Flash

This needs a bit of a preamble.  For those who don’t know, Flash Fiction is very short fiction.  The idea is to write a story – a complete story, not an excerpt – with a limited number of words.  I am a member of an online writing group, and the group founder hosts a daily flash contest.  He provides a prompt, such as a setting or a line, and we all try to write a story based on that prompt.  There is a 300 word limit.  The first line of the story below was today’s prompt (I added the capitalization).  My wife thought it was cute, and suggested I post it here.  I wrote it in 15 minutes to get it in by the deadline.  You know how it is with the boy whizzing all over the place, and the other 3 yelling “Daddy” every 2.7 seconds, it’s hard to start these projects early.

Enjoy!
Legends

Dark Clouds rolled over the horizon; Lightning flashed and Thunder clapped in the distance.  

The gods were drinking again.  

Dark Clouds, the god of rain and snow and anything precipitous, thought he could hold his sauce.  Being a god of fluids, he always felt he was best at absorbing and then shedding any liquid – and those that made a “lesser god” somewhat unsteady were the ones that Dark Clouds liked best to imbibe.  A bit of a show off was Dark Clouds.

Of course, as it is with drunks, their egos are often bigger than their ability to tolerate mind altering substances, and tonight he’d overdone it.  His large, billowy, cumulo-form manifestation in this dimension rolled, unsteadily, over the horizon and on into tomorrow.

This display of inebriation, so inappropriate for a god, made the equally stupefied Thunder (god of all things loud) clap and cheer and yes, believe it or not, giggle like a fatuous child watching the circus clowns caper and cavort.

Lightning, who fancied himself the most spectacular of the gods (but was rather more of a spectacle when he was drinking) because of his brilliance – in terms of light waves not brain waves – tended to make the biggest scene.  He had thrown on an old trench coat, covering a naked body, and frolicked about exposing himself at intervals.  Unfortunately, this type of “flash” was what he had gained more renown for than for the electric streaks of white light.

If you wonder why the Earth has become such a mess, look no further than these three idiots – or so say the old Native American legends.