{"id":204,"date":"2011-03-25T15:50:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-25T15:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=204"},"modified":"2011-03-25T15:50:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-25T15:50:00","slug":"new-flash-fiction-from-charlie-wirth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/new-flash-fiction-from-charlie-wirth\/","title":{"rendered":"New flash fiction from Charlie Wirth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font size=\"2\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">Pre Pre-School<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">What can kids possibly learn from the school before pre-school? I learned one thing: How to play with toy dinosaurs.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">There was one thing on my mind: get to the coolest dinosaur before anyone else could. Sitting at tables with crinkly paper and watercolor trays shaped like a longed traffic light was not the most exciting part to a male toddler&#39;s brain. What could I even draw at that age? A semi-yellow sun, faded rainbow, and a cave-man-art-inspired person? It was all about the action figures, and it only took a small human&#39;s brain to make them come alive.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">As soon as arts and crafts time ended, the teacher had to play the cruelest game of all; dismiss the most angel-faced, well-behaved children sitting perfectly in their mini chairs one by one to the play area. Torture. It was ok if a girl was dismissed, they didn&#39;t usually run to the dinosaurs, but if a boy got to go ahead then there was the only hope that they had the building blocks mentality. <\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">My mom must have dressed me extra cute that day because I was one of the first to be freed. I ran as fast as my little legs could take me, slamming my knees onto the faded carpet in front of the wicker basket full of plastic toy dinosaurs. I don&#39;t think real dinosaurs were all one solid color, shiny, and had their mouth open all the time. That didn&#39;t matter, because They seemed more real than anything else could be at that age.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\">* Charlie Wirth<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"> is a creative writing student at Concordia University St. Paul. Some of his works are forthcoming in the Cynic Online Magazine.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><br style=\"font-family: Courier New,Courier,mono;\"><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pre Pre-SchoolWhat can kids possibly learn from the school before pre-school? I learned one thing: How to play with toy dinosaurs.There was one thing on my mind: get to the coolest dinosaur before anyone else could. Sitting at tables with crinkly paper and watercolor trays shaped like a longed traffic light was not the most [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}