Short Order

Starlight has put out a challenge to aspiring writers to come up with a short story of 300 words. Not an easy thing to do, mind you. After days of contemplating and hours of exasperating over a topic, I have gone with Starlight's suggestion and written about my one true love.

On Top Of Old Snowy

Percy Perfect smiled back serenely.

Impossibly plump, his parsley-flecked skin as shiny as the Parmesan crown over his head. He sat like an angel atop a beautifully decorated Christmas tree, dry and untangled by the long fingers of durum wheat that enslaved us. We stared up in awe. Mutated, half-formed, broken and soggy in the red mess of passata.

With each passing second, my insecurity gripped the very being of my meat. Why had my maker, the hands that formed me, made me imperfect?

There was only a second to glance at Percy Perfect’s astonished face before he was pierced through his stomach, juice bursting from his very core. I was thrown face down, into a pool of red.

As the metallic army raked its way through, it ravaged and twirled in a disgusting dance of savage and farce. The boards of my shelter turned into soft, slippery planks that snaked in and out. Those deformed like me and those unlike me, perfect as Percy, flew into the air and disappeared. I caught the scent of a battle lost – of burnt meat - and then the slow but sudden onslaught of cold.

I was alone. Naked. Exposed on a flat white plain, with no one and nothing around me.

Except for the metal rake with its four menacing spikes that now lay motionless. Defunct. Spent from its frenzy of raking.

I fell into a pit of utter darkness. I hit bottom with a thud and heaved from the stank of rotten meat. Is this heaven? Or hell?

Or just space? Except that someone had turned off the lights in the stars. Hours passed as I wept, prayed, cursed, laughed, willing for redemption.

A whiff of hot air, panting. A rustle. My savior had come at last!