Written for the Daily Flash Fiction Challenge with a word limit of 300.
The prompts: This story must contain the words: dictionary, mind and circle
Nested Minds
They floated down the empty streets of New York, surveying the damage.
They had been too late. Not by much, but too late just the same. The damage had been done. The current condition was irreversible.
Originally, they were to be part of a Prevention Team. As such, they would have stepped in and taken action as needed to prevent the otherwise inevitable fall. Sometimes, a Prevention Team arrived too late. When that happened, they became a Rescue Team.
This time they were too late to rescue anything.
Meet here, appeared in the mind of each of the widely dispersed team members. It wasn’t the actual words. They had no need for those. It was the feeling that they were to be at a specific place designated by the team leader.
Immediately, each surveyor stopped whatever it was doing and headed towards the thought. Soon, hundreds of them hovered together in their social circle. The junior members made up the outer ring while other, more senior members made up the interior nested rings. At the very center were the team leader and the one survivor they had been able to find.
This was a very important moment. This one individual held, perhaps, the key to the planet’s demise. Given the backward nature of the creature, the team leader would not be able to use telepathy. Instead, he had his survey ship download the appropriate thought-to-verbal dictionary.
The entire nested group sent positive thoughts to its team leader. This had to go well or they may never know what happened here.
The team leader slowly morphed a mouth, lips and a collection of other parts needed to create sound.
He then chose a “greeting” phrase. Lowering himself down to the alien’s eye level, the team leader said a perfect - “Woof.”
Word count 299
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
An Inquiring Mind
Written for the Daily Flash Fiction Challenge with a word limit of 300.
The prompts: This story must contain the words: Tornado, scrape and time
An Inquiring Mind
The sound of the back screen door banging open caused Judy to look past the sheet she was hanging out to dry. A dog wearing a Mousekateer hat and a backpack flew out the door and around towards the front of the house.
Not a good sign, she thought to herself.
Bobby had a lot of – creative energy; especially when left alone. She’d only been outside for a few minutes; not enough time for him to do too much damage.
The scene was beyond belief. There was spaghetti on the wall. The entire contents of a box of Cheerios had been distributed across the floor with impressive uniformity. Bobby sat motionless in the corner wearing nothing but a Batman cape, some flippers and his older brother’s football helmet. He’d seen something the day before on Animal Planet that made him think being still was a good defensive strategy against large and aggressive animals.
His hope of going unnoticed was quickly dashed.
“What’s going on in here? It looks like a tornado came through our living room!”
She walked right over to Bobby, ruining forever his trust in television programming.
“Mom, it was an experiment. I was going to clean it all up. I wanted to see how much of the floor I could cover with a box of cereal.”
Such was the curse of raising a six-year-old genius.
“What about the spaghetti?”
“I was trying to see if it would stick to the wall longer than jelly bread.”
She followed his eyes to a neat row of Wonderbread slices starfished to the wall.
She handed him a spatula. “Scrape that stuff off before it dries.”
Smiling inwardly, she left him to his task. As she did so, all she could think of was, Where’d he learn to cook spaghetti?
Word count 300
The prompts: This story must contain the words: Tornado, scrape and time
An Inquiring Mind
The sound of the back screen door banging open caused Judy to look past the sheet she was hanging out to dry. A dog wearing a Mousekateer hat and a backpack flew out the door and around towards the front of the house.
Not a good sign, she thought to herself.
Bobby had a lot of – creative energy; especially when left alone. She’d only been outside for a few minutes; not enough time for him to do too much damage.
The scene was beyond belief. There was spaghetti on the wall. The entire contents of a box of Cheerios had been distributed across the floor with impressive uniformity. Bobby sat motionless in the corner wearing nothing but a Batman cape, some flippers and his older brother’s football helmet. He’d seen something the day before on Animal Planet that made him think being still was a good defensive strategy against large and aggressive animals.
His hope of going unnoticed was quickly dashed.
“What’s going on in here? It looks like a tornado came through our living room!”
She walked right over to Bobby, ruining forever his trust in television programming.
“Mom, it was an experiment. I was going to clean it all up. I wanted to see how much of the floor I could cover with a box of cereal.”
Such was the curse of raising a six-year-old genius.
“What about the spaghetti?”
“I was trying to see if it would stick to the wall longer than jelly bread.”
She followed his eyes to a neat row of Wonderbread slices starfished to the wall.
She handed him a spatula. “Scrape that stuff off before it dries.”
Smiling inwardly, she left him to his task. As she did so, all she could think of was, Where’d he learn to cook spaghetti?
Word count 300
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