#Ongoing Adventure: The Master of Syllables
Part of a Collaborative Fiction Series
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It had been a long day and you were exhausted. Were being the operative word here. “Why would someone send me a random invitation as a haiku,” you ask aloud to an empty room.
You read the poem over and over again to yourself. It doesn’t seem to make any sense to you at all. You pace around the apartment tapping the paper to your head, hoping something will happen.
There’s a loud knock at the door. It startles you for just a moment, until you realize you ordered food.
You pause before approaching the door. Had you really been pacing around for 35 minutes? It didn’t seem like that long at all. After checking the clock and assuring yourself that you weren’t crazy, and maybe just needed to eat, you answer the door and collect your meal.
You set yourself up a nice place on the table — your ramen in front of you, and the mysterious haiku propped up behind it, staring back at you as you eat.
You grab the phone and call your old friend, Avi. He was always into poems and cryptic messages.
Hello, it’s Avi. Who am I speaking with, please? And please, speak loudly.
“Hey, Avi. It’s me. I’ve got this haiku I want to share with you that I got in the mail. It’s really strange, and I think there might be a hidden message in it,” you respond.
Cryptic messages? Those are my favorite kinds. And it’s a haiku?
“Yes. It was shoved under my door in a fancy envelope. It seems to be some kind of invitation. It reads:
filled with gratitude for honeybees and hummingbirds please come & join us.
Does that mean anything to you?”
An invitation. With an extra syllable. An ampersand too?
“What, what is it,” you ask.
I need to go look something up. I’ll call you back.
Avi hung up the phone immediately. More troubling than that, he didn’t speak in haiku… or any sort of poetic verse for that matter. That’s not like Avi. What did this mean?
You look back at the invitation.
Options:
👉 Go to this meeting alone.
👉Throw the invitation in the recycling bin and go about your life.
👉 Wait for your friend to call you back.
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