At midnight the next evening, thunder boomed, nearly drowning out a timid knock on the door.
Jakob was sitting in the kitchen and practicing his russet carving skills. Bela’s rejection had shaken him so that he dared not risk another true potato under his untalented blade. Instead he was practicing on marble. It was far easier to carve Bela’s beauteous countenance in the cool stone, but it was the potato that would truly show the lengths he would go to love Bela (until, of course, Woeisme reached a legal age).
But the knock, it was faint, but truly there! Jakob put his carving tools away and went to answer the door.
There stood Bela, soaked to the bone, tears spilling down her cheeks like the raindrops falling down from the sky. In fact, it was only the redness of Bela’s eyes and Jakob’s keen senses that told him she’d been crying at all.
“Bela!” he said, startled. “I’m surprised to see you here!”
“I know,” Bela said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
“You are always welcome here, you know. But why did you come?” Jakob asked, feigning ignorance.
Bela shook her head sadly. “It makes me so upset to talk about it! My beloved Edwood and I… had a fight!”
“A fight?” Jakob could barely contain his joy, though he tried hard. “That’s terrible! What about?”
“Pronunciation!” Bela sobbed.
Jakob led her into the house and brought her a handkerchief. “Pronunciation?”
“Yes,” Bela sniffed and blew her nose into Jakob’s handkerchief. “But that isn’t where it started. I’ve long noticed he has a tendency to horribly split infinitives! And sometimes prepositions are what he ends his sentences with!”
Jakob gasped in horror and mentally thanked his third grade teacher. She may have been arrested for child endangerment the year following his, but he would never split an infinitive again. He still had nightmares about her grammar lessons.
“I let him distract me too long with sparkles and beauty and cool indifference, and I tried to accept his grammatical errors, but when he mispronounced potato, I simply couldn’t take it!” She burst into tears again.
Jakob patted her arm consolingly and tried to think of a sentence so stunning in its syntax, so miraculous in its metaphors, so gloriously grammatical that Bela would fall for him like a sack of potatoes dropped from the roof of the Empire State Building.
But there was something missing still. Something beautiful and lovely and still too young, though Jakob wished she were otherwise.
“But Bela!” he cried. “Where is Woeisme?”
• 
Where indeed? Oh, woe is me!!!!
LOL.
Only here could tuber carving lead to grammar fights!!
“Jakob gasped in horror and mentally thanked his third grade teacher. She may have been arrested for child endangerment the year following his, but he would never split an infinitive again. He still had nightmares about her grammar lessons.”
hahhaha, that was awesome too, I love the way that paragraph plays out.
You know what’s great? If you go back and read all the other little pieces that people have added to Jakob the overall portrait is that he’s really, really, really, really screwed up and has alot of awkward things happen to him on a regular basis. It’s pretty funny.
Yeah, this is turning into quite the interesting character study. I’m actually amazed at how good this whole thing is turning out to be. In my experience with these sorts of round-robin stories, they usually turn into a series of anecdotes (“this happened, then this happened, then this happened”) and ultimately become an overly plotted mess. But this is a freakin’ NOVEL!
I have to agree. Thus far all the contributors seem to understand the fundamental concept of improv, which is to build upon what the person in front of you has done. This thing is actually progressing, and I’m as curious as anyone to see what happens next. That was part of the decision to just put them up as soon as I get them, rather than always wait 24 hours. It gives it a bit more immediacy…not to mention you never know when you should check in on the site, because another chapter could be up!
.
PAD