Dating : Old Ways

A Furious Fiction Rejection

500 Words Maximum
— Your story must take place on a TRAIN.
— Your story must include something FROZEN.
— Your story must include three 3-word sentences in a row.

“I may only have one eye,” he said leering across the small table between them, “but I see what you’re doing over there.”

“And what am I doing over here, hmm?” She asked and turned to watch the landscape pass by outside the bumbling train. Tans and greens and browns flashed by the window, but she couldn’t focus on any of it.

“You’re enticing me.”

“Oh, am I?”

“Oh, yes ma’am.”

She rolled her eyes and tried to focus on anything but him but he smacked the table.

“Come on, you and me, right here in front of them all. Let’s give em’ a show,” he goaded.

“If you think I’m going to waste my energy giving a show to these creatures,” she crossed her arms. “You’re even more delusional than I thought. There was a time they would kill themselves for the honour of witnessing such a thing, now I cannot even look at them.”

“Oh, don’t be that way, you used to love these creatures,” he chided.

“Yes,” she drawled. “I used to, back when they knew their place feared ours.”

A plump little woman pushing a trolley down the narrow isle stopped beside them and started yapping happily as she piled their table high with food.

She paid no attention to what the woman said but was instead more focused on the atrocities that had been laid before her, and her husband’s giddy, childlike demeanour in response to it all.

It took a great amount of restraint not to throw the rubbish into the floor where it belonged.

“They used to honour us with sacrifices, celebrate our names and fear our wrath,” she said hotly, “and now they have reduced us to nothing more than fictional figments, yet you still sit there and manage to celebrate their ridiculous creations. What IS that?” She pointed to the pile of pink slush on the first plate he settled in front of himself.

“This, my dear wife,” he said gazing lovingly at the dish, “is strawberry and pistachio ice cream.”

“Oh dear god,” she sighed.

“Don’t invoke that word now,” he snapped, “the last thing we need is for one of these newbies to pop out of the next booth over and try to preach to me a sermon. I may enjoy the humans but I don’t enjoy the deities they have concocted over the years.”

In that, they agreed. “They’ve no respect for the old ways,” she said.

“Speaking of old ways,” he said, “I hear Zeus will be at the gathering.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh yes,” he said, and thunder crashed outside and the skies suddenly roiled with clouds and darkness. He pointed out the window.“And it seems our boy is still angry with him too. This should be fun.”

“Or a nightmare,” she said. “I heard that food thing with the tentacles will be there as well.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “I’m curious about this one. The humans call it the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

“Of course they do.”