I write all of my stories using the predictive text option on my phone now.
It’s so much easier! I don’t have to be clever or anything. I just plug in a word and BLAMOLA: It’s freakin’ A.I. Mad-libs time, baby!
I mean, let’s face it, who wants to put up with annoying crap like “Making the Effort” and “Integrity” and all those other time consuming practices? Am I right? Time is for playing X-box dammit!
I need my free time to watch gorgeous women from Europe doing Tarot readings from the privacy of their own bubble-baths! I just can’t live without meme wars on Twitter, between me and all 11 of my way-more-talented-than-me followers.
Can you?
Don’t lie.
How can I possibly watch all the funny compilation videos on YouTube if I’m sitting around trying to be brilliant all the time! Who has room for that and cross-stitch! It’s unreasonable, and furthermore, it’s rude.
Look, if you don’t believe my phone can produce works at least comparable to works of all those suckers out there, slaving over sentences, in a six-craft-beers-deep haze—well try me! Gimme a pronoun! A preposition! A gerund!
What? What did you say? “My”? Okay! Watch this!
…My proboscis hippopotamus is winking in and out of supermarkets like French fries giving hernias to Superman on Camaro biscuits…
You see that?! Tell me that isn’t a fantastic opening line to my next flash fiction piece, I double-dog dare you!
Wanna do another one? NO? Well, too bad! Gimme a word!
Cankles? Easy-peasy:
…Cankles rainbows are u serious Bigfoot banana has at least more calculators than Statue of Liberty tough booking agent potty umbrellas…
Okay, I admit, that one didn’t roll off the tongue quite as smoothly as the first one, but that’s what deletion’s for ya’ plebe! Didn’t they teach you anything—no, I mean besides crippling debt management—in that MFA program you’ve been in for the last decade?
HAHA, J/K, me either.
Let’s do one for the road!
Wada ya say drunky! Do? Ya wanna do, “do”? Ha! Doo doo…
C’mon bruh! You got this! We got this! Observe:
…Do you have emergency demon sponges for ice-cream cones to forgive Jesus pencils of the Mona Lisa pickles…?
Oh snap people, lemme tell ya…
Do I ever.
Josh Price is an avid gardener and enthusiastic watcher of cartoons. He lives in California with his wife and two dogs. South Florida Poetry Journal has published his flash fiction; he has a forthcoming flash fiction publication with The Los Angeles Review. Find him on Twitter: @timepinto