As most of you know by now, each week Chatty's creative and imaginative friend Raven comes up with a couple of lists of unrelated (BOY, are they unrelated!) words, and asks her players to form them into a short short story that makes some kind of sense. Well, that is the assignment, anyway - whether or not we manage to do so is a matter of opinion!

    Chatty could not resist playing this week, so here we go:

    For the ten-word challenge we have:

prefix
art festival
income tax
chicken noodle soup
jump rope
Dutch Treat
flowering plum tree
bats in the belfry
diamond earrings
tigers

    "After paying their income tax, Betty realized that she and Bob couldn't even afford to go out to dinner with the neighbors on a Dutch Treat basis, much less pay for the four of them, as she had wanted to do. Nope - it would be staying at home and eating generic chicken noodle soup mix for the foreseeable future. Betty also realized that she must have had bats in the belfry to have even considered buying those diamond earrings she had fallen in love with at the art festival last weekend. Ditto the flowering plum tree Bob had wanted to buy at the home and garden show they had attended yesterday. And going on a photo safari to India next year to see elephants and tigers? Dream on, teenage queen. With a sigh, Betty went back to deciding what items they could cut from their budget. The gym membership could go, for one - she supposed she could just walk every day, do a few push-ups, and jump rope. With luck, she wouldn't hate exercising any more just because she was doing it at home instead of at the gym.  She certainly wouldn't miss the long commute across town. And she definitely wouldn't miss the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that magnified her flapping bingo arms - and contrasted her so hideously with the little hard-bodies in expensive designer outfits who waltzed in from neighborhoods with more fashionable prefixes than hers. Betty smiled. She wouldn't miss that at all!"

    The mini-challenge words are:

book club
organic tea
the cow jumped over the moon
paragon of virtue
wench

    "Madge was tempted. To tell the truth, she was sick and tired of having all and sundry consider her a paragon of virtue. She was fed up with her volunteer work, her book club, and of being one of the ladies who lunch - making polite and meaningless conversation at the Country Club while picking daintily at chicken salad made with low-fat mayonnaise and sipping organic tea until her back teeth floated. What had happened to the carefree girl who lived for adventure? When had she morphed into a Stepford Wife? She looked at the invitation again. Yes, Madge was tempted, all right. What fun it would be to wear a corset that made Victoria's Secret push-up bras look tame; to sing bawdy songs while serving mead; and to flirt shamelessly with dashing men in tights, capes and codpieces. The cow jumped over the moon, didn't she? Nobody saw that one coming, either. Right, then. Madge was going to accept her old college friend's invitation to be a serving wench at this year's Renaissance Faire. She could hardly wait to see the look on her husband's face when she slipped him the glad tidings - he might even look up from his Blackberry..."