Round 4 - Flash Fiction Holiday (Inkdrinker v Taed)

[ASGetty ((Zovo))]

The style is Flash Fiction
The word limit is 500 words

Topic: Valentine's Day

[Matteo ((Taed))]

On the backs of four elephants, on the back of a turtle, in a city surrounded by the universe’s largest cabbage field, a new guild opened its doors. It was known as the Romance Guild, staffed by rosy-cheeked women and blue-eyed gentlemen, and generally just chock full of oh-so-lovely people very concerned about everyone else being oh-so-lovely as well. And if they maybe blinked a bit too infrequently, and if the shuttered windows of their guildhall maybe glowed with a bit too much unexplained otherworldly light, was that really something that you could hold against a group that was otherwise oh-so-lovely indeed?

Unlike the Assassin’s Guild, who assassinated, or the Haberdasher’s Guild, who haberdashed, the Romance Guild’s members were already quite full-up on their chosen commodity, and seemed more concerned with encouraging its use in others. They held seminars on love-letter-writing and candlelit-dinner-having, in preparation for a great festival they called Mail‘n’Dine Day, where it was promised that everyone would be able to explain to their significant other exactly how and why they loved them in ways that were somehow impossible on every other day of the year.

The wizards of the Unseen University, who had never had significant others before, were generally very suspicious of this; even more so when a number of expensive instruments in the High-Energy Magic Lab became spontaneously filled with red wine and cocoa beans in the midst of their inquiry.

A farrier named Beddingfield Schlubb publically wondered what was wrong with the days when romance consisted of a meat pie and a trip to the chapel, but no one was able to follow up on this, as he disappeared shortly thereafter. The only clue was the symbol of a crown marked on his door in red paint, which everyone for some reason began calling “The Hollow Mark” as it appeared on more and more homes.

As the festival approached, guildmembers went around the city affixing finicky tissue paper hearts to everything, which were very nice while they lasted, but somewhat less nice when they all blew down and made the streets look covered in soggy giblet stuffing. They also began selling little candy hearts with words on them, which were useful both as aids for the poetically challenged, and as a fun way of distracting everyone from the recent chalk shortage.

On Mail’n’Dine Day Eve, the guildmembers invited every couple in the city to a romantic banquet. This seemed untenable at first, until it was handily revealed that the guildhall was built on top of an enormous subterranean cavern. Thousands of gentlemen cleared out the city’s flower shops, and thousands of gentlewomen cleared out room in their compost bins. However, the first dinner guests to arrive found only a smoking crater, a number of tattered wizards, and the corpse of a moderately large Cthulhu.

Although disappointed at first, the wizards presented everyone with a stash of clever apology cards they had discovered in the wreckage, and this generally made everyone feel a lot better.

[Inkdrinker]

I am sixteen years old and it is Valentine's Day.
I met a girl named Sarah today. She was beautiful and smart, interesting and funny. She was the one. I knew it.

I am seventeen years old and it is Valentine's Day.
Sarah and I had been going strong for a whole year now. I liked her, and she liked me. Today was our first anniversary. We were happy.

I am eighteen years old and it is Valentine's Day.
I had big plans with Sarah tonight. Sarah had been teaching me to cook for the better part of a year and though I still wasn't a very good cook, I thought she would appreciate my efforts. I ended up burning the parmigiana, but the tiramisu turned out good.

I am nineteen years old and it is Valentine's Day.
It was a low key day, but we were spending it together, lounging around in our new apartment. We didn't have very much furniture yet, but that was okay, the carpet was soft enough to roll around on anyway, and Sarah was prettier than any painting I'd ever seen.

I am twenty years old and it is Valentine's Day.
That year Sarah took me out. We went to a little bistro I had never heard of, Sarah said one of her work friends had told her about it. It was the best meal I have ever eaten in my life. I told Sarah that if I died, I would leave all my earthly possessions not to her, but to the bistro's chef. We laughed, then we went dancing.

I am twenty one years old and it is Valentine's Day.
I proposed to Sarah today, five years seemed like long enough. She said yes. It has been less than twelve hours and planning has already begun. We decided to have an autumn wedding, when the leaves were crisp and orange.

I am twenty two years old and it is Valentine's Day.
Sarah was pregnant, she had surprised me after our special dinner, at our usual little bistro, where I worked. We had not been trying to conceive, but neither of us was upset. She told me she had only known for a few days. We cried a lot, then together realized we'd need more room. The hunt for new real estate began.

I am twenty three years old and I am alone on Valentine's Day.
I sit here, alone and naked in a house far too big for just one person. Sarah and our baby haven't left my mind since it happened. But I can't help but smile, as I browse through memories of happier times. Oh, Sarah, what happened?

[ASGetty ((Zovo))]

Taed’s Review:
I actually had to read that a few times to pick up on the puns and such, but once I did I started to sort it out a little more clearly than it was when I just wasn’t following. A fun little story remarking on the trivialities and superfluous nature of a day perpetrated by Big-Greeting-Card.

I’m still not sold on the ending, but I feel more like maybe I missed the joke rather than you rushed to a close that didn’t make much sense.

You pushed the word limit pretty hard, even to the point of the occasional self-made compound word and hyphenates. I feel like you tried to think of the shortest story you could tell, but couldn’t resist a bunch of little details and gags and, while humorous and well constructed, Flash is really about saying more with less, not cramming as much into the word limit as possible.

I’m not docking you points for that since all four submissions together clock in at over 1900 words, so everyone else is just as guilty. But yours was the first review so I’m mentioning it here first.

A fun story… I just wish I understood the joke in the second to last paragraph.

Inkdrinker:
What did happen?
I like the narrative structure… the tiny stories within a tiny story. The chronology brought back memories, I just wish I had a better sense of the ending. It sort of blindsides you; not in the sense that you didn’t know the narrator was going to end up alone, your use of tense made that pretty clear from the beginning, but rather there was no indication that anything was less than perfect between the two of them. It led my thoughts to thinking there might have been an accident or something… But I imagine the narrator would know what happened if that were the case. I guess it’s a testament to how quickly things can go bad in a relationship.

This is a tough round because I really liked both stories for different reasons and had similar problems with the conclusions of each. Gonna give it to Inkdrinker, though, for appealing to my sense of nostalgia. Well done, both of you.

[Jenny (Reffy)]

Taed: yours was super purple and flowery. It doesn't match the Flash style which is concise and to the point. There is no "And the sky was blue like the deep, deep ocean which twinkled like sapphires under lots of lights". I liked your story and what you did with it though! Love Discworld.

Ink: I think yours was strangely beautiful. I, like Zovo, wanted to know a little more, like why she died or what happened or about the baby ... but then, was that the aim? To leave the reader to fill in the blanks. I think this would have worked better if you'd watched the wording at the beginning so it didn't allude to her dying.