Grandma's Advice...A Short Story

Weekly Photo Writing Prompt

This week's picture is a classic and I'm finishing my story just before the deadline. If you'd like to hurry and write a short story of your own, now's the time! But, you'd better hurry. Or just check these linked sites tomorrow and see what new picture and words we'll have then. Here are the rules:

1) Use the photo and the 5 words provided in your story
2) Keep your word count 500 words or less.
3) You have until next Tuesday to link up your post.
4) Link up your story at these sites: Nicole, Carrie, or Leanne.    

5) Have fun, don’t stress, let those creative juices flow.

The Required Words:

Reject

Flood

Toy

Angle

Trophy

Enjoy!

Grandma's Advice

You might think finding yourself stranded in the desert without food or water would mean certain death.

And you would be right.

Unless, of course, you see a dragon, a tandem bike-riding pair, and a crystal skull. It's like my grandmother--who heard Japanese planes as they flew to Pearl Harbor--used to say, "If you reject reality, it'll come back and bite you in the butt." 

Love my grandmother. She also, as a kid, rode shotgun when her father decided to stage a one-man protest of the federal government's edict that all alcoholic beverages were scarred with the stench of sin and run moonshine in the back hills of North Carolina, and that wasn't a toy shotgun she held as her dad pushed the old '25 Packard to its limits.

Now, what does my grandmother's life and amusing saying have to do with a dragon, a tandem bike-riding pair, and a crystal skull? I asked myself the same question as I walked from my fuel-deprived SUV in the Nevada desert having miscalculated the amount of gas needed to reach my very first Burning Man experience.

Remembering that funny short firecracker of a woman, a woman who said she's have kicked Hitler right in the...ah...behind if she ever go the chance, a woman who buried two husbands from sheer exhaustion, I think I know what she would tell me. "Jr," she'd say, the raspy voice from smoking unfiltered Marlboro Reds for 45 years. "Jr, why the hell didn't you think? You gotta think in this world--don't be one of those 'every-kid-gets-a-trophy-just-for-showing-up' brats we're cranking out from every university by the boatload. Think!"

As I walked with my emergency gas can in hand toward what may be some of the weirdest people on the planet and endure rays of light as they flood my eyes as reflections scream off both angle and mirror coming from the desert dragon itself, I laughed and screamed at those gathering for the event, "Hey! Anyone out there got any gas for someone who doesn't listen to his grandmother?"

Word Count: 345