Short Story, Phrase Prompt, Writing Prompts, Writing Challenge

The Incident

Nancy's Notes 🖊️♬

Written for Fandango’s Story Starter.
 Here’s where the prompt line took me.

Image by Me & Grok

Gerald had to make sure that none of his colleagues noticed.

He’d been eating the yogurt from the office refrigerator for two weeks before realizing it was Wynonna’s. Not just Wynonna’s …. Wynonna’s special yogurt. The kind she ordered from a wellness website that charged by the syllable. Probiotic Himalayan Goat Culture with Activated Charcoal and the Tears of a Grateful Yak …. or something like that.

And Wynonna had just sent a company-wide email.

“Someone has been eating my yogurt. I have installed a camera.”

Gerald read it twice. Then a third time. Then he looked at the fridge. Then at Wynonna, who was looking at the fridge. Then at his desk drawer, where …. God help him …. there were six empty containers he hadn’t gotten around to throwing away.

He spent the next forty minutes walking very normally to the trash, one container per trip. Each time with a different item in his hand to make it look incidental: a pen, a stapler, a hole punch, a plant he’d never watered, the hole punch again.

On his seventh trip, Fred from Accounting stopped him.

“What’s with all the pacing, Ger? Your wife expecting a baby?” he asked.

“Training,” said Gerald. “For a thing.”

“What thing?”

Gerald looked at the hole punch. “Competitive… walking.”

Fred nodded slowly in the way people do when pretending to understand.

Gerald made it back to his desk, empty-handed and technically innocent, just as Wynonna announced that the camera footage was all static and unwatchable.

Everyone in the office groaned in commiseration. Gerald groaned the loudest..

NAR©2026
#FSS

Fandango’s Prompt: “Gerald had to make sure that none of his colleagues noticed.”

This is  “Wynonna’s Big Brown Beaver” by Primus

Fandango’s Story Starter #248

Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.

27 thoughts on “The Incident”

  11. I did find it funny, while I was working in an office, I sometimes ate a sandwich that had a name. Some days it was a different name. The one I like best was called Russell 😁

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