I had a lot of fun with last week’s flash friday. I wanted to juxtapose sci-fi and typical office politics in order to tackle the prompt of “blunder” and a man running down a sand dune. This piece came in at second runner up! I’d love to hear what you think.
A Bad Day at the Office
(209 words)
Trusting Calloway, that was my first mistake.
But, Lord help me, it hadn’t been my last.
From not packing an extra suit to botching the landing, this entire mission had been a haphazard series of blunders that had damn near killed me. But hey, the day wasn’t over yet. It still could.
Smug, pug-nosed Calloway was probably sitting in our commander’s office right then, outlining why she should have my job. Criminally inept. That’s what Scott said she called me the moment after I set out on the mission she promised would “make my career”. Yeah, make it crash and burn anyway.
But hey, I’m an optimist. Even sprinting down the dunes, microscopic shards of silicon berating my unprotected skin, I had a chance. If I could just recover the artifact, complete the mission, and not suffocate, then Calloway’s sadistic little sabotage would fail.
I had about 7 more seconds until the extraction team would be forced to teleport me back to the ship, lest my lungs explode. I could see the strange cube peeking out from the sand at the bottom of the dune. All I had to do was reach out and grab it.
Which totally would’ve worked, if I hadn’t tripped and fallen on my face
Thanks for reading!
Why White Men Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Teach History By Angelina Hunt
(155 Words)
I was two cans of redbull, a pack of twizzlers, and an embarrassing amount of oreos in, and still, nothing. The blankness of my laptop’s screen hummed away, mocking me. Two hours until the paper was due, and the only sentence I’d written (and deleted) thus far was:
“I hold these truths to be self-evident, that the founding fathers were a bunch of sexist, racist pigs…”
Couldn’t imagine my Ben Franklin worshiping, Revolutionary War re-enacting, American History professor would like that too much.
I needed at least a B on this assignment to pass the class, but somehow found it difficult to write 5-7 pages on, as Professor Wilson put it, “The great men that freed our nation from tyranny.”
Well freed, the white, land-owning, male nation anyway.
Time was ticking away, I’d run out of snacks, and I think the lack of sleep was really getting to me when I finally started writing.
Thanks for reading!