Taylor Clogston

Day Two of my ten-minute short story challenge! Read Monday's entry here.

I interpreted the character to be a man who'd walked around the world, the setting to be a world carried along by bees, and the situation to be a star waking up. I got closer to a complete story than yesterday!

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There was once a man who had walked all around the world. He was a stupidly rich man determined to undergo arduous, pilgrimmatic tasks to prove his spirituality to himself, so he didn't settle for simply walking on land. No, he chartered a cruise liner devoted to himself and to his mansionful of butlers, ordered it to travel no more in a day than he himself could walk, and relegated himself to the longsuffering task of walking on a treadmill on the ship's upper deck from sunrise to sunset.

The process of walking all around the world in this way took many years. At the end of it all, the man returned home to his favorite overstuffed chair. Unfortunately, his legs were so muscularly massive by this time that he could not fit. Instead, he clambered atop the chair and perched within its seat like a bird.

At that moment, there was a flash of light and a seismic jolt within the man's luxurious sitting room! The man gasped in shock. "Could it be that my fantabulous spirituality has bequeathed to me a vision?" he wondered. The man then noticed that the flash of light was more than simply a flash—it had remained behind as an undulating thing like a candle flame, though much dimmer than when it had initially arrived. "Hello there!" said the man.

"Greetings!" said the flame. "My apologies—you startled me awake. You see, my people have been using your home as a base of operations."

The man was bewildered. "No apologies needed, good spirit! Seeing as how I am now a very spiritual person, this makes perfect sense. However, I wasn't such a spiritual person before I began my pilgrimmage, I can't fathom why you would have made your base here before now."

"Oh," said the flame, "I'm not a spirit! My people are a very small sort of star—and much more intelligent, not like the stupid, beefy stars that your science has spent so long observing."

"Oh," said the man politely, not understanding in the slightest. "That sounds sort of spiritual to me."

"Call us whatever you wish," said the flame. "Here's the thing—would you mind leaving again? Our plans are almost completed but the presence of humans is sure to muddy them all up."

"Plans?" asked the man.

"Yes. We've captured your galaxy and are taking it back to our own cluster to be turned into star-honey."

To warm up for NaNoWriMo 2023 next Wednesday, I'm writing as complete a short story as I can manage each day this week—in no more than ten minutes each. Hopefully, I'll become more efficient as I repeat the exercise. Before I write, I roll three pairs of Rory's Story Cubes—one for the main character, one for the story setting, and one for the starting situation. Then, I start the timer and begin writing.

The first step is interpreting the story dice. I adapt a technique from Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight: I quickly write down the first few ideas which come to mind to get the obvious and more boring ideas out of the way. Usually, the third or fourth idea is something that has a bit more subconscious-born creativity in it—something that surprises and excites me enough to want to write about it.

In this case, I interpreted the character to be a customer service worker with the wrong documention, the setting to be the help desk of a massive fishing supply store (inspired, of course, by one of the world's largest pyramids), and the situation to be that someone couldn't find their way out of a maze (interpreting the boxed "L" to be a maze section).

I sketched rough story outline, then began trying to fill it in. I didn't get terribly far in the ten minutes I allotted myself. It's easy to look at that whole dice process and say, "Maybe spend less time fiddling and more time writing," but frankly it took far longer to explain the process here than it did to actually do it. Hopefully the interpretation process is a few moments shorter tomorrow, but what'll be more helpful is deciding on a much simpler story without so much need for setup.

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"Welcome to We Know Carp," I spat between gritted teeth. "When it comes to carp—yep, we know 'em."

I wasn't a very good customer service representitive. I shouldn't have let such a stupid situation get my goat. Yet, here I was, clenching the store phone's receiver with a hand that was, unfortunately, far too weak to shatter the ancient plastic casing.

For the eleventh time, the wheezy voice on the other end of the line said, "Yeah, that didn't work. I just ended up by the Play-Doh and Kool-Aid display again. Gettin' real tired of this, boy."

He wouldn't stop calling me. This was my first day on the job at We Know Carp's customer service desk. Was every day going to be like this? Every day, would scrungy old men call me nearly a dozen times from within the store itself, demanding I give them directions to the front door?

Sure, our four-floor mega-store devoted to all things carp fishing was a bit of a labyrinth. In fact, I'd gotten lost a few times during my orientation morning... and while my manager surely had just popped off to do some work somewhere else, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen him fall into our primal koi display when I was turning to examine a massive wall of designer hot sauces. But when I'd approached said koi display and squinted suspiciously at the rippling water, my manager hadn't been there at all—only a dozen very large, very innocent-looking koi poking their heads out of the water and grinning at me with their precious little rows of teeth.