Welcome to Flash Fiction Fridays! Every Friday I use conversational AI to generate a new flash fiction prompt inspired by the changes and updates to my digital garden.
Flash fiction is a unique and challenging form of writing that requires creativity, brevity, and skill. By using conversational AI to generate the prompt, I’m tapping into the power of machine learning to come up with interesting and unexpected ideas that I might not have thought of otherwise.
I use the weekly changes and updates to my digital garden as a starting point for the AI to generate the prompt. The prompts are designed to be open-ended and flexible, allowing me to explore a wide range of themes and genres that are aligned with my interests and experiences. And thats not all, there is a piece of AI generated art to go with every story as well! If you want to dive deeper, check out the updates to my digital garden.
The Prompt
After a near-death experience, a cutthroat executive finds himself inexplicably transported into the body of a street artist in a small town, where he must grapple with the unexpected chance to live a life of passion and meaning.
The Story
It felt sudden. Like a hard-cut from black to white. Why? How was it possible for him to change so quickly? He didn’t want this. He was forced into this new self, with memory fragments of the past fading into the vast expanse of his consciousness. Moments of this transcendence came to him in his dreams. The excess of money, the overindulgence in mind-altering substances. He had lost himself in a sea of flesh and what had started as a brave voyage into the conceivable limits of pleasure, had ended in the loss of his life. Or rather, in the loss of that life.
And with the flick of a switch, night turned to day, darkness to light, and flesh to… art? He stood in front of a concrete wall, holding a spray can. The wall held the evidence of his past transgressions, a wild orgy of pain and pleasure, sprayed in broad strokes across the surface. The first thing he noticed was the smell. It was the musky smell of the poor. A smell he was all too familiar with, every morning he used to pass them, those lost souls lining the air vents of his office building. No, this time the smell was coming from his own clothes, which apparently hadn’t been washed in a few days. The contents of his wallet had gone from an American Express Centurion Card to 12 dollars and 25 cents in cash. A tragedy. But he was too busy working on the mural to lament his losses. A detail was missing. The pain in their faces.
It did not take long for him to be surrounded by a few of his companions, who were cheering him on and admiring his work of art. He felt a dualistic awareness of reality that was hard to describe. He knew these people. The process of spraying paint onto the concrete felt so familiar, it brought him so much joy, and yet, he also knew that something big had changed, he had access to a past that felt too real to be a dream. That night he went home to a modest studio apartment in the outskirts of town. There wasn’t much there, other than a massive assortment of spray paint. These colors shined so bright in these otherwise dark and drab surroundings. He felt a pull towards them, an agency that originated within his heart. The more he tried to capture this feeling with his mind, the more he saw what was missing. There was no economic motive whatsoever. No person whose pockets he was trying to empty. It was a passion for expression that felt almost too innocent to even exist in this world. But somehow, it did.
Time had a different quality to it. It passed, regardless of whether he measured it excessively or not. He moved from moment to moment, almost on his own. There was no scheming, no big plans or master mind groups. He was simply there. Here. Working the counter of the neighborhood supermarket. People came in an out, buying things they needed and didn’t need. It was not a surprise all he had left was 12 dollars. It was the end of the month, and he was due to receive his salary today. And with it, the first thing he did after his shift was over, was buying a can of the cheap energy drink as well as more flesh toned spray paint.
He went back to his mural, situated at the bottom of a ravine that must have housed a great river once. The sun still gave him a few hours to paint. More limbs, more drugs, more flesh, more, more, more. How far could he go? How far could he bury himself in the expressions of his subjects? Those faces. Terrified and absolutely ravished with ecstasy. The moment of his death, of his birth, captured on concrete, it was almost like he was performing an exorcism on himself.
He turned around when he heard footsteps approaching. The sun had almost set. What was she doing here? He hadn’t seen her since the day he fired her. She looked at him as if a long search had come to an end. And yet to him, it did not make sense, it all felt like a dream, like he was going to be sucked back into the concrete wall he faced. That guy, indiscernible in between the red hues of lust, had all but forgotten about her. She didn’t understand the world. She didn’t understand profit. When in reality, she had simply rejected his insane manifesto of surviving at all cost. She wanted what he wanted now. It was all so simple. To live for life itself.
