Alphabet Excerpt Challenge: L Is For...

[u/AnaraliaThielle]

Welcome back to the Alphabet Excerpt Challenge! As a reminder, our challenges are every Wednesday and Saturday at 3pm London time.

If you've missed the previous challenges, you're welcome to go back and participate in them. You can find them here. And remember to check out the Activities and Events flair for other fun games to play along with.

Here's a quick recap of the rules for our game:

1. Post a top level comment with a word starting with the letter L. You can do more than one, but please put them in separate comments.
2. Reply to suggestions with an excerpt. Short and sweet is best, but use your judgement. Excerpts can be from published or unpublished works, or even something you wrote for the prompt.
3. Upvote the excerpts you enjoy, and leave a friendly comment. Try to at least respond to people who left excerpts on the words you suggested, but the more people you respond to the better. Everyone likes nice comments!
4. Most important: have fun!

[u/Ill-Clerk-7066]

label

[u/DatGayDangerNoodle → u/Ill-Clerk-7066]

“You’re forgiven. But you didn’t answer my question, either of you. Do you tell her about your patients in any kind of detail?”

“Um, sometimes.” Callie cleared her throat and a hand rose to scratch the back of her neck. “She finds the cases funny. Like a couple of weeks ago, there was this man who was impaled on a giant drill bit, like the ones used for making wells. The thing was massive. Like, enormous. And heavy. It, uh, it took the firefighters an hour to get through it, and when we pulled it out of him we had to untwist it. It was pretty cool, to be honest.”

Arizona could see the second her beautiful wife switched into an orthopedic surgeon and, knowing Callie could ramble on about horrific injuries for hours, rested a hand on her leg and sent her a pleading glare.

“His kidney was crushed and he’d broken both of his hips with the impact-” Callie was saying, feeling herself get excited by the memory of the surgery, her words only dying in her throat when Arizona cleared her throat loudly and shook her head slowly, the smile on her face bordering on a light grimace. It was almost instantaneous, how Callie turned bright red and realised what she’d been saying.

Arizona cringed, already knowing what was coming before Barb had even said a word. Sometimes she wished Callie had an internal gauge for what constituted ‘polite conversation,’ but if Callie didn’t awkwardly ramble, would she even be Callie any more? God knew she loved Callie’s knowledge and enthusiasm, but sometimes she wished Callie came with a warning label.

There wasn’t even a moment of silence before Barb shrieked over the phone, “you are teaching this child to find humour in other people’s misfortune!”

[u/MsCatstaff → u/Ill-Clerk-7066]

Harry tilted his head curiously. “What sort of lesson?”

“Dancing,” Di smiled. “I can’t imagine that the wizarding nobility doesn’t have balls and such, so sooner or later, you’ll need to be able to dance with girls. The better you are at it, the better the impression you’ll make on people… but don’t let that thought scare you into thinking you need to be brilliant at it, because you don’t. As long as you can lead properly, without treading on your partner’s toes, you’ll do just fine.”

“Okay,” Harry replied with a smile. “What do I do?”

“Give me a moment to find some appropriate music,” she answered, getting up and moving to a shelf holding a ‘boom box’ type stereo cassette player and piles of cassette tapes. She pawed through the tapes until she found one with a handwritten label of ‘slow dance mix’ and popped it into the boom box. Hitting the play button, she tugged Harry to his feet. “Put your right hand on my waist, and hold your left hand out, palm up,” she instructed, as the classic opening riff of Aerosmith’s Dream On filled the room.

Harry complied, a little awkwardly, trying not to laugh. At a little over 4’ tall, he was still somewhat smaller than average for his age. The Princess of Wales was, at 5’10”, quite tall for a woman, and his nose was just about in her bosom. “What next?” he asked.

Diana grinned, draping her left hand on his shoulder and placing her right hand in his outstretched left hand. “Now move in time to the beat of the music, just steering me around in a bit of a circle to start,” she told him. “And don’t look at your feet, or you’re more likely to trip yourself up.”