I hope I'm not boring anyone with all the repeated shout-outs to InspiroBot, but one of its posters inspired this fictionette, and it was too good not to share.
The pseudo-quote was, "Originality and low impulse control go together like alcohol and paper cuts." How cool is that? It's very cool. It doesn't make a lot of precise, logical sense, but writing prompts don't have to. They just have to spark ideas, make the mind flash upon concepts and combinations it would not have thought of otherwise, that sort of thing. What does it make you think of? Me, I thought of drunken origami.
The accompanying image was the view from space of a waning gibbous Earth with the lights of North America glittering like stars on the dark hemisphere. I found a place for that image in the story, too, but I'm afraid the protagonist had too much on his mind to appreciate it.
Cover art incorporates NASA image by Robert Simmon (Earth Observatory) and "Ancient Dragon" by Malachi Brown (CC BY-SA 2.0).
YOU ARE READING
Come Home to Roost (excerpt)
Short StoryThis was not how origami was supposed to behave.
