You may have seen my Pubski post. My tame Thanksgiving events (my sister was too hungover to show up, and skipped it) managed to inspire me with a bit of a story idea.

I've written a brief beginning setting up the general plot premise. Feel free to ignore certain details if you want to take your story a certain direction (for instance, in my beginning, the story begins as the notorious Aunt is pulling into the driveway and parking -- if you want her entrance to be different, I encourage you to have fun with it and go ahead!). Also, definitely feel free to change out of 2nd person present-tense. It's an awful style except for choose-your-own-adventures -- which, if you ask me, this exercise kind of is.

My idea with this prompt was to create comedy, so if you're not sure where to head with this or you get stuck, my advice: make it absurd.

Enough from me. Here goes. I hope you have fun with this prompt. I am ready and steeled for no one to bite. ;)

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Every year, your family invites your Aunt D to Thanksgiving, and every year, she never shows up. Once it’s too late and everyone’s certain Aunt D is off the attendees list — again! — the room releases in a collective sigh of relief shared across twenty-odd thankful sets of lungs. Then, you remember being regaled with infinite stories from infinite relative sources recounting exactly how bad Aunt D has always been. How well-honed are her skills of Ruining Thanksgiving. All the stories of Thanksgivings past with Aunt D present are like one part Grimm fairy tale (the Grimm-est Grim ones), one part meant-as-warning, and one part Rockwellian depiction of the first meal Pilgrims had at Plymouth Rock if Norman Rockwell had a secret twin — and maybe he did! a hidden twin — called Ab-norman commanding the brush and paints and canvas.

For context, I assure you. If Ab-norman was, like Rochester’s first wife, a real person, not a myth, he would’ve had a voracious imagination, a creative spirit both restrictive and perverse, not unlike the appetites of vegans. Except instead of meat, in Ab-norman’s case the creature had never consumed any inspiration for his art that was rooted in fact or reality. Norman depicted the idyllic American life, and Ab-norman was obsessed with the idyll of non-Euclidean planes, of moving human shapes composed of stacked stones with mushroom-fungus heads, with melting what does not melt and lighting on fire objects which would never burn.

Aunt D, in other words, was feverishly heckin’ weird. That’s what all the stories amounted to, whether you heard one or heard them all. The one shared, unspoken conclusion to every Aunt D admonition was that we as a family unit sure better ought to be thankful this year, to be blessed once again with her absence.

Except now it’s this year. Thanksgiving hasn’t happened yet, it’s only about noon. You’re helping your mom host as always, so you got there early, to help with the food. That means it’s you, today, who gets the pleasure of not recognizing the beat-up silver four-door sedan just as it pulls into the driveway, and it’s you who asks: “Mom, who’s car is that?”

Your mom comes to stand by/behind you at the window. She peers through the eggshell lace curtains. “Oh no,” she gasps. “No, no, no.”

“What?” you ask. “Who is it?”

“God damn it, Sue,” your mom spits out. “That’s your oh-so-famous great-Aunt D.”