Jane ambles through festival avenues, enchanted. The diversity is staggering. Bright colors, strains of different styles of music, smiling faces beckoning her to their booths: Come see this blanket, this bracelet, this vase. Flags are everywhere, almost none she recognizes.
What draws her most are the smells, the different foods. There are foreign foods she’s familiar with, of course — Thai, Korean, Italian, Mexican. But so much to taste from countries previously unconsidered: Romania, Guyana, Cuba, Lebanon, the Basque provinces. Her mouth waters, her stomach rumbles.
As a parade of nations, the Olympic Games have nothing on downtown’s International Festival.
Every week at the Ranch, Charli Mills hosts the Rough Writers and Friends flash fiction challenge. This week’s prompt: “In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about a parade of nations. It can be literal, or it can be a phrase that you use to describe a situation. Explore what it could be. Go where the prompt leads.”
99 Monkeys 
That would be a fun parade to see. I wonder if it’s hard for those who are homeless to see such displays? Or if it would bring hope.
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