A Sticky Situation

This is an homage, a story written in my version of Anchorite's inimitable style. 

I follow his convention of starting quite close to the middle of the action, then using narrative to convey the backstory and explain how the character got there. I created a solitary heroic character facing long odds in a hostile world. There are anime and manga influences and the main character is female. The story ends with the main character in transition and about to embark on a great adventure. I've also made a special effort to use longer and more sophisticated sentences. 

There is just a touch of affectionate satire and I've tried to make it funny. It doesn't quite sound like Anchorite, but I hope you'll enjoy it. 

A Sticky Situation

The blue and white cartoon sticker of a whale surfing on a red surfboard against a yellow sky peeled herself from her paper backing and viewed the world for the first time. For two years she had been trapped in a box of Wotan Rice Candy, the dark coffin where those of her kind started rather than ended their colorful but short and pointless lives.

It had been a lonely two years despite the fact that she shared her tomb with six rice candies. Although they were superficially sweet, the sticker had found in them a certain underlying hardness, a brittleness that made them poor companions. They also evinced little interest in anything other than the worst kinds of anime and manga and the ugliest examples of pop culture. The sticker considered them tasteless.

The sticker thought of the others like herself, the "free stickers in box," the afterthoughts, the bonuses included with the important things--the candies, the nameless products of a faceless corporation, born to futility, doomed to lives stuck to strollers, to toys, to sticker books, to windows or walls, or, most often, just thrown away. They were tenacious of life, those colorful mass-produced characatures of cheerful cuteness, holding on tightly where they could, and at the end leaving behind a residue of adhesive that would remain, a sad legacy of wasted potential, until someone came along with a razor blade and scraped away those last vestiges of cheap, one-dimensional lives.

"I am not one dimensional," the sticker declared defiantly. "I am two dimensional."

She decided to sunbathe and enjoy the golden rays she had so recently seen for the first time. She lay upon her printed side, mindful to keep the sticky side up, for she had had long to ponder in her sepulcher, and did not wish to spend eternity stuck to a park bench. She lay down in the sun and had barely perceived a shadow when she was suddenly thrown into darkness as a strong but pleasant feeling of pressure overwhelmed her.

Blondhilda the Norse Warrior Goddess had sat upon her, and now the sticker found herself stuck to the most flawless, powerful and heroic derriere in history. 

When Blondhilda stood again, the sticker surveyed the world from her new vantage point. "I wonder," she thought, "what adventures await me."

 

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