When you grow up ...

When I was a kid, my cousin insisted he wanted to be a trashcan.  No, that's not a typo.  Trashcan.

We fussed over him and tried to figure out if he really wanted to be a trash man or trash collector, or anything else that rhymed with trashcan, but he stuck to it.  He wanted to be a trashcan.  (Probably the attention he got for it contributed to his insistence.)

Lucky for him, we don't always grow up to be what we want to be as kids.

The prompt for this week: If you'd grown up to be what you wanted to be as a kid.

Enjoy!

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My response:

The whirring of the fans drowned out the radio that always played in the background of the ceramic shop.  I picked up the last mold and carefully angled the opening towards the funnel.  The mud splashed as it started to pour, but I'd done this one more times than I could count, and I didn't spill a drop.  When the mud stopped running, I set the mold back down and eyed the thin layer of mud on the sides.  Not bad.

I grab the egg timer and set it, then turn and look at the short row of molds I just finished.  I know it's risky to pour lots of molds at once, but five or six is manageable.

The bell rings, and I smile as one of my regular customers walks in, a large box in her arms.  It's full of shredded newspaper, but nothing else.  She drops it to the floor by the front counter and heads towards the shelves of greenware.  "I'll just leave this here ..."

I nod, and she disappears into the shelves.  I turn to the sink and run the water, rinsing the dried mud off my hands.

(I'm going to stop here because ... really, where do I go with this?!  To me it sounds like the beginning of a murder mystery.  Maybe she finds a corpse in the trash behind her shop.  Or a romance; the bell would ring and Mr. Tall Dark And Handsome would walk in.  But I don't write mysteries or plain romance, so I'm going to let this one go.)