Dinner at Six (Peregrine Arc Creativity Contest)

From Peregrine Arc comes this week’s Creativity Contest:
For this week’s prompt, I want you to imagine you received a mysterious letter in the mail asking to prepare an elegant dinner for an unnamed guest. The letter has no return address, but is written on thick paper with one of those wax, emblem seals. The guest is to arrive sharply at six o’clock. Like with last week, the scene and setting are yours. Build up some anticipation, but eventually you need to let your readers know who arrived for dinner and why. Take this and fly, fellow writers.

I think I met most (some?) of the prompt and I left other parts out because I went with the first idea that popped into my head. If you want to play along and share some of your creativity, go HERE.

Dinner at Six

The second time he looked at the mysterious note nothing changed. And nothing changed the third time, or the fourth time, or the twelfth time. The only thing that changed was the note he found under his door this morning became more crumpled from his repeatedly folding and unfolding it.

The note —

Dinner at six?
I’ll bring the pizza.
Looking forward to seeing you!
-M

M.

For the first time in his 21-year-old life, Ricky thought that dating two women at the same time might not be such a good idea.

Michelle?

Molly?

Which one?

Damn.

The pizza was a clue but not much of a clue since he met both Michelle and Molly when they worked with him at Gustino’s for a couple of months last year. Michelle waited tables and Molly delivered pizza. Both quit Gustino’s within weeks of his being hired but neither of them quit Ricky and unbeknownst to the “M’s” he’d been dating both of them ever since.

Ricky decided the only thing he could do would be to prepare for a night of pizza and mystery and enjoy the company of whichever “M” showed up at his door. It’s not, he thought like the cad he was, like they’re really very different.

It wasn’t until later that afternoon when he was talking about the note with Paul, the day manager at Gustino’s that he came up with the idea of adding a little surprise to whichever one of his girlfriends was his mystery “M”. His idea wasn’t as mysterious as hers, but he thought it’d be more entertaining and it was that thought that accompanied Ricky on his bus ride home.

Ricky got home at 4:30. He walked around straightening things up to make his place look presentable. He gave the carpets a quick vacuum, gave the bathroom a quick wipe down, cleaned the toilet bowl and put a fresh set of sheets on the bed. Then he grabbed a beer out of the fridge and at 4:40 he sat down on the couch and started up a Beavis and Butt-head DVD. He dozed off right about the time Butt-Head tipped a cow over onto Beavis. He woke up about an hour later and went to take a shower. He dried himself off and wrapped the towel around his waist. Standing in front of the mirror he smoothed his hair back and smiled. “Beautiful as always and ready for pizza,” he said.

He walked back out to the living room, sat back down on the couch and finished off his beer while he waited.

At a couple minutes to six the doorbell rang and Ricky stood up and walked over to the door to let “M” and the pizza in. It was time for his surprise. He opened the door with his right hand while he removed the towel with his left. He watched the towel drop to the floor and with a grin on his face he looked up and said, “Hi babe is that my… Mom? MOM!”