction writing pleasure. The Monday prompt is geared to fall between 33 and 333 words and based on a one word prompt. Using the third definition from the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary you will put together a fiction masterpiece. Along with the other nearly 100 writers taking the plunge you will create an exciting story for others to read.

And now for this week’s prompt.

PLUCK: (transitive verb)

1: to pull or pick off or out

2a : to remove something (as hairs) from by or as if by plucking

b : rob, fleece

3: to move, remove, or separate forcibly or abruptly 

4 a : to pick, pull, or grasp at    b : to play by sounding the strings with the fingers or a pick – See more at: http://www.trifectawritingchallenge.com/#sthash.3z7p96Ky.dpuf

 ★★★★★★

“Where are you?” Elsie barked into the phone.

“Just inside the door. There is about twelve of us fussing over the last three buggies,” Mary Ann replied.

“I see three big butterballs left. You had better bust a move or you will be serving pork chops again this year.”

Mary Ann’s blood ran cold. She had regretted her decision last year to eschew the usual Thanksgiving week Monday morning trip to the grocery for a trip to the casino at Shreveport with the girls. She won $1,722 that day, enough to buy sixty turkeys the size she normally fixed, but when she traveled to the grocery store the day after she returned there was no turkey in sight.

The panic was not immediate, since there were other stores in town and within driving distance. After the seventh repeat of the same fruitless search Mary Ann begin to feel a real concern. This was nothing compared to the ridicule and shame that followed. Her mother’s voice over the phone was appalled and even condescending.

Her husband Bob did not say much. He didn’t have to. Thirty two years of marriage and raving over her scrumptious Thanksgiving meals highlighting the plump bird was going to be laid asunder by her dalliance. As Mary Ann sat and watched the Gone With the Wind marathon that evening she swore this would never happen to her again. Never would she ever be without a bird. Now here she was two hundred feet from a repeat of the worst day of her life. She rushed between two of her fellow church members. Sensing the urgency, others began to chase after her.

“There’s two now!” Elsie screamed into her phone.

Mary Ann saw her target and her last competitor. She dropped her handbag and her phone as she readied to make her grab. She threw her right hip into the woman reaching for the last bird and managed to pluck it from the case. Victory was hers.

 ***********************