Creative Writing Assignment - The Pink Story

The theme for the assignment was write something inspired by a color. I chose pink. Let me know what you think.

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I didn’t want anything to do with his pig roast, and I didn’t want anything to do with his family. Yet somehow I was still stuck at this family reunion, wearing a pale pink shirt with the letters “Honorary Smith” across my chest and staring at this repulsive pig roasting on spigot over an open.

It all began when I started dating Harvey my junior year of college. His family lived three hundred miles away from campus, a good six hour drive that served as a barrier between them and us. After dating for six months, we determined that we were in love with each other; as neither had met the other’s parents before, we decided that now would be a good time to do so.

The meeting with my parents went fine. They showed Harvey embarrassing pictures of me dancing around wearing nothing but a top hat and a pair of my father’s boxers pulled up past my waist, Harvey laughed at my father’s terrible jokes, and everyone bonded over the deliciousness of my mother’s chocolate cake.

His parents, on the other hand, were a completely different story. My first encounter with the rest of the Smith family took place in an Indian restaurant; they assumed, because I was a quarter Indian and looked ethnic (not white), that I only ate Indian food and didn’t care much for normal (American) types of cuisines. Clearly, they had never seen my mother cook pasta before or watched me eat a hamburger.

His father was a large, beefy man. Mr. Smith, as he preferred to be called, was “an upstanding, religious man” who thought I was a heathen because I wasn’t repulsed by the idea of a man kissing another man; I would have mentioned that I went to Catholic mass every week, but I didn’t think it would help my cause much. I also wanted to tell him that for a man who against “flamboyant nature of those devil gays,” he was wearing a rather outrageous rainbow-striped tie with a pink shirt.

His mother was thin as a rail, wearing an awful salmon colored dress to match her husband’s shirt. She didn’t say much, just nodded in agreement with everything her husband said. The brother, on the other hand, was the loudest person at the table. Every few minutes, he would shout something irrelevant and ignorant – “That man was fat,” “That woman’s lesbians,” “The French are gay,” “All the gays should die,” etc. If I could have taken my fork and stabbed him with it, I would have.

They all ordered the same curry dish. It was pink, to match their outfits; it seemed like a weird color for a curry to me. The top of the curry, with its weird shimmer, looked like Pepto Bismol to me. Luckily, Harvey ordered a different dish than they did, so not everything the Smith family ate looked like a chalky antidiarrheal.

After dinner ended, we stood up to the leave the restaurant. I began my rapid retreat to the door when I stopped by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I was invited to their family reunion next weekend; it was a big event with “a delicious pig roast that you might quaint and exotic.” I stopped in shock, not sure how something could be both quaint and exotic (unless you considered the people exotic, because I was certain his brother’s awful manners could be politely called exotic).

But as Harvey gently squeezed my hand, I somehow found myself saying yes and writing down directions to the Smith Family Farm and Country Church in some town in the middle of nowhere.

That brought me to my present location, on the Smith Family Farm and Country Church (because it would be a sin to forget the church part), staring at the pig roasting on the fire. I was not normally a squeamish person, but the pig roast looked repulsive. I had always wanted to try a pig roast, but not with a crowd of pink-wearing, Born Agains.

The pig was sitting in the middle of flames, its eyes seeming to mock me. You wish you were in the fire now, don’t you, it seemed to say. I figured that if I really wanted to join the pig, I could tell his severe-looking grandfather that I was a huge Harry Potter fan and even owned a wand I bought as a souvenir from the Wizarding World in Florida. It would the Smith Witchcraft Trials of 2011, with me as the first victim and a gay man as the next.

The flames couldn’t burn away the pinkness of the pink’s flesh; even the apple in its mouth was pink (one of those Gala ones I think). Even the flames seemed to be turning pink, though that could have been a combination of the light and reflections of pink shirts on the fire. The old women wore matching pink lipstick, the kind that stuck to your cheek after they kissed, no matter how much rubbing and spitting you did to get rid of it.

I decided to stand near the fire, for I figured it was the safest area. After all, food made for a great awkward conversation topic. Harvey was somewhere in the middle of the crowd, talking with some cousin or another, leaving me to fend for myself. I desperately wished the pig would finish cooking faster; then I could constantly be eating and unable to talk because I had food in my mouth. It was a genius plan.

