Laundry List: Little stories I just made up

In one of my Creative Writing classes, I'm reading a book by Ray Carlson on story writing. One of the loveliest concepts between its pages is that of inventory. Inventory are the details of a story that make it seem real--tangible--believable. It's the first time I've heard a name for the reason that I love to read. Thank you, Ray Carlson, for coming up with the word inventory. So I'm going to make up some inventory and some little tidbits of writing, just for fun, because it's my favorite thing to read:

*He'd never paid much attention to the things that filled people's houses. What color had his last girlfriend, Ellie's couch been? He felt a little bit guilty that though he'd watched a wagon's worth of movies on it, he couldn't remember to save his life. Suddenly, in spite of that, and most of the other reasonable pieces of himself, he was in love with Delia's kitchen cupboards. The tea cupboard was his favorite. The first few times that he'd come over, she'd had water boiling on the stove, and asked what kind of tea he'd liked.

At some point, she'd stopped asking and started being in the shower or flipping through a cookbook, or kissing his cheeks when he'd come in. So he fell in love with opening up the tea cupboard and gambling with an unknown bag of leaves. She'd had every kind under the sun--some of them tasted like meadows of purple flowers--some of them, like the worst medicine--some of them put him to sleep--some had him using an entire roll of toilet paper in one day. He loved it.

*I noticed, when I was waitressing, that the paintings on the walls made absolutely no sense. On one side of the restaurant were depictions of normal fruit toppings--strawberries, blueberries, bananas--in their regular shapes, but filled in with some kind of pattern. The strawberries were plaid; the bananas had polka dots. But, on the other side, were these weird ovals. It took me months of waitressing to figure out what they were-- upside down pancakes. Who in their right mind thought to do that?

*When she was a little girl, she made her pink bed differently every day.

*"The joint's open 24 hours a day, so I set up this bell at the front door. On the off chance that someone walks in at 3 A.M. I'll wake up and hear them."

"Where do you sleep?"

"In the ball pit."

*The moon was off in someone else's sky. It was one of those times of no moon and no sun, but I didn't care because the nine of us were about to strip naked and jump in the fountain. Louise led the charge. Her sneakers flew up into the air like missiles. Mavie unbuttoned the top button of her retro Polo, Jess ripped off her Dior blouse, and before some of us had gotten to take off our socks, Belly was already splashing around. Heaven knew how she undressed so fast.

So, Daph gave her easy laugh, and any self-consciousness or fear of getting arrested for lewdness disappeared. We jumped in, forgetting about our rings that would turn green if we'd gotten them wet, the people that might see us in the apartments on the corner, that we had work in the morning. I saw things that I'd never seen before--Kiki's poofy hair lose volume from the weight of water, Georgia's hair leave its straightened state for some waves. We'd been new to each other at that point--unaware of such things, and that night was when the walls came down between most of us. It ended up being a bit of a disadvantage to not have the light of the moon, though. When some people walked by, it was too dark to see our clothes, so we ran away naked.

P.S. It turns out that I didn't write Monday's blog post in time at all. Please forgive the inconsistency--I'm working on it ;)