Splashdown

This picture, of Gemini 5’s return to Earth in 1965, is the prompt for today’s Flash! Friday challenge.. 

We don’t speak Martian here at NASA. Anything more complex than five notes and we’re pretty baffled.

So when we got the message, with co-ordinates and then something that sounded like Swedish being coughed through bagpipes, we thought that they wanted to meet us.

The co-ordinates were at sea, so Halsworth and I were put in a dinghy to wait, and to offer them Mars Bars in greeting.

They hadn’t wanted to meet us. They’d been asking us to take the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Their giant bucket bounced us out of the dinghy like two kids on too tight a trampoline.

We were rescued by conspiracy theorists. They follow us everywhere, ever since Roswell didn’t happen.

The Martians have sent us the video and we feel that we now have a bond.

So we’re challenging the Klingons, launching our own huge ice-filled bucket to land at high speed on their planet.

We have a good feeling about this.

 

Washed Up

Ok, I’m back. I could make some excuse, but I’ve just been plain lazy. Anyway, the picture below is the prompt for today’s Flash! Friday challenge….

There should have been a girl.

Everyone knows this. When you wash up on a desert island you meet a girl stranded by a previous shipwreck, blonde, beautiful and wearing an outfit that she has apparently fashioned out of her handkerchief.

That was why he had jumped ship. He was too good for life at sea, with its scurvy, rats and monotonously easy games of I Spy. He would find the girl and found an Eden.

But now he sat dejectedly on sand that stretched endless and empty, like his future. There wasn’t even the obligatory single palm tree. Too late he reflected that urban legends do not apply outside an urban environment.

Actually they do. At that very moment the girl was sitting under the single tree, calmly awaiting companionship.

Sadly, it wouldn’t be with him. He had come ashore on Bikini Atoll, and she was on the other half.