Don’t think i’ve ever done this before and am not 100% on the rules. My guess is to write a piece of prose or a poem inspired by the rather splendid photograph provided. Having just read the simple rules I am up for the challenge. Here goes my first:

Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge

James Lovelock was correct, this much we know now. Having bled Mother Earth dry for decades and decades the very black life giving vicious liquid she needed to survive was being abused quicker than she could produce the stuff. Trees had died, living things followed and the earth was burning. The sea was fuller than it had ever been, both with water and plastic. Huge underwater kelp forests had been planted in an effort to deoxygenate and filter out the microbes in the oceans but this was proving useless whilst well meant.

The lunatic president, sick with Maniacal power, had of course rebuffed Lovelock’s books as fantastical fiction, as he continued to Drill and Frac, the nuclear reactors dangerously old, running on stand-by to keep them safe, the real reason; lack of funds to keep them open. He ruled the western world with a Nationalistic Zeal which the past had swallowed decades before hoping to shit it out into the latrine of the dark ages. Bad times. As Lovelock’s theory gained momentum and began to unfold, Gaia slowly started shutting itself down.

The President theorised that if Gaia was a living organism, then surely an organism the size of the earth would have a brain, something controlling its actions. If this Brain could be found, thought the president, we could get out best Neurosurgeons to examine and operate on it to alter the course. Like landing on an asteroid and deploying a nuclear explosion to alter the trajectory. He was sure this had been done before.

As with all the President’s recent proclamations, when once they could be taken with a pinch of salt, now, these increasingly insane ideas were being actioned to a full or lesser extent. People refusing to cooperate disappeared, like in Wonderland or North Korea.

But this wasn’t Wonderland or North Korea.

Agonising news appeared a week ago; splattered all over the news, and we can’t be sure how much earlier the Brain was found, but you can bet the President’s best “Brain Docs” (his words) would have been all over it. An enormous silver coloured brain was found, exposed in a forest in Alaska, surprisingly similar in appearance to a human’s.

God help us all.