I’ve got something a bit different to share this week: Chuck Wendig has issued a flash fiction challenge using these hilarious and bizarre stock photos as prompts.
Since I’m a naturally indecisive person, I used a random number generator and drew this image:
And here is my resulting fiction.
Wanted: Two legs, possibly stocky
The problem was that it is nearly impossible to find a pair of legs divorced from their associated brains. For one thing, such legs are naturally found only rarely — most legs being rather firmly affixed to their proper brains by way of a torso and spine. And, even in such rare cases of leg-brain separation, it is particularly difficult to track the brainless pair.
After all, without brains, the legs are forced to wander — mindlessly.
And frankly, she was fed up with the search. Her missing legs were worse than a two-year-old.
She resented her legs for wandering off so spitefully after a particularly disdainful comment she’d made about the proportions of their thighs and the build of their calves.
She resented the bruising of her elbows from where she had been forced to drag herself about — reduced to something less than a crawl in the absence of her recalcitrant legs.
And most of all, she resented the absence of her seat.
She longed once more to stand tall — to look others in the eye as equals. She longed never again to hear someone jokingly refer to her as a shoegazer.
She longed, once again, to roam free.
Free once more to wander, free to run and chase, free to feel the tug of the wind in her mousey brown hair.
And for this she was willing at last to pay the price of two legs, imperfectly muscled and stocky.
–
A week went by, a month, and then two. She enlisted the help of friends and social media. She made phone calls to the local police department and placed wanted ads. She even called around to local department stores to see if anyone had found an extra pair of legs, perhaps discovered standing in the window display.
It was all to no avail.
The police informed her that as legs were not a whole person, no missing persons report could be filed for an absent set of bipedal appendages. The department stores assured her that all legs were present and accounted for and that no extra pairs were to be found.
Her friends set out and scoured the city — but always returned empty-handed.
And her pleas on social media had made her temporarily Twitter-famous — but still it was for naught.
Her legs were utterly vanished.
–
It was a Tuesday.
It was a Tuesday in November and her friends had demanded she quit moping about the house and get on with her life. They had insisted she join them after work for a drink.
And so she had dragged her self on weary elbows down the block to the local bar and she had looked about grudgingly for her friends’ familiar sneakers.
She didn’t see them. She couldn’t see them through the forest of feet that filled the bar and she knew instinctively that this had been a mistake.
Any moment now she would be tripped upon or stumbled over and then she would be trampled like so much dirt beneath an unfriendly shoe.
Sighing in resignation she made her way reluctantly toward the bar, unsure how she might ever hope to mount a stool and be seen by the bartender – perhaps she would just hide in the shadows beneath its dark paneled surface, safe from the general hubbub and ever so many feet.
She reached the bar at last and found her self eye-to-foot with a pair of handsome ankle boots, brown leather and with a three-inch heel. How she longed to wear such shoes once more and she found her thoughts wandering to her own favorite pair, now reduced to languishing forlornly in the back of her closet.
Her gaze traveled further upward… past shapely calves and well-toned thighs and lingered with envy upon the elegant swell of derriere…
And it was then she realized that these legs were missing their torso and brain–
“Legs!” she exclaimed, “I’ve found you! You’re mine!”
When I graduated from college, five years and two degrees later, I entered the workforce. A temporary summer internship obtained through my Master’s thesis advisor turned into a full-time position and more than a year and half later I’ve found myself inexplicably and unexpectedly a cog in the nation’s corporate wheel. And while I’ve come to really like not being in school, it has honestly been the biggest adjustment I’ve ever had to make. Much bigger and harder than the adjustment required after leaving home and moving from California to Boston to attend college in the first place.