Voodoo something to me

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I’m having a go at Fiction Friday this week. The prompt here is always a sentence which starts you off on a fictitious story. I won’t say what it is because it’ll spoil my merry little tale!

As you know there’s nothing I like more than a bit of knitting. And despite what a certain fella has been telling you, I really am getting pretty good at it, even though I say so myself.

A friend of mine has recently had a baby. Can’t say I envy her, babies aren’t really my thing, but she’s really chuffed. Not as ‘chuffed’ as she was when she was podgy-preggers, she was enormous then. I remember back in the summer when she was almost ripe, we went to the beach and I was seriously worried in case Greenpeace turned up and tried to refloat her.

As I was saying I’m a bit of a knitter and I decided to knit my friend’s baby a doll. I was staying away for a long weekend with a mate and we stayed in a posh hotel and I spent hours sitting on the balcony looking out at the sea with my needles a blur.

I was making quite a big doll. I didn’t mean it to be a big doll, it just kept growing and if I’m to be honest it was looking a bit ugly and I was seriously worried about it scaring the poor child rather than comforting it! When the day came to leave I’d just started the stuffing and sewing together process.

But when I got back home and unpacked my case I discovered the wretched doll had disappeared! I was certain I’d packed it. I must have dropped it and left it in the room. Maybe it had taken on a life of its own like Chuckie and gone off on its travels.

A few days later I got a call from the hotel. It seems that a businessman had rented the room after we had vacated it. He was staying several days. On the third day, he dropped something down the back of the huge leather armchair in the room, and he had to pull it away from the wall to get whatever it was back.

I’m told the ambulance crew arrived just in time. Seems he had a dicky ticker, you know, a weak heart and when he peered down behind the chair he saw what he thought was a voodoo doll complete with needles sticking in to it. He was convinced his ex-wife had planted it there!

Anyway, the hotel receptionist remembered seeing me knitting the doll and was able to assure him that it was a harmless unfinished child’splaything. (I’ll never forget the expression on her face the day she looked at it close up. I’m sure she shivered!) She told me what had happened and said she’d send it in the post to me.

That was two weeks ago and as yet the package has not yet arrived. I wonder where my doll is now?

Oh by the way, the prompt was 'During his third night out of town, a traveling businessman discovers a voodoo doll in his hotel room'.

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