Scorched
Photo by Gigi on Unsplash
Instructions
Choose the best word by reading the passages below to fill in the blanks and locate the young boy’s missing tongue.
- This word, often associated with Tauruses, is a synonym for hard-headed, persistent. For example, when I was sixteen, every few weeks I’d stop by the Mr. Jim’s Pizza up the road from my trailer (roughly the size of several small stables) and politely ask the manager if they were hiring. When I was finally hired, she said she appreciated my determination. An idiom associated with this word: ________ as a mule.
- This word is a color associated with people lacking melanin, granting them societal benefits such as not being asked if you have a dad (I don’t, but that’s hardly the point), if he sells drugs, if you speak Hispanic, not getting shot or detained by police during routine traffic stops, and not facing longer prison sentences for the same crimes.
- This word is both noun and verb. It is how we tame a person’s or animal’s hair into a state of flat smoothness, using hand-held instruments of the same name to do so.
- The opposite of never, this word. Similar words include forever, eternally, consistently. It is, essentially, what this skin is.
- If there are negative connotations to this word, they are of sadness or shame, rather than anger. When I laugh, a hand
