Get your face out of your food!

Lying on the floor with your face in your food is NOT an eating style approved of by Miss Manners.  But if you’re a horse, why not relax and enjoy your food at close range?  Ahh, life is good!

Friday Fictioneers: Give Us This Day Our Daily…

Travel and real life have put a cramp in my Friday Fictioneers style for several weeks and threaten to again.  My 100-word story is found below, but as I’m fortunate this week to be traveling to an OWL meeting in Branson, Missouri, while getting to meet fellow Fictioneers Rochelle, Kent, Madison and possibly Russ, as well as writers such as Jan Marler Morrill and Beth Carter, I won’t have time for much online activity.  So forgive me if I don’t get to your story until much later (I leave Thursday morning and arrive back home Sunday night, then have company Monday and part of Tuesday) or if I don’t get to it at all this week.  Because of that, I considered not doing a story again this week, but I decided to publish or perish.

I stared at the photo for some time, a variety of thoughts running through my head.  All seemed to me too obvious and as Fictioneers, we’re trained and encouraged to avoid the “obvious” (and does the obvious then become not obvious?)  In the midst of my contemplation, this story showed up, grabbed me around the throat, gave me some good shakes and refused to let me go until I wrote it, however feebly.  It’s something I’ve been experiencing lately and which I think threatens to take much pleasure from our lives.  Is it thus fiction or not?  Am I this week a Fictioneer or a Factioneer?  That’s for you to decide.  So without further blathering or ado, here’s my offering, based on the intriguing photo prompt by Kent.

Copyright Kent Bonham

Give Us This Day Our Daily…

Hungrily perusing the menu, his mind suddenly dredged up a variety of warring advice.

“Only eat whole grains!”
“Eliminate wheat products.”

“Don’t eat anything with a face.”
“Grass-fed and cage-free makes all the difference.”

“Meat raises your cholesterol.”
“My blood pressure dropped 50 points on the Atkins diet.”

“Darling, you simply must try this fabulous raw milk cheese!”
“U.S. government bans raw milk and raw milk cheese.”

“Salmonella outbreak linked to raw veggies.”
“A raw diet and juicing!”

“Have a glass of red wine daily.”
“Avoid drinking!”

Choice stymied and pleasure gone, he wearily left the restaurant, hunger completely routed.

Wondering how on earth I got here from there?  There’s a pathway (alley) with many shops on the side (things on all sides) and my character is headed somewhere (for a good meal) when things come at him from all sides.  That’s the gossamer yet strong connection I turned into this story, with my disheartened character making his way wearily along the way at the end of the story.  🙂

Preying–a haiku

Preying

Hawk floats lazily
Buoyed by updrafts, perusing
The day’s lunch specials

Summertime and the eatin’ is easy

It’s difficult to want to do much cooking in summer, sometimes because it’s too hot and sometimes simply because everything is so luscious on its own.  But whether you decide to cook or not cook, mealtimes are good times during the summer.