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July is Flash Fiction Month! I’ll be sharing short short stories here through the month of July. More notes at the end of the story.
“If you’d told me that we’d lose all the music in the world tonight, I would’ve pushed you under a car.” Andre waved his fingers, indicating for the panda to give him another cigarette. Xue never had a shortage of them. Andre didn’t know where she kept them. She wore no clothes, and didn’t have a pouch to hide them in.
Xue handed him a cigarette and lit another one for herself with surprisingly dexterous paws. “I tried to warn you, that this would make you blue. But you needed those pictures, you stupid mister. All because you said Green Lantern wouldn’t work.”
Andre’s eye twitched. “They were vintage Spider-Man comics. And you were a vintage lamp. You sure there’s no way I can revert you back to that?”
Xue breathed out a long puff of smoke. “No way, Andre. The spellbook’s broke, and that’s your fault. I hated being stuck in clay. Then you messed with the occult. You just had to hear that piano make noise.”
“You were the one who told me about the piano in the first place.” Andre took a drag, and crossed his arms. “‘Right over there, next to the haunted Playboys and sanctified Hummels. Can’t miss it,’ you said. “‘Immortality,’ you said. ‘All you need to do is play the right song.'”
Xue shrugged a shoulder. “Only you could master it. You knew the song in a tick. You have a musician’s heart and hands, you’re the best pianist in the land! But I did fucking warn you, bro.”
“You said I’d lose something I loved. I thought you meant my comic collection. Seemed like a small price to pay for immortality.” The cigarette had burned down to Andre’s fingertips. He let it. What use were his long fingers and perfect hands now?
Xue ground her own cigarette under a calloused paw and lit a new one. “Immortality costs the world. When you played, everything curled. You lost music for every boy and every girl. You’ve thrown your whole livelihood away, so what is left for you, for all of us?”
“Music is gone,” Andre said to himself. “Forever.”
“Don’t have a panic attack, it can come back. It won’t be easy, it won’t be short. And it will probably hurt. All you have to do is die.”
Andre stared at Xue. She blinked slowly.
Rain hissed on the road as cars drove past them. No songs on the radio. No one singing along. “So if I threw myself in front of one of these cars, would it…?”
Xue blew out another cloud of blue smoke, and didn’t say a word.
Today’s challenge was a three-parter, leading to a bizarre tale.
Element 1: Go look through our generators either via the Prompt Generators page or our itch.io profile (and please excuse the lack of cover images; we have yet to decide on a design for them). If you come across any issues, please let us know here or on the page of the troubled generator.
Element 2: Pick at minimum three (3) generators other than the yearly prompt generators (2009-2025 and 2026), David Bowie Song Randomiser or 2675 Things Mr. Welch Can No Longer Do During An RPG Generator. Grab one (1) prompt from each of your chosen generators. Bonus points if you pick the first prompt you generate from them.
Element 3: Use each prompt you got in today’s story. You may combine them with prompts from excluded generators if you wish to use them as well. Make sure to tell which generators you got which prompts from!
I did not do this properly and chose sections of prompts from various generators.
From the adventure generator:
MacGuffin: Mystical piano that’s said to grant whoever can play the right song immortality. Nobody has succeeded.
– by bookcrusher
Character mashup generator:
Character 1: A chain-smoking panda who speaks only in limericks but doesn’t know how rhymes work.
Character 2: An internationally acclaimed concert pianist who wants pictures! Pictures of Spiderman!
– by DamonWakes
And a generator which shall not be named because I can’t remember which one it was:
Opening line: If you’d told me that we’d lose all the music in the world tonight, I would’ve pushed you under a car.
– by WindySilver
Overlooked Books 