A Flash Fiction Triptych: The Consequences of Sadness

I brought the cards from my Dixit game to my writing group. This is a fun storytelling game for ages 8 to infinity. The cards are beautiful. We used them as prompts. See the three cards I selected from the ten or so I was randomly assigned. If the image doesn’t show up, click on the blue text below.

Three cards from original Dixit Game. Artist M.Cardouat
Three cards from original Dixit Game. Artist M.Cardouat

Part The First

The true artist will buy paint over food. As Rumi purportedly said (via John Moyne and Coleman Barks) “If you can’t get fed, be bread.”

Puss in Boots, in her 92nd incarnation, this time as an artist, has made good use of her soul’s accumulated wisdom. Her current painting is of a fish, so realistically depicted, it swims off the canvas, naively thinking itself liberated, but now free to fall prey to the waiting fisherman.

Part The Second

Sadly, my head drooped. Forced back in to the ring too soon after my daughter’s death, this time was the only time in my life that I was sorry I had chosen this profession. It was the first time I felt inadequate to the challenge. I needed a clown to cheer myself up. The tears of the clown flowed down my face. I at least wished I had paid more attention to the prof in that 400 level class, “The Sad Clown.”  Back then, I thought it would be unnecessary. I’d always been the fountain of cheer.

Part The Third

Will there be anyone left alive to witness the heat death of the universe? Only the consciousness of the eternal serpent. No longer able to survive on its own waste products, the perpetual motion machine is winding down. The serpent bleeds its last drops of vitality as infinity chills toward absolute zero.

Perhaps, perhaps on its way to a new bang in the network we call the mulitiverse.

Note about the Eternal Serpent: This reference is to the Orobouros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros), or the snake eating its own tail. The issue isn’t eating its tail though, it’s what is implied in the action of eating its tail. The snake exists self sufficiently, on its own waste product. We humans can’t do that and survive in human form. Only “The All” is capable of this feat.

See this link for an image of the Orobourus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros#/media/File:Serpiente_alquimica.jpg

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Shona

Engineering consultant by day, science fiction writer in off hours.

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