Writing Challenge: Expand a short sentence into one longer sentence

"That's not it."

Mother sends me down to the chest freezer in the basement with instructions to bring up the brisket, and I go and rummage around in the tightly-wrapped packages, hoping to pick out the right meat, for a wrong choice will require another trip down the stairs, so I choose a likely package, and deliver it to Mom, and she looks at it, then looks at me, and says, "No, that's not it."

Next prompt:

Natty haggled.
 
Natty haggled.

Crowds made walking through the marketplace difficult, but Natty skirted his way to Stellan's stall, and touched a finger here and there upon all the strange contraptions, and settled upon a mechanical timepiece, with jeweled movement, but Natty figured that time was cheap, and he haggled, and he not only beat the vendor, but time itself.

Next prompt:

Pop goes the weasel.
 
Nellie considered herself a friend to all living creatures, especially those that seem to be at best taken for granted, and at worst taken advantage of for nefarious human purposes or even rejected as not worthy of continued existence on this planet, so when she found a weasel cowering on her doorstep, soaked through and obviously suffering greatly from the cold, it was no stretch of imagination and effort for her to scoop it up into a towel and take it to her kitchen to be warmed and released, but she was totally surprised and brutally disappointed when, after considering her options, she put it in the microwave and set the power to "defrost," and suddenly, without warning, "pop" went the weasel.

Next: The sky darkened.
 
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The sky darkened.

The frigate skimmed the waves of the ocean and the great sails billowed, moving away from the ancient homeland, but as the sky darkened, the immigrants peered up at the celestial lights, and were comforted, for they realized they were taking the night sky with them, something of home in the new land.

next:

He courted trouble.
 
He courted trouble in the way a male portia spider courts its mate: with dance and jest and charm, fully aware that the ensuing events may lead to his demise, and in fact, in his private moments, he even liked to think of himself as a spider, especially the kind of spider that preyed on fellow spiders, but - with the leaden weight of regret in his stomach - he realised the metaphor had stretched too far when he woke, already trussed and oiled, the next morning in the bed of the woman from the (officially) uncontacted tribe, right before they carried him to the spit over the waiting fire pit.

Next:
The bees absconded.
 
Oscar stopped beside the screen window, his attention grabbed by the incessant buzzing out in the far garden, a sound growing louder with each passing second, then, snapping out of that mesmerizing moment he pushed out the back door, saw a pulsing flickering mound of wings and sound, the sight of which impelled him to grab the garden hose, because he knew that the bees had absconded and that, unless he acted quickly they would be long gone, and with that awareness he began to spray at the seething mound until the buzzing subsided and the bees dropped to the ground, and he knew that, for the time being anyway, the swarm had been compelled to abandon their misguided (by his standards) decision to move on to happier hunting grounds.

Next: Some thing happened.
 
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Some thing happened.

The plank-walled attic of the old Victorian house was dusty and dark, and no-one had been up there for ages, among the old wardrobes and one-hundred-year-old leather suitcases, but I shuddered in the stale air as a prickly sensation crawled all over my skin, with the awareness that I was not alone, that a thing—some thing—happened, and came to life, and boy did I scoot quickly downstairs.

Next prompt sentence:

The soldier deserted.
 
Dawn seeped around the dense fog of acrid smoke and utter destruction, and the last man, so far as he knew, carefully lifted his head over the muddy berm, just far enough to see nothing, which was all there seemed to be, and when he softly called out for any survivors, and heard nothing in reply, he figured enough was enough and with a sigh of resignation and disgust, the soldier deserted his lonely and now-irrelevant outpost and carefully edged his way back to what in normal times passed for civilization.

New sentence: Things never seem the same again.
 
Utter surprise and disorientation followed the awakening from the deep, medically induced sleep for the surgical procedure that preceded what was now the end of a particularly vivid and realistic dream so overwhelmingly life like, that it inspired the basis of a novel, after which, the words, things never seem the same again, would be an understatement.

New prompt: The human mind operates at many different levels
 
Utter surprise and disorientation followed the awakening from the deep, medically induced sleep for the surgical procedure that preceded what was now the end of a particularly vivid and realistic dream so overwhelmingly life like, that it inspired the basis of a novel, after which, the words, things never seem the same again, would be an understatement.

New prompt: The human mind operates at many different levels
Oops!

Correction: Minds perform at many levels
 
Minds perform at many levels

It's all in there, in that three-pound mass of grey and white matter in your skull, with all its bumps and grooves providing highways for the billions and billions of neurons connected in a vast chemo-electrical grid, sending and receiving commands concerned with senses, body control, thought, memory, emotions, and beliefs, for minds perform at many levels, and can even create, so that what we knew yesterday can make something new for us tomorrow.

New prompt sentence:

The compass pointed North.
 
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