The Fully Configurable Hat
This piece was the winner of a 250-word challenge, with spam bot inputs as the prompt:
Oh, French Polynesia! Land of the fully configurable hat. (Panama eat your heart out.) Kids not yet born will sing your name, in refined accents. Oh yes, there will be kids, the personal loan account and credit references always permitting. The fully configurable hat will see to that. How? Matrices. Nothing less than matrices, of course. (And let us leave it at that. There is no explaining matrices. However orderly they may seem.) The fully configurable hat is fully equipped with matrices — and Bluetooth naturally. For the backwards compatibility. For we must always be able to connect with the past — or what will become of us? (The small plastic table is an object lesson there. It became too forward thinking, right? — and now lacks all application. Just try to use one! You can’t. Your keys are already lost, countless eons into the future, along with your contactless wallet.) Yes, who among us knew that this — the fully configurable hat — would make us happy, sexy, harmonious, present? (Rich? Well, no. One item can’t solve everything. Richness is an abundance of awesome fresh towels — we know that now — and endless reasons to use them.) So much more than a mere head warmer, baldness obscurer, elegant finishing touch to any outfit, protector against sun, hail, cold and rain — the fully configurable hat is the greatest marvel of human ingenuity.
The final pinnacle! All that remains is to invent it. French Polynesia, we await your intervention. N’est-ce pas? S’il vous plait?
Tim Warren is a writer of mostly very short things. His microfictions and flash can be found in The Parabola Project, National Flash Fiction Day Flash Flood 2019, Serious Flash Fiction Anthology: Vols. 5 & 6, Paragraph Planet, the VSS365 Anthology. The rest you can find on Twitter (@FredTweetzsche). In his non-spare time, he's a writer and editor of copy and content for websites. He lives in Cornwall, UK.
