edge

i stumbled upon a piece of a blog called Literary Lion, [who i believe to be Laura Gabrielle Feasey who you can find on the Twitterer as @laurafeasey], in which there lay a challenge to write a 400 word or less piece titled ‘Edge’ and in the absence of regular Tandem Blog posting, i decided to take up that challenge and so here is mine, i hope you will enjoy, or something:

EDGE

David woke up with an impressive jolt.

He’d had that dream again. The one where he was the guitarist that Bono had picked to be in his world famous rock band. You know, U2. Yes, THAT U2. Except that he hadn’t been picked, had he? Because his name was not “out there” or cool like ‘The Edge’. His name was David.

Big world-travelling hit-producing rock bands didn’t choose people named David as their guitarist. They chose someone who people would not make complete eye contact with, who you would half-smile and nod to as he entered the room and quietly made space for him to pass by. They chose someone called ‘The Edge’.

“I could have been The Edge”, thought David, whose last name was Evans. David Evans. You don’t see people getting excited about screaming that name into an announcer’s microphone as a legendary quartet set the stadium on fire. Metaphorically, that is. They didn’t actually set the stadium on fire. Although with U2, who knew what they might try? David Evans clearly didn’t. Because he was lumbered with that sad, ridiculous name?

What if he’d told them that his middle name was ‘Howell’? That was slightly interesting, wasn’t it? I mean, not by itself, but maybe snuck in between the two most boringest names he could think of, maybe ‘Howell’ was just what was needed to have helped him force entry into the band?

David Howell Evans. He whispered it again. As he finally climbed his way out of bed and started getting dressed.

David. Howell. Evans. He liked the sound of that. If he had applied to be a member of the group that would Wow the world with ‘Boy’, by giving them his whole name like that, maybe it would have been he who was synonymous with not being able to find that thing you had misplaced on a badly signposted road somewhere on a clot-ridden Sunday afternoon?

David Howell Evans pulled on his jacket even as his face continued to shout to anyone who might have been vaguely interested that he was sulking. Pouting, even. That could all have been his!

Yet here he was, stuck in a hotel room somewhere in the middle of who knows where, doing he couldn’t for the moment remember what.

David looked up and caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. “Oh, right!” he exclaimed out loud.

edge

i hope you enjoyed reading that – make sure you check out the home page for Literary Lion and all the other entries for this challenge… and maybe consider writing one yourself…