Wordzzle

Jay, at Cynical Bastard, got me interested in reading the entries for Raven's Wordzzle game, and more or less dared me to give it a try. So here goes.




Five words:

History, Shylock, myrmidon, frozen, incapacitated

Due to a history of dealing with the local Shylock and his club-wielding myrmidon, Bruce, I am incapacitated inside the frozen tundra that is my mind.

-----

Ten Words

Fruitcake, necromancer, gibberish, Marshland, Lone Ranger, hog-wild, Effluvia, plaintiff , phonograph, Fern





“What’s that?” asked my friend, Fern, as the strains of the William Tell Overture sounded in the next room.

“Oh, my brother’s listening to his favorite radio show, “The Lone Ranger”.

“Sounds like gibberish, to me,” said Fern. And we turned our attention back to our dolls.

The year was 1948, the year that I discovered that I could talk to the dead. Just the night before, I had overheard my father telling my mother that it wasn’t natural for me to have so many imaginary friends. Imaginary?

I turned to Fern, “Are you imaginary?” I asked. “No,” she chuckled. “Then, why am I the only person who can see and hear you?” I asked, confused. She shrugged her shoulders and said calmly, “Because I’m dead.”

As the years went by, I learned the term for it. I was a Necromancer. By the time I was a teenager, I was acquainted with more of the dead than the living. At one point, I tried to turn off this unusual talent. But, they wouldn’t leave me alone. Sometimes, I would wake up in the night and hear music that sounded like a scratched record, played on a phonograph. Other times, I was confronted with a newly-deceased spirit that emitted an odor similar to marshland effluvia.

Naturally, it was impossible to keep my ability a secret. I tried to explain this talent to my parents, who wasted no time getting me into therapy. Then, when the therapist became convinced that I was the real deal, my parents made appointments for themselves, to learn how to cope with this changeling daughter they felt they no longer knew.

My brother blabbed early-on, of course. He couldn’t help himself. He went hog-wild with newfound popularity at school. Thereafter, I was called various names, but the kindest and most common one was “fruitcake.”

After law school, specializing in the area of wrongful death, I became a Plaintiff’s attorney, representing the families of the dead. Until my retirement, two years ago, I was very successful at obtaining large amounts of money for my clients, as well I should, since the dead could tell me what caused their untimely deaths, whether it be from a faulty appliance or at the hands of someone else.

Lately, however, since my retirement, it has been increasingly difficult to tell who’s dead and who’s alive. Everyone wears white, here, and they refuse to enlighten me. They keep wanting me to guess. I’ve never been especially good at that.