A writing exercise from my critique group.

I had to write a paragraph using ten words. I won't tell what they were, but here's the paragraph.

Once there was a boy full of joy. Until the day when he cut off his finger—that’s when the trouble started. Before that he’d been one of the cool kids, running around the playground with his cool kid friends, trading his apple for some grapes with his best bud at lunch. Then there was the incident with the finger, and he became strange, different, a mystery even to those friends who had known him all his life, shared his apple, ran after him at recess. Now he ran by himself, running up the hill into the aqua sky on his way home from the bus stop, watching his cool kid friends playing basketball with all ten fingers. He thought his head would explode from wanting to be one of them again, but they wouldn’t even let him explain about the finger. Explain that he was still the same boy, that there was nothing remarkable about him, that one missing digit did not a boy make.