Don't Look A Dark Gift In The Mouth

Several years ago now, I was feeling nostalgic about the local carnival and city festival in the town where I went to high school, so I wrote a story about it ("Round & Round").  And I enjoyed it so much that I wrote another one ("Try Your Luck") and another one ("Father's Day In August").  Decades went by, and I wrote another one, this one inspired by a handsome douche lamenting that being attractive is what he refers to as, the dark gift.  Be careful what you say around me, or it'll wind up in a story too.

This one isn't really a nostalgia-fest.  Sure, it takes place in 1992, and I mention the music that's playing on the speakers (like I always do), but this one is a more modern story, and not at all based on experiences I had all those years ago.

A teen girl (Nobie), her brother (Grump) and his boyfriend (Eris) go to the Pickle Days festivities, and play a wheel of fortune carnival game.  And what the wheel stops on is something called The Dark Gift.  People like to be center of attention, and everybody wants to be attractive, but be careful what you wish for, kid.   

Check it out HERE.

As far as the cover goes, I tried having A.I. generate me an image of Nobie (basically typing in teenage girl at carnival that everybody loves), and this was the best one it gave me:*

Then I told it a couple more details, like that I wanted her to be dark-haired and that everybody loves her, and it came up with this:

So strange how different--almost opposite--those two girls are.

*The first one I tried created me a girl at a carnival, but in five of the six images, it was the same girl, with a tell-tale mole beneath her left eye.  I don't understand how the program does this--is there an actual girl somewhere that looks like this that it is stealing the image of?--but it's funny how much the image changed when I added "that everybody loves" and the genre).