Yesterday’s writing prompt from a friend of a friend: “Write a seven sentence story featuring a grape leaf, a kayak, and the color chartreuse.”
So I tried my hand at a sort of flash fiction thingie in the interstices of the day. I think mine turned out more like a fragment or the conclusion of a larger piece than an actual story, but here goes. Seven sentences, and all the necessary words included.
Eleanor the Illustrious, Queen of Chickenroost, opened her eyes just as the golden kayak of the sun slipped free of its horizon moorings and sailed into view above the hills east of the farm. Shadows shifted in the corners of the coop, and Eleanor ruffled the last sooty vestiges of night from her speckled feathers, keeping one bright eye on the strange Visitor who snored shallowly, curled in a pile of straw across the room from her nesting box.
On the rooftop, the sudden clarion of Janticle’s matins rang forth upon the hills and fields, juddering the Visitor to a wakeful and wary crouch, patchy grey fur a-quiver and bare pink tail snaking over the dusty floor.
“Mistress,” spoke the tiny royal hen into the ringing silence that followed the Rooster-king’s bugling, “you will be safe as long as you stay in these lands. We have heard tales, whispered from the rafters by wandering spiders and trilled through the gardens by sparrows and finches returning from sojourns in southern lands, of the Brave and Valiant deeds of Chartreuse D’Rat, and of the Vanquishing of Moses the Viper only last week in the Battle of the Vineyard.”
Chartreuse the Mighty calmed visibly as Her Ladyship spoke, and–bowing low and murmuring her thanks–held out the bundle she had carried close and warmed with her own body heat for the last days of her long journey.
“Here,” she said, unwrapping a small brown egg from a grape leaf and placing it gently beneath the soft feathers of the amazed Queen, “is the Child of the Prophecy.”
Mockingbird Chronicles 