Grandpa’s Hippie Birthday Cake

hippie

PHOTO PROMPT © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

“What about this one, Grandpa?” Ten-year-old Mia pulled on Tom’s arm dragging him through the bakery section of the party emporium.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding,” he said exaggerating his frown. “I can feel myself becoming diabetic just looking at that awful thing.

“But you were a hippie a long time ago, right?” she giggled.

“Not exactly,” he mused. “Sure, I’m old, but I don’t remember eating anything like that.

Tom looked at her smiling face and lamented the world she was growing up in. Sure, the world of his childhood was far from perfect, but it had hope.

It’s Wednesday and time again to participate in this week’s edition of Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ Friday Fictioneers. The idea is to use the image above as the prompt for crafting a poem or short story no more than 100 words long. My word count is exactly 100.

That cake looks hideous. I noticed the background as well which changed how I wrote it a little. If I hadn’t been limited to 100 words, I’d have added “and good music,” but such is life (I was thinking of the Beatles and the Stones).

To read other stories based on the prompt or to add your own, visit inlinkz.

The “Ruins” science fiction anthology is coming soon:

Across the vast expanse of space and time lie the remnants of civilizations that reached for the stars—and vanished. Silent cities carved into asteroids. Derelict megastructures drifting between galaxies. Temples buried beneath the red sands of dead worlds.

haunted waters

Cover art for the anthology “Haunted Waters.”

This book contains 13 bold tales of humanity’s encounters with these cosmic ruins.
That’s how the narrative for the Kickstarter for “Ruins: A Space Opera Anthology” begins. The anthology contains my short story “Sunrise.” The kickstarter is at well over 80 followers now and growing. Please consider contributing to this effort or even passing the information along.

The ghostly anthology Haunted Waters edited by Jamie Ferguson is now available for purchase. It features my short story “The Wreck of the USS Hollander.”

Sixty years ago, the U.S. Navy attack submarine Hollander sank in the Atlantic under mysterious circumstances. Today, a group of pirates and weapons merchants are descending to nearly 10,000 feet to retrieve the submarine’s nuclear torpedoes. However, they find something terrible waiting for them, not only in the surrounding waters, but on board the derelict sub as well.

31 thoughts on “Grandpa’s Hippie Birthday Cake”

  6. My husband would agree with you on adding in the ““and good music,” and was just commenting the other day about modenr music and now the AI generated stuff – anyhow, good story and I was right there shopping for cakes with them

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  7. it must be our age, that we saw the Hippie connection in the prompt. I was too young, honest. I can empathise with the honest feelings of the past where we accepted a future on our own terms. Nowadays, the younger generation seem, in my experience, pass the blame for their woes onto others.

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  11. He’s a grandpa. He’s supposed to worry. I do feel like “the good ole days” were far simpler for kids than today, but I also suppose that there is no better day than the other, there’s just the good and the bad that we must maneuver. My husband is fully onboard with the sentiment that classic rock is the best! 🙂

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  13. Granddad is worried, as most grandads do. I do feel bad for kids today – the existential threat. But it may just be because we carry the world in the palm of our hands now. It’s just too much all at once. I agree the music was good, but there is good music today too, it’s different music for different times. The good old days is just nostalgia (nothing wrong with that). Speaking as an American what was good – the Cold War and the threat of mutual destruction, nuclear war? The McCarthy Era? Viet Nam? Jim Crow and segragation? lynching? red lining? Male Chauvinists? … I could go on, but the point is, like that cake, we all find joy in the places that we can in a world that cares little for humankind.

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    • There’s good and bad in every age, but as I mentioned in another comment, the fact that kids have access to the internet, smartphones, and TV streaming destroys innocence at a very early age. I think kids growing up before all that had a better chance of just being kids.

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