2014 minus 34: Classic fast fiction – The Randomness of Everything

It’s been a full twenty-four hours, and a post that I was writing, that for once I’m pleased with… isn’t ready to be released. I’ll reveal that it’s to do with political hypocrisy and the hypocrisy of politics, but that’s all you’re getting for now.

This blogging every day is harder than I anticipated, and unlike Robin Ince (who did something similarly recently) I’ve neither the excuse that I’ve been preparing to go on stage, nor the skills to blag 800 words every night and know they’re be good enough to be seen.

So, here’s a fast fiction challenge I write which hasn’t been on this blog previously and with which I’m particularly pleased.

It’s been a while since I wrote something in verse, and maybe I should return to the format at some point. But not tonight; tonight, you get an oldie but (I think) a goodie. Toughest thing about this one? Finding a way to use a five syllable word in the verse format in which I write the tale. I think I pulled it off, but then that was part of the challenge…

Enjoy.

Title: The Randomness of Everything
Word: synchronicity
Challenger: LJ – opheliasclone
Length: 200 words exactly

The physician to the newly crowned
Monarch of Seville
Delighted when he’d finally found
What made the new king ill.

He jumped around in celebration
And then he stopped quite dead
And poured himself a large libation
Wond’ring how to save his head

The problem was, he saw at once
With the diagnosis
Twas not a boil that he could lance
Nor was it halitosis

The king was poorly, he now knew
because of strain and stress
He’d need to live his life anew
Complete and utter rest.

No more could he allow the power
The strain of being King
With fifty things to solve each hour
He handled everything!

From who was right and who was wrong
O’er disputes large and small
Deciding fashions; short or long
He could not do it all!

There’s a time for randomness all right
It’s there in every city
But in the royal palace, right
Only synchronicity

But he knew the king’s right hand men
Would never listen right
And so upon the stroke of ten
He ran into the night.

And no more was ever heard of him;
He’d wanted no alarm.
He’d merely followed the physician’s lore
First off: ensure no harm.

© Lee Barnett, 2005