Alright… I decided to use today’s PROMPT to write the beginning of a short story for my Sam and Nick series… tomorrow I will either use the new prompt to continue my short, or start a whole new one… by the end of October I will have a million ideas recorded for future use… muhahahaha… without further ado, here is what I came up with…

Pumpkin Explosion

Sam just wanted to make it to work. Being late on the first day would be a horrible first impression. Being a female cop was hard enough; she didn’t need to give the others anything else to throw in her face. It was bad enough that she was being transferred to the other side of the country. At least when she worked at the San Francisco police department she knew what to expect; the temperature stayed predicable, traveling the city was best done with some kind of motorized craft because of all the dang hills, and Chinatown hand her favorite rice and noodle dishes. Did Myrtle Beach even have hills or cool weather? It was 100 degrees in august. Unnatural was what that was.

Fed up with her overworked air-conditioner, Sam rolled down all of the car’s windows and took in a lungful of ocean air. She couldn’t see the sand and waves from her potion on the highway but the coastal breeze helped to make her wait bearable.

Sam had been sitting at a standstill for over an hour. Finally, she got out of the car and started walking. It was tempting to push her way through the parked cars, just drive onto the median but she had been in the middle lane when things decided to ground to a halt.

Making her way to the end of the stopped cars seemed to take hours, but a glance at her watch showed that no more than ten minutes had passed. Pushing her way through the other onlookers that should have been sitting in their cars, Sam could only stare in wonder at what she found. She knew that hot summer weather was good for the growing season, but damn, the road was full of pumpkins. “Wow. Just wow.”

She looked around for an overturned truck, and irate farmer screaming about lost produce, or even a couple of kids laughing their heads off about their well-planned prank, but found nothing. Nothing but pumpkins.

There was no way to move through the closely placed pumpkins and no way to drive over them. Sam had never seen pumpkins so large. Squatting down to look closer, things only got weirder. The pumpkins hadn’t been placed; they had grown up through the road itself. Right through the asphalt. “That so isn’t right.”

Shaking her head, Sam pushed to her feet. Pulling her phone out to call in to the police station, she first glinted her eyes and focused on the other people standing around gaping at the unnatural sight. “Okay, people. Police. I need you all to either get back in your cars or help me to move these things to the side of the road.” One way or another, she was getting to work.

Kicking the nearest pumpkin, Sam wondered if she was too old to change careers. She was only twenty-seven, but finding a different line of work would be a hassle. Finding one she loved as much as police work would be near impossible. But come on… she was now in the lead of clean up for a pumpkin explosion. Not exactly what she dreamed of when she went to the academy.

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click on the PROMPT to see oct 2nd prompt and add your own thoughts… happy wordage, tracey