Ingredients:
- Fridge door
- Pen affixed in some clever, purposeful way to fridge door
- Designer pad of note paper, preferably decorated with bright flowers or small animals the like of which are never seen in nature. (Failing this, a used envelope or scrap of junk mail will do)
- Fridge magnet to hold the above in place. (Your choice of design, provided it is too cute for words)
- Guilt, for garnish
Directions:
Use the pen to list on the paper everything in your life you should have done by now, everything you ought to be doing this very minute instead of what you are in fact doing and everything that, by all that’s holy, you should at least try to do before you die. Ideally, your list will include both the somewhat doable (eg – Lose 15 pounds) and what can best be categorized as the do-I-laugh-or-do-I-cry (eg – Try to be a better person)
Ignore your finished list for at least a week and preferably several years.
When the paper is yellowing and the ink beginning to fade, re-read your list, pen in hand.
If you can tick off even a single item, you have failed failure.
Garnish with guilt.
Serves one. As often as you choose to subject yourself to it.
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K.D. Miller’s stories and essays have appeared in Canadian literary magazines, have been collected in Oberon’s Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Anthology, and have been broadcast by the CBC. She has published four collections of stories: A Litany in Time of Plague, Give Me Your Answer, The Other Voice and All Saints; an essay collection, Holy Writ; and a novel, Brown Dwarf. In 2014, All Saints was short-listed for the 2014 Rogers Writers Trust Award and named as one of the year’s best by the Globe and Mail.
Visit K.D. Miller’s website at: www.dawnwriter.com
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Up Next:
“torn open, smashed flat – mourning my dead, the future trumped,”
The Litter I See Project 