Flash Writing From Prompts

Land began to die around Sameyd when he noticed a single living plant that looked a lot like marijuana. Why would Mary Jane live on, he thought, while every other form of vegetation wilted away? Whatever the reason, the plant became Sameyd’s obsession. He walked a half hour every day, across increasingly barren plains, to the gift of the ganja gods. He carried water, of course, and sometimes a couple handfuls of fertilizer to scatter around the base of the plant. The sweet leaf thrived, growing into a garishly green stalk of mowie wowie. Soon others will notice, thought Sameyd, and then what will happen?

We had charted the ship’s course to Cersea but failed to account for the possibility of a kraken. Sure, we’d heard rumors that one had been active in the area, but those who mumbled such tales tended to be whacked-out shipwreck survivors whose brains had been inexorably warped by the combined consumption of sea water and cheap grog. Yet, there we were, tossed about on rough waters, when the first three tentacles slithered up the port side and began flailing about for a victim. I was up in the crow’s nest, my tired eyes ripped open in terror, screaming at the top of my lungs.

Kleane had spent every night wondering when her parents would finally explain to her how they came up with her first name. She was an only child, so it’s not like she had older siblings named Kenny and Kaeley and her parents needed another ‘K’ name to round out the trio. Her father’s name was Donald; her mother’s Gale. None of her extended relatives had interesting names. They were all Debbies and Julies and Roberts and Daves. Her name, Kleane, sounded like something an alien ordered her mother to name the child that he/she/they/it implanted in her womb with a laser probe. “Seriously, you guys, why am I named Kleane?!”

When my vision switched to black and white, I immediately noticed a clarity of purpose that I’d never known before. So many time- and energy-consuming decisions that had plagued me for years were no longer a concern. Matching my clothes? Pointless. Binge-watching an endless litany of TV shows? Much less enjoyable now that everything was colorless. Walks in the great outdoors? Still enjoyable for the fresh air, but the scenery wasn’t quite as distracting. Life, in short, became a series of binary choices. Some were easy; others hard. But within a few months, with the color gone from my eyes, I became a sentient being of perfect clarity. And that is how I remain to this day. Alone, naked and unafraid.

Ruling the world had turned out to be something that everybody wants to do. Personally, I had always thought that conquering every continent and ocean on the planet would be an insurmountable military, logistical and geopolitical task. And yet every cartoon that I watched as a kid, and so many movies that I watched when I was older, indicated that there was, indeed, a global network of supervillains who wanted to take over the planet. My thoughts on the subject took an unexpected musical turn in 1985. That’s when the British pop group Tears for Fears released the hit single, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” The poetic lyrics, pleasing melody and yearning overtones of the vocals really put the issue in perspective for me.

Gift or curse? I learned at a young age of my unique ability to properly fold a burrito. It all started en la cocina de mi madre. I was a mere five years old. Cinco anos. She was sautéing chopped tripe and slow-cooking a pot of beans. My grandmother, mi abuela, came in and dropped a stack of large tortillas on the counter. “Miguel,” my mother said playfully. “Give me a tortilla.” Straining my stubby arms, I reached up on the counter and peeled a tortilla off the pile. She took it from me and said, “Muy bueno!” She put the tortilla on a plate and then loaded it with meat, beans and some shredded lettuce that had been drying in the sink. Then she put the plate on the small table where I often ate my meals or colored in my coloring books. “Now fold it, mi corazon,” she joked. Without hesitation, I walked over and folded the tortilla around the burrito perfectly, tight enough to hold together soundly but not so tight that it might explode when picked up. “Dios mio, Miguel! You have a gift!” mi madre exclaimed.

At the antenna site, the researchers learned they were not the first to communicate with the survivors of the avalanche. A group of indigenous people from a local village had exchanged, well, vocalizations with the unfortunate ski troupe stuck in a network of caves in the Alaskan mountains. One of the survivors had a transistor-based communication device that he used to tune into the antenna site’s broadcast frequency. This gentlemen, his voice quivering with a mixture of cold and terror, said they’d heard strange voices calling out them around midday yesterday. The language barrier prevented them from meaningful communication, but anguished cries for assistance translate pretty clearly in any tongue, he said. The authorities were baffled until an anthropologist doing research with the indigenous community reached out to report that a village elder had told her that a scouting party had made contact with the survivors. They knew the general area where the skiers were holed up, but the cave network was vast, complex and dangerous, and it would take the scouts another day or two to find the stranded skiers.