Hello friends, I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. I've replenished my creative juices in order to bring you better content in 2024!
My goal for January is to have The Digital Heart, my NaNoWriMo novel, edited and ready to be published. That doesn't mean I won't have any content for you, I'm hoping to have short stories or flash fiction for you all to read. Today's flash fiction was born of the prompt containing these conditions:
-The story must end at a birthday party.
-Militaristic emus are the secret rulers of the world.
-Your character is on fire.
-Needs to be written in one sitting.
I hope you enjoy this silly flash story!
This is easily the worst birthday I've ever had.
It's been a while since I've actually had a birthday party. Life can get in the way of throwing one, but the end of civilization is out of my control.
The day started horribly; I was on fire. I got caught in a forest fire, which is way too common now. Getting water in the end of civilization is hard. Running water is pretty far from home, so I was running through the heath to find a pond, setting lots of the plants on fire around me. Real smart, I know. But you weren't the one on fire, so deal with it.
With birthday luck I managed to find a pond and jumped into it, shaking off fire and water. It wasn't great to be soaked, but being on fire is much worse.
In the distance, I heard the sound of conversation. Cautiously I moved closer- you never know who's after you nowadays- and saw a group of friends. When they saw me, they waved me over.
“Hey, happy birthday dude.”
“You look singed, you good?”
“I got caught in that forest fire, just cooled off.”
"Glad you're alright.”
“Yea, me too. What're you up to?”
“Well, we know it's your birthday, so we were gonna bring you some fruit to celebrate!”
And then I was really excited, because it's hard to find fruit in this climate.
“That's so nice, thank you!”
And everyone said “you're welcome” and we feasted on what they had gathered. It was the closet I was gonna get to a birthday party, as I said, it's hard to have one. Then I started to hum a little tune, it's nice to be hanging out with friends. My friends joined in, and one even got up to start a friendly dance off.
That was our downfall- we made too much noise. Parties are hard to have because they come around. And they come around with weapons, puny weapons that can only ruin the fun. A shot rang out and my friends and I turned to see a strange contorted face staring back, with said puny weapon. There were more shots, but we're used to this by now.
Damn humans, they forget who's in charge. Didn't want to have to go to war on my birthday, but we emus have gotten pretty good at quelling rebellion.
Have a wonderful week,
-Rosetta 💖
Image By Greyson Joralemon