I have a lot of fun writing ten-second fiction for 600 seconds. I’m never entirely sure what my brain is going to come up with, and the knowledge that I have to come up with something forces me to write. Today, I wrote this, which was fun, and then, because there were ideas still bouncing around my head, I wrote the short-short story below. I decided to post it here just for a change. I hope you enjoy.
They called themselves the uaomons, although their true name, they said, could not be pronounced with our tongues. We found them on one of the planets closest to their sun. They, too, were explorers, they said. They had never left the face of their planet — indeed, had only recently begun to dream that such things were possible — but they claimed to have arrived from distant shores and traveled other continents. They showed us their vessel, built of iron and thick wood, showed us the maps they had pieced together on their journey. They no longer believed the old stories, they said. Here there be dragons. Here lies the end of the world. They had seen their breath in the icy dawn of the north, had traveled west where their maps showed nothing but darkness and death. They were explorers, and they were not afraid when we showed them our ship and charted the course we had followed on our own system’s map. They were men of honor, they said, servants of their king. Our arrival filled them not with fear, but with wonder. It was the dawning of another age. They were wise, they were brave…
And they were delicious.