This weeks fun words: Padlock Glamour Ditch Perversity Fade Affinity Parallel Desticate (to squeak like a rat) Jagged Scarecrow Hungry Currant (a small seedless raisin)
Scarecrow looked across the table at me. We hadn’t seen each other in twenty years and the years since had not been kind to him. He was the sort of man my mother would describe as being behind the door when looks were handed out.
Back then he was at the top of his trade. Scarecrow was a private detective and had made his mark the day he smashed the crime ring of Candice O’Doud the Irish mobster, the sort of woman you could imagine could peel paint from a wall with one withering look.
O’Doud had a menagerie of followers, all women, equally as shady as she was. They were in the main a glamorous bunch of women, The Rose who only had one leg but had an unusual affinity with links and padlocks, Basket whose desticated voice made her a liability in a tight spot as she was immediately recognisable when she opened her mouth and MJ, Mary Jean Tackan whose brother Sean ‘Tackers’ Tackan had emigrated to Australia and had become a household name in the blogging world.
All that was now in the past. Scarecrow, for that was the only name I knew him as, which made sense when most of the people I came in contact with had enigmatic names. Though if you looked closely he did had many scarecrow characteristics. Tall, sallow, his hair stuck out and he had a habit of having straw stuck down his pants.
I’d received a call from a mate in the force to say that Scarecrow had been picked up in a ditch, with only a pocket full of currants to his name.
He fallen a long way from the top. His fame had faded, and there was no doubt in my mind that some perversity had occurred in his life to place him in the position he now found himself.
As he made his way through his second bowl of pumpkin soup it was clear to me that he was hungry, very hungry.
When I asked him how he had come to be living in a ditch with hardly a penny to his name his jagged features became even more jagged as he tried to explain the many parallels in his life.
It was at that moment that I remembered I was parallel parked and didn’t want to attract the perverse attention of the parking police especially Rat Face Raymondo the Spanish immigrant whose job as a parking officer allowed him to desticate loudly in the streets to any one foolish enough to question his methods.
Scarecrow wiped his mouth on the tablecloth; he was never one for table manners and looked me in the eye. We had an affinity with each other even after all these years and once I had delivered him a cup of coffee the padlock that locked his mind was released and he regaled me with countless stories many of which made the hairs on the back of my neck curl.
I left him with another coffee and a promise to look in on him tomorrow with the hope of getting him back into a more glamorous side of life.
Written for: https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/wordle-prompt-43-12-january-2015/
Morpethroad 