© Ted Strutz

“What’s it do, Mikey?”

“Beats me, Lynn.”

The eight-year-old boy and his six-year-old sister stood contemplating the strange series of discs constructed in their Grandpa’s backyard.

“I’ll take a picture and do an image search.” Moments later the boy’s handheld yielded a result. “I think it’s called a Rube Goldberg machine, a really complicated machine that’s supposed to do something really simple.”

“Like?”

“Can’t tell.”

“That?” Grandpa called from the back porch. “Doesn’t do anything. Built it outta scraps ’cause I was bored. Hey. I found a game I used to play with your Dad. Anyone up for Mouse Trap?

I wrote this for the Rochelle Wisoff-Fields weekly writing challenge. The idea is to use the image above as the inspiration for writing a flash fiction story no more than 100 words long. My word count is 100.

I was really stuck on this one. If it really were a Rube Goldberg machine, I’d think its purpose could be derived from looking at it, but nothing came up for me. The best I could do was think of the game “Mouse Trap” which I played as a kid.

Yeah, the story’s weak, but it’s all I could think of.

To read other (and probably better) stories based on the prompt go to InLinkz.com.