The Green Bunch
Just Another Day – Flash Fiction [#19]
Ach, I’m so sore, lying here all day.
Wotch out. Custommah aisle two, comin’ dis way!
Oh, woe. She took Mr and Mrs Carrot. Alas, poor little ones, all alone. What tragedy.
Grim. Where’s she now? Will, can you see?
The bread section. What’s that noise? No! Bernd! Oh, what gruesome fate. The horror…
Wots happnen?
She put him in the cutter. Bernd… he… he’s gone.
O’ Bernd, we shall ne’er forget thee, o’ noble loaf, gentlest soul, softest character, tender and true, richest who called thee friend, poorest for thou hast been culled from this cruel world too soon.
Wot’s with ye? Bernd’s goin’ places. Ye wanna stay and waste away? Naw. Go, Bernd! Yo, slice of life!
Easy for you to say, Edgar. I prefer to stay here. Take it easy. I hope she leaves us alone.
I’m with Bart. Please, no, I’m too young to be taken. Let me ripen a wee bit more, get that noice yellow touch.
Yer tiny, Liza, ye wimp. She ain’t gonna take ye ennyway. She gonna rip ye right off.
You’re a meanie, you’ll get what’s coming to you. Get ripped, cut into pieces, drowned in milk and honey... with yoghurt.
Dat’s messed up, yo. Don’t maddah. None of us are free. Gonna face it head-on. Take de bull by dem horns.
Hark, by the pricking’ of my peel something wi—
Shush! Will, ye silly sod, quit yer jibber-jabber or I’ll—
Guys… GUYS!
WOT?
Look! It’s HIM!
O’ woe is me…
But I don’t wanna go, I’d rather just stay and sing…
Shut it, Bart!
Mayday, mayday! Little Terror on the loose. Prepare for GSTD!
Stop makin’ stuff up. It’s annoying.
Grope–Squeeze–Throw–Drop! How do you not know that? We discussed this in every postmortem.
Whatevs. Sue me.
Ewwwwww. GERMS! Ack! He licked me.
Gross.
Earthquake! We’re all gonna die! Halp!
Phew, that was a close one. Everyone OK? Edgar? Will?
Yo, we’re fine.
Liza? Bart?
I’m OK. Bart’s scared.
Am not. What happened?
The Terror… he stomped… The Clementines and the Smiths…
Casualties?
All of them. They’ve fallen. Trampled. I saw some rolling to freedom.
GO GRANNIES! GO!
Don’t be daft ye punk, there’s nowhere to go. Freedom’s an illusion, if ye think otherwise then ye need a serious dose of common sense infusion.
Spouting wisdom one idiom at a time. Why do we quarrel? Don’t you see, we must fight together? For together we stand, together we fall, all for one and one for all.
Yer an idiot, it’s everyone fer themselves, de world’s gone bananas.
Look at us, lying here, day after day, wasting away, prisoners in our own home, groped and squeezed to smithereens by inescapable hands of time. We lament, we discuss, we fuss, we make plans only to discard them, make resolutions we never keep, we do nothing, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
What shoe? Surely, she won’t touch a green bunch like us.
Shhh, quiet. Here she comes. Act normal.
A Writing Prompt Exercise
Just another day at the supermarket. Some writing prompts can lead to rather silly things, in this particular case the prompt was to write a maximum of 500 words from the point of view of an object or several objects, choosing either first or second person.
What do you think? What’s the object? How many are there? Can you tell them apart? How? By register? No direct dialogue attribution but some naming, enough to know who’s who or… what?
Any Subtext? A clear case of Personification? Pathetic Fallacy? Allegory? In a manner of speaking… or simply ridiculous, absurdly ridiculous fun, existentially.
If you liked this story, here’s another one with a particular POV, including breaking the 4th wall, based on the following prompt:
A chess piece. A mystery. An old house.
Announcement
You may have seen or heard already. There’s a new section of TFTD. A little corner for my audiobook narrations.
Page Turners is where I narrate classic books here on Substack and on my YouTube channel. Since this content will not be sent out via email, if you want to be notified of new chapters, hit that notification bell on my YouTube channel (Substack doesn’t do web-only post notifications).
All those must-read books, the greatest works of all time, I will be reading them, book by book, page by page, chapter by chapter. Grab your headphones, and let's (re)discover all those classics together.
I have spent over a decade on stage, performing in a variety of plays from Ayckbourn to Shakespeare, dramas, comedies, and musicals. With that experience, I will bring each narration to life with a rich tapestry of characters for you to enjoy.
My first project is this “very short” book by Leo Tolstoy called “War and Peace,”reading and recording a chapter a day, using the Newly Revised Oxford Edition, which includes a lot of French and a decent amount of German, some Italian and some songs, yep, I sing, too!
War and Peace – Book One, Part One is complete.
25 Chapters, 300 Minutes runtime (around 400 recorded and edited).
![Page Turners: War and Peace [B1P1C1]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2jqX!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd77f2bee-f1c6-4739-aaf7-3fbe247d30aa_1260x900.jpeg)
The whole book is around 60 hours (3600 minutes) of audio, which means we are about 8% done. This is a gargantuan project, and the cadence of recording releases depends on various factors, voice, time to record, time to edit, and moreover, time set aside to write my novel, some flash fiction, edit pod videos and record VO for my own stories.
TFTD Community
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That image for the post is great. Did you make that yourself?
This was quite amusing and fun. Definitely works without dialogue attribution, and in any case the use of constant speech means that the POV is essentially irrelevant (or at least to my mind that's the case). I didn't try to keep count of how many distinct "characters" there were, but there's certainly change in voice/style that distinguishes, as well as several names thrown in. Also, I feel like there's a few literary and musical intertextual moments here too, or perhaps it's just me? 😆
Dat’s messed up, yo!
How many speakers are there? Who are they? It don’t maddah, Ipfelkofer. This is likely the funniest, most wierded-out dialog I have ever read. I loved every line. ( "Ack! He licked me." "Gross.") Here's the killer, though:
"Look at us, lying here, day after day, wasting away, prisoners in our own home, groped and squeezed to smithereens by inescapable hands of time. We lament, we discuss, we fuss, we make plans only to discard them, make resolutions we never keep, we do nothing, waiting for the other shoe to drop."
Ouch. Ain't dat da trooth.