Flash Fiction Friday: Satan Was the Rabbit

There it was, a Friday morning, and she had not yet written a flash fiction for that day. She stared at her computer screen, beads of sweat dripping from her temples. What could she do? Inspiration on demand seemed to flutter away from her every time. Desperate, she got on the internet and clicked on her favorite random title generator, the very one that had aided her so many times in the past.

Tensely, she held the cursor over the words, “generate titles.”

She clicked.

The website gave her a suggestion without delay, throwing out inspiration like a guy wildly shooting t-shirts at a ball game.

“Satan Was the Rabbit,” it said.

She hesitated. She had made stranger titles work, such as “A Steam-Powered Rat out of Treasures.” Would she do better to simply re-post that story from her old blog, and hope nobody noticed? Should she sneak a link into her post and hope people would not abandon their faith in her as a writer? No, she had to press on. She had to produce some kind of flash fiction.

But how could she make “Satan Was the Rabbit” into a story? She thought for a while, supposing she could write a story about a farmer plagued by rabbits, who then died and went to hell only to discover Satan sitting upon a throne of vegetables. Yes, she thought, that could work. But the title was kind of a spoiler. Could she write the story under a different title? No, “Satan Was the Rabbit” was sure to be better clickbait.

Shaking her head, she decided to try her hand at the random title generator again.

“Joseph, the Hollywood Hamlet”
“Thog, the Bat Force”
“The Blogger of Susan”
“At a Fish with a Bullet”
“The Chair is Perfect”

No luck. None to be found whatsoever. Perhaps these titles might find a place in bizarro fiction, but none of them seemed to fit her current style. None of them even seemed workable, and the last one sounded more like something one would say after a delivery from Ikea.

Finally, she tried one more time.

“Suicide, Spoke the Cry”

She sat up a little straighter. That story title had potential. But alas, inspiration had fled her for the day. She resolved to write that story for her next flash fiction post, and decided to go with something a little more metaphysical for now.

Still, even as she wrote the story of her plight, she found herself wondering if her readers would now demand a story for each of the titles she had discovered, and just what the heck she was going to do if they did.

“Satan Was the Rabbit” copyright 2017 by A.L.S. Vossler.

Rabbit image courtesy of Johnny Automatic on openclipart.org


What are your thoughts?