Micro Fiction Challenge: Golden Sombrero

Posted by David Duhr in Micro Fiction Challenge      9 comments

Mar
31

If the hat in this stock image were golden, and if it were a sombrero, it would be a golden sombrero.

(To skip the piffle/folderol and get to the contest, go to paragraph #5)

Baseball’s Opening Day is the surest sign of spring. Yes, it kinda/sorta snowed in NYC this morning, but that won’t postpone the Mets’ 1:10 p.m. start, by which time it should be nearly 60 degrees, and perhaps even a little sunny. And yes, there will be plenty of rainouts, and even a snowout or two, in the weeks ahead, but, as Bart Giamatti wrote, “The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings.” (Of course, the rest of that piece goes something like “Oh my God life sucks hard and winter is coming and I can’t stop time.”)

My half of the brain trust here at WriteByNight will be taking the afternoon off, but I wanted to get up a new Micro Fiction Challenge before I turn on my glitchy MLB package and bliss out.

Baseball is a game in which a successful batter performs at a 7-to-3 rate of failure, and one becomes a legend by failing in “only” six of ten at-bats. The most useless at-bat result is the strikeout. Whiff three times in one game, you’ve achieved a hat trick, a term which has its origins in cricket but became popular in hockey, where fans throw their hats onto the rink after a player scores his third goal of a game. But in baseball, a hat trick is bad news. And the dreaded golden sombrero is badder news. If three whiffs in a game is a hat, then four whiffs in a game should be a bigger hat, right?

(After the 4-K golden sombrero, the creativity goes out the window. Strike out five times in a game and it’s a … platinum sombrero. Six is a titanium sombrero. And only once has a hitter struck out seven times in a professional game, April 18, 1981, when Russ Laribee went 0-11 with seven strikeouts in a 33-inning game, the longest ever played. I can’t find evidence of a term for this, but I might nominate “KKKKKKKaribee.”)

OK, enough bluster, let’s get to the games. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to write a piece of flash fiction using the term golden sombrero. Your story does not have to contain baseball. It can just be about a hat. A magical golden hat. Or a simple sombrero that becomes magical by being urinated upon.

Keep your story to 25 words or fewer, write it out in the comments section below, click “Notify” to keep abreast of your competition, and feel free to use a pseudonym if you’re shy. Be creative, be funny, be bold. We’ll announce the winner in this space soon, and we’ll give a shout-out to our favorites on Facebook and Twitter.

The winner of this week’s challenge gets a FREE proofread of a piece of writing ten pages or fewer. Because a literary golden sombrero (four typos in a submission) is sure to lead to a batting average of .000.