Prompt and Circumstance

Hornblower... is that You?

"Horn" (Jan. 20-22, 2017)

"Dammit, where is it? I've searched everywhere." Amazon tried to stay calm, but his failure to find the key to his most important treasure was aggravating.

"WO..." he called loudly to his son, "Have you seen it anywhere? I swear it was just here on my desk in the wee small hours of this morning."

WO ambled through the door in his usual hapless and helpless fashion, his face wearing the same vacant expression as most days. "Dunno," he said. "I haven't done anything with it."

"Hmm... more's the pity," Amazon muttered. "That'd be too much to ask of you these days, I guess." He sniffed and sighed with disdain. Amazon's hopes had been high for this latest of his offspring - his WO - but alas, he was turning out to be one huge disappointment.

With an impatient shrug Amazon dragged his thoughts away from that depressing problem to the more pressing issue of the present enigma. He mentally walked through each room - of his house first, and then his mind. Nothing to be found... anywhere.

In desperation he'd even dashed off an email to the good friends he usually relied on in such emergencies, Null and Void. They were pretty far out, he had to admit, especially with an address like theirs - 000@blackhole.com - but they're reliable as, at finding things, he thought and puffed his cheeks tight before exhaling a blast of hot air.

Null insisted she would do the bulk of the searching. "Void will only give the Black Hole a 'man' look, and see nothing much past the end of his nose," she'd written. "He hasn't felt himself since he went interstellar... had a bad time with his androids ever since, sad to say. Tell you what, I'll strap on my trusty head-lamp - the one with the supersonic beam - cast some light on the subject and boldly go where no man has gone before."

She'd put Void to work doing something useful, like sweeping aside all the odd socks floating around. "To be honest," she wrote, "the socks are not so much aimlessly floating as deliberately dancing. They can prove quite a handful to round up." Amazon had sensed a hint of playfulness in her next words - "You remember all that music you lost when you changed to your new 'you beaut' computer, last decade? Well-ll-ll.... "

Now Amazon just needed patience... and a lot of it. Even though Null and Void's Black Hole was close to Earth, relatively speaking, it would take many nano-seconds for their sonic boom to reverberate. Once again he focussed on WO, and he was inspired to lighten up and take a little poetic parody-doxical licence -

Come my son WO, come blow your horn.
I'm losing my faith in you, since you were born.
Where is the prompt, I ask you my boy?
"It challenges the writers, it's not just a toy"
"Will you find it?"
"No, not I;
"I like them to suffer, to whimper, to cry."

Author's Note:

Although many writers love one particular writing platform, members have been experiencing deep unhappiness with the almost total lack of communication from the so-called technical support we once enjoyed. Much advice and support is shared amongst the friendliest and most helpful writers via comments on each other's works and in a forum on the site. Still, friends are hurting, some even deserting when technical issues sit unanswered - except for members trying valiantly to second-guess what the answers might be.

This is my protest about a weekly prompt that finally comes - hours and hours later than ever it did. This particular one was 7 hours later than the usual 'announcement' time once was, and there's a groundswell of feeling that these 'prompts' are on some kind of automated setting, with little or no human involvement. Will it change anything? Doubt it. My protest last year 'Promptless in Sebastopol' changed nothing except my satisfaction in speaking out. Ditto anticipated with this one.