Five Minute Flashes, Part 2

The short version: Fantasycon 2017, Ready Steady Flash, Lee Harris, writing stories in five minutes in front of a live audience, myself, Guy Adams, Anna Smith Spark and Jeanette Ng.  A darkening spot upon the surface of the sun.  A hot wind with the odour of fresh blood.  Elder gods stirring in their sunken graves.  Death ... death ... death!

Alternatively, the long version is here.

So, story number three was on the topic The Night of the Kittens, which is certainly the kind of subject that someone might come up with if a lunatic jabbed a microphone in their face and demanded that they give them a short story topic.  I bet Tolstoy never had to deal with situations like this!  I bet no-one ever told Voltaire that he had a write a story about kittens in five minutes!  I bet Joyce wasn't such an attention whore that he'd have agreed to something like this in the first place!*

This one's called The Night of the Kittens, presumably because I'd briefly recovered my ability to write obvious titles at this point...

Bill knew when he bought the house that it shouldn't have been half so cheap as it was.  There was the nuclear power plant next door, for a start; nothing ought to glow like that.  And there was the fact that the estate agent kept trying to downplay the fact that the foundations were built on an ancient Indian burial ground.  And then there was the secret government facility at the end of the road, with the armed guards in dark glasses and the weird smog hovering over it.  But what were they to do?  They had to move the cat sanctuary somewhere, especially now that Bopsy, Mrs Whiskers, Purditer and Snuggles were all of them pregnant. 

In retrospect, though, Bill thought, as he nailed another plank over the cellar door and tried to ignore the weirdly shrill, distorted mewling from the other side, the decision was certainly a mistake.

Honestly, the only thing I'm remotely proud of in that one is that I managed to come up with four different silly cat names.  And one of the four was the actual name that I actually called my actual cat when I was nine, so even that's a stretch.

But for the final round I had a back-up plan, and I was just about exhausted enough by then to run with it.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I sort of had the idea for this one in mind already, as a kind of mental bomb-shelter for in case things got really bad, and it was a case of cheat a little or forfeit by hurling myself out of the nearest window.  For this final, apocalyptic round, we had a choice of three topics, which were Inside Out, Shakespeare's Brain and Interdimensional Toilets.  And the result is called, for reasons that I don't remember and probably never existed in the first place, Aristotle's Last Dance...

It was a dark and stormy night.  Three writers sat on a bench.  The first turned to the other two and said, "You know what, I was recently invited to be on a flash fiction writing contest by that bastard Lee Harris.  You had to write short stories in five minutes.  It was terrifying!"

"That sounds like the worst thing ever," said the second writer.

The third writer, who was mute, just nodded their agreement.

"So how did it go?" the second writer asked.

"Well, the first three rounds were merely hellish.  But the fourth, on the topic of Inside Out, Shakespeare's Brain or Interdimensional Toilets ... Christ, that was just impossible!"

"But you came up with something in the end, right?"

"Well, yes, in the end I did.  But it was a close run thing."

"You have to share it with us, after all this tedious build-up.  Otherwise, what are we even doing here, sitting on this bench in this middle of this dark, stormy night?"

"No," the first writer said, "I'd rather not."

One final thought, because I don't want to leave you with that awful, awful joke.  I said that the above was my mental bomb-shelter, but in fact, I had a backup plan for my backup plan.  If all else failed, I was planning to read the limerick that I'd written a couple of days before and try and pass it off as in some way a response to the actual topic.  So here, by way of dropping the curtain on the tragic drama that was my Ready, Steady Flash experience, is said limerick...

There was a young porpoise named Maurice,

Whose skin was excessively porous,

He shouldn't have ought to

Gone under the water,

That tragic, unfortunate porpoise.

I'm convinced that if I'd got to read my limerick I would totally have won.




* I'm kidding, of course.  James Joyce would have lapped up Ready, Steady Flash and come back for seconds.  Yeah, Joyce, you heard me right!