Three weeks ago I started a “Furthering your Creative Writing” course at CityLit. The first assignment was writing a 500 words story using all these words: Anti, Anodyne, Delicate, Jasper, Bodysuit, Dew, Today, Six, Outing, Oboe, Built. Here is what came out. Here’s what came up in a couple of hours.

“Today was exactly three years since he’d first seen her in Adelle’s living room. Standing tall and dreamy, in her jaded bodysuit. Long limbs, skin delicate and golden like sandy beaches, eyes deep and tumultuous, like rivers cascading into the ocean.

He marveled at how green they looked in the afternoon sunlight. “She must be some kind of mutant, half alien, half human,” he thought to himself while his mind’s eyes were rolling snippets of scenes from the V series. “What if this beautiful creature’s head suddenly split open to let loose a monster with slithering tongues and drooling jaws?”

He shook his head to chase away the vision and smiled politely while taking a sit in front of her at the big, rectangular oak table. They did not speak much that day, apart from the polite conversation over a bowl of gazpacho and vegetarian lasagna. But he was hooked.

Her name was Dew and she was Adelle’s niece visiting from Nice. She spoke English with a sexy French accent. One more reason to be smitten with her. He’d had a thing for French girls ever since 9th grade, when he fell in love with Lilliane, their new neighbour’s daughter. All afternoon he couldn’t help but stare at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. He was entranced, subdued by Dew’s outwardly beauty. He flinched every time their legs brushed against each other under the starchy cotton tablecloth, as if his body was wired and she was his electrical switch.

He reddened up to his eyeball when Dew caught him starring at the huge jasper Cleopatra-shaped pendant resting between her breasts. He was just trying to hang on to something other than her hypnotizing eyes, God damn it! Was it his fault that she was practically naked in her see-through outfit? Her cheeky, derisive smile in the corner of her Jolie-esque lips didn’t help ease his shame.

He forced himself to fix his gaze on Adelle and more grimacing than actually smiling, he tried to take part in whatever nonsense the other six members of the party were yapping about. Something about an anti-war committee that would serve as panacea for all wrongs in the world. Then the night became a blur. He remembered a guy named Lenny playing the oboe, snippets of anodyne conversation and Dew’s perfect laughter.

“If it wasn’t for that stupid outing, I would have never met Dew. And I wouldn’t be now trapped in a time vault,” he blurted out loud and the echo of his words brought him back to the bitter reality. The Earth was at war with aliens looking very much like the visitors from his childhood SF movies. Turns out, Dew was indeed an undercover mutant and that outing was nothing of an accident. They were meant to meet, because he was somehow part of the aliens’ wicked plan to conquer the Earth and perpetuate their species.”