24 march 2025, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2685: make it coincide

Image by Pairoj Ponglerdnadda from Pixabay

“So then, the supervisor was outside Big Discounts for Your Loft trying to impress the security that they couldn't treat him that way, and one of those men said, “If you are who you say who you are, you either are on something or you need to get on anything other than be re-elected – and I was going to vote for you!' I just kept filming – he told me 'get over by those watermelons where you belong, boy,' so I just put the phone up in the watermelon stack so I could walk away and laugh!”

“I just keep running that back on the Lofton County Free Voice website and I can't stop laughing at it!” Thomas Stepforth Sr. said to his intrepid grandson reporter, 16-year-old Thomas Stepforth III.

“See, this is what happens when the Angel of Death gets married, starts wearing Hawaiian shirts, and starts indulging his love of situational comedy!” Mrs. Velma Stepforth said. “Henry Fitzhugh Lee as a man of peace for people who do not want peace is still not safe!”

“Yeah, because you can only die once, but Internet replays are going go on and on,” the younger Tom Stepforth said as his grandfather broke out laughing again. “What people gotta learn is, if Col. Lee already has a tropical shirt on, you're done. You just don't know it yet.”

“You know, I was trying to make it coincide yesterday,” Mrs. Stepforth said. “The whole time he and darling Maggie were taking care of their little cousins I never saw him dressed down that much!”

“Some of that was him working to stay calm, I think,” Mr. Stepforth said, “and to center himself with Maggie and his little cousins in a world of peace and love, helping his mind figure out how to do a complete takedown of that obstructionary gentleman without coming home with blood on his hands.”

“But that's the thing,” Tom said. “The supervisor was physically unharmed, but I don't think his ego is ever going to recover.”

“Better before he got hundreds of his constituents washed away than after,” Mr. Stepforth said.

“Totally agree, Pop-Pop. He really is getting off easy in that sense, although I'm sure he doesn't feel that way at the moment.”

“And meanwhile, look at Mr. Blue Hawaii,” Mrs. Stepforth said and started laughing as she saw Col. Lee coming back out on his porch in a beautiful blue Hawaiian type shirt.

The man thus observed could not hear the Stepforths, but had come out on the porch with his journal to just unwind … now that the residents of the neighborhood in danger were out of harm's way, the burden was off of him.

Mr. Stepforth was also right about the previous day's wardrobe choices; the colonel had done all he could in every way to make sure he would come home without blood on his hands. He took no joy in his reputation as a killer, and was not interested in extending it except as it was absolutely necessary. Most people, as his cousin Major Ironwood Hamilton liked to put it, could be taken care of through creative solutions.

“Hey, that's a nice shirt – hey, Edwina, do you think we should just go on and make Cousin Harry a honorary fashionisto?” seven-year-old Amanda Ludlow said to her eight-year-old sister Edwina.

“Oh, of course – that man could make a burlap suit look good, just like Papa!”

Col. Lee had a good laugh at that as he opened his arms.

“Thank you, ladies, for the confidence you have in my fashion sense,” he said, and they got their snuggle before running off to play with their siblings and friends.