Cheerful Company And A Merry Time

Many years ago, the writers' group I am privileged to attend held a writer's prompt where an assignment was given with only ten minutes to write something inspired by the prompt.

That particular meeting's assignment was a delight. We were given fortune cookies with the instructions to relate the “fortune” to the future of our writing, My fortune said merely:

Cheerful Company And A Merry Time

Tuesday night! Alan smiled to himself in delighted anticipation. Tuesday night was his night for public dramatic reading and he savored the sound of his own voice enthralling a captive audience while he a wove an imaginative tale.

A woman-in-white opened the door and Alan walked onto the brightly-lit stage and looked at the sea of faces before him.

The mistress of ceremonies beckoned the audience to come closer. “Come, people! Come to the stage. Mr. Loewen has another lovely story for us.”

Mr. Stevens stopped chasing imaginary ferrets and made his way to the front. As people walked, skipped, or crawled to the stage even Mrs. Purdle stopped pretending to be a wall and took her place within the crowd.

“Tonight is also fortune cookie night, Mr. Loewen,” said the woman-in-white. “Here’s yours.” Carefully, Alan cracked open the cookie trying very hard on concentrating on not eating the paper this time and pondered his fortune. Cheerful company and a merry time, Alan read and he delightedly clapped his hands together like an overgrown toddler. He was always overjoyed when such fortunes come true.

“Okay, Mr. Loewen,” the woman-in-white said. “what do you have for us tonight?”

Alan giggled and reaching into his tattered terry robe, pulled out a wad of construction paper covered with illegible scrawls of black Crayola.

“Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a little pony … “