Accept, Salt, Noiseless

3 things to inspire 1 story written in 20 minutes. #story320
words/phrase provided by https://wordcounter.net/random-word-generator

Peter woke up. It had been raining and water was running down through his spot on the middle of the hill.

He heard birds chirping and could see some light peaking through a slit in the tarp. He knew it was about 6 AM because the sound of passing cars on the freeway was intermittent.

The clock ticking next to him, he never se to the correct time. The ticking sound was all he needed. He wasn’t sure why but he couldn’t sleep in a noiseless environment.

Peter grabbed his hat and bent to step out of the tent. His breath was visible in the air and he pulled his hunting cap down over his ears.

Peter walked under the freeway and up around to the other side. Following the road for about a mile until he came to a McDonalds.

Peter ordered from the dollar menu. While he waited, he filled his pockets with as many salt packets as he could before the manager chased him off.

Peter walked back to his tent. Before stepping inside, he held the bag in his teeth to free his hands for tearing open salt packets.

One packet at a time he sprinkled the salt in a circle around his tent. Satisfied, he took the bag from his mouth and stepped inside the tent.

Sitting back on his pile of rags, he started a small fire and opened up the McDonalds bag. Once again he threw everything in the middle of the burger out of the tent, keeping only the bread, which he toasted in his hands over the fire.

After having eaten, Peter pulled out a crumpled spiral bound notebook.

On the open page was a drawing of a flag, black with a skull and cross bones. Taking a pen from his pocket, Peter continued coloring in the black of the flag. As he did so, a shudder ran through his body, jolting the pen through one of the crossing bones.

Nutritious, Cap, Measure

3 things to inspire 1 story written in 20 minutes. #story320
words/phrase provided by https://wordcounter.net/random-word-generator

“Take a swig,” said the Cap. “It’s nutritious and besides that it’ll cure your alopecia. You’ll be as hairy as a Himalayan Yak again in no time.”

I looked at the mixture the Cap had poured. Supposedly, besides being Captain of the Jelly Dodger, he had once also been an herbalist.

I’d gotten alopecia suddenly after seeing a ghost. I was shaving and in the mirror, behind me, I saw a tailor. He was holding up a measuring tape with pins in his mouth.

When I saw him, all the hair on my body instantly fell off. From head to eyebrows, balls to toes. All gone. Then to add insult to injury, the first mate kicked open the bathroom door, followed by a gust of wind behind him. The first mate took a piss and the wind blew all my hair into the urinals at the far wall. I wasn’t even left enough hair to gather and glue onto my chin.

The Cap being the good leader he is, said he had just the remedy: the shit of a seagull, the ink of a squid, coconut water, algae, rat fur and the piss of the hairiest man or woman onboard.

The seagull shit was the easiest to get. All we had to do was climb up the masts and scrape the white chips into a cup. The job could even be done without looking.

The squid ink just took some fishing but eventually we put a squid in a bucket and it inked right away. Two ingredients down.

The coconut water, algae and rat fur were almost simultaneous. We were drifting just off shore and someone noticed coconuts off the port bow, that’s also when we remembered all the algae under the boat, which reminded us of all the rats on the boat.

So we cracked the coconuts, scraped up algae and shaved rats. That was the funnest part, watching the crew shave rats with their razors.

The next part was not so fun. We had to find the hairiest man or woman on board to piss into the soup of ingredients we had collected.

Before my scare, I was the hairiest man. So all the men lined up and we judged who was the hairiest. It was the first mate.

The timing of all this was unfortunate. Our rations were thinning and the only food we had in abundance was asparagus.

Now I held a fowl smelling concoction that was to supposedly cure my alopecia and bring back all my hair.

The color was black. It was thick like paste from the seagulls and covered in millions of tiny hairs. It smelled like asparagus urine.

What would you do?