author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Notes from the author:

One way of using a bunch of random words as writing prompts is to try to make a sentence out them all. Maybe two sentences. Whatever works. The resulting bit of prose, however nonsensical, is the new prompt. This week’s fictionette began with the sentence, “He was feeling sickly, but he couldn’t let anyone see. So he went all cocky to the prom, wearing odd socks pulled up over his slacks cuffs.”

Why, yes, the carrot absolutely is a nod toward the Fifth Doctor’s everpresent stalk of celery.

It wasn’t a good idea to go, not now, but he couldn’t just stay home. So he decided to go to the harvest dance in style. He pulled up his mismatched socks over his slacks cuffs and put on a clashing plaid shirt. He manufactured a pair of extravagant costume glasses wide enough to cover the more noticeable anomalies. (”Bigger,” he told the shipboard computer; “no, bigger than that.”) And he completed his outfit with a fur-lined snow cap, the sort with a gigantic pom-pom up top and with ear flaps whose cords tied securely under his chin.

He’d carefully cultivated his not-from-around-here reputation so that he could get away with almost any weirdness. So his outlandish party dress was fine. Expected, even. Everyone would just nod at each other behind his back, like they always did, agree that they sure did things differently in Philly. But he was pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to shrug off the arm trying to grow out of the top of his skull, nor the new pair of eyes just opening under the old.

“Why?” he asked his reflection. “Why now? This wasn’t supposed to happen for years!” But the mirror only mouthed the words back at him. It had confirmed his worst fears when that nagging tickle turned into brief eternities of searing pain and he ran to catch a panicked look at himself. Beyond that news, his reflection had nothing to tell him. Well, it told him that his green-lensed glasses were indeed big enough to hide his sibling/child’s imminent emergence. If no one jostled him too suddenly. If the process didn’t suddenly accelerate. It might, for all he knew. He’d never done this before.

He was, of course, from much farther away than Philadelphia....

This has been an excerpt from the Friday Fictionette for December 25, 2015. Subscribers can download the full-length fictionette (1101 words) from Patreon in PDF or MP3 format depending on their pledge tier.

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