I casually moved away from the fire and toward a table full of salads. They all appeared the same to me, all disgusting, creamy potato salads, full of mayonnaise that was beginning to overheat in the hot summer sun. The pink tablecloth made the metal tins and its creamy contents appear pink, which further served to ruin my appetite. I therefore decided to bypass the salad and find something to drink, preferably alcoholic.

What I did find at the drink table was your typical assortment of soda cans and the Smith family’s signature mocktail. Because they didn’t drink because alcohol was evil and led to the devil, never mind that Jesus shared wine at meals with his apostles and turned water into wine at a wedding. Nope, Jesus clearly hated alcohol; apparently, this fact was clearly stated in the Gospels, though I never found him saying anything of the sort when I read the Bible. But then I was reading the evil, Catholic Bible, which was probably wrong.

The signature mocktail was pink, like everything else in the farm. It smelled fruity and didn’t taste too bad, as long as you didn’t look at it while you were drinking it; if you looked at it, you felt like you were drinking Pepto Bismol, something this family seemed overly fond of.

I made my way toward the area where I hoped Harvey would be, dodging a few dodgy uncles and pious aunts. Then I encountered it – his little brother – in the middle of a tirade against gays and lesbians.

"Because being gay is so gay,” he said, causing me to roll my eyes. “And gay people are evil.” I kept walking past, taking deep breaths with every step before I said something I should, but would not, regret later.

You know what we should also do,” his father said loudly. “We should round up all the black people too. All the terrorist and dark-skinned men with beards, and shoot them. It’d make the world a much better place.”

At this sentence, I stopped mid-step, my mocktail shaking precariously in my hand. I looked at the father, smiling smugly as his family cheered and greeted his words with approval. I thought of my father, jokingly called “The Indian Santa Claus” for his dark, Indian skin and grey beard.

“Maybe someone should take a gun and shoot you. It’d definitely make the world a much nicer place,” I said loudly, without really thinking.

Mr. Smith glared at me, his bushy eyebrows raising and slowly camouflaging into his hair while his eyes squinted in anger.

“You filthy, little –” his father began. He stopped suddenly when he saw a pink, slushy liquid begin to creep down his face. I had just thrown my mocktail at him as I started to walk purposefully toward my car. I lengthened my strides and quickened my steps as I began to feel a trickle of cold liquid dripping down my back.

“And by the way,” I yelled as another mocktail hit my face, “I love Harry Potter! And I think gay marriage should be legalized!”

I finally reached the safe haven that was my car and quickly stuck my key in the ignition, backing the car out of my parking space, and speeding away into the distance. I figured that Harvey would probably never talk to me again. At least the Smith family would have something to remember me by, I thought, as I threw my “Honorary Smith” t-shirt onto the side of the road by the farm. In my rearview mirror, it looked quite nice, the brown of the dirt muting out the harshness of the pink.

with “a delicious pig roast that you might quaint and exotic.”

Missing a word here?

I really enjoyed this! And totally pictured the Dursleys >.> I think that the way you used the colour theme to reflect the narrator's feelings of revulsion was really cool! The only critique I might have is that at some points it comes off as a little... Idk the word... Preachy, or propagandaish or something? Like it's a bit subjective & condemning of B.A. Christains as a group rather than focusing on the Smiths & the narrator as characters in a way. Not saying your message isn't dead on & that views like theirs shouldn't be challenged because I am completely on board with that! But if there could be a little more focus on thoughts & feelings it might be something to add to round it out. Maybe some memories from the narrator to demonstrate her viewpoint & why she feels that way & some more in-depth dialogue from the Smiths to give a bit of background to why they subscribe to their ideals?
Idk if I'm making much sense or being helpful at all & I hope I'm not being a negative cow- I really did like reading this & the way you used the imagery of the pink is brilliant! And I got all invested, too. I did a little happy dance when he copped that drink to the face & actually want to know how her next conversation with Harvey went.
Hope that helps in any way, and it is just my opinion that could be dead wrong. xx

Don't worry - thank you so much. It does help a lot; something was bugging me about the speaker and now I know how to fix her. I did want her to come off as somewhat bigoted herself, but not to extent she did.

I love con crit though; I hate being told my writing is perfect because it isn't. No one's is.

Really glad to help, love. <3
*loves constructive crit too*