A story:
Her eyes were not filled with wonder but a growing horror. She looked across a foresaken landscape, emptied of people. Decaying buildings, slouching in shame of their paint-stripped nakedness. It no longer spoke of a community where people once walked, laughed, lived and…
Loved…
The car. A rusted hulk that mocked her. She could still feel the soft leather against her bare back, his hand sliding up her thigh, his lips against the soft of her neck.
She whirled on him, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt.
“Take me back,” she hissed, “Back. NOW. I don’t want to know the future.”
**********************************
Now, it’s your turn.
The old woman barely had the strength to bury her husband and now she’s both queen and sole subject of the family farm. The dark closes in from within and without but she leaves a lantern lit each night and thanks the Lord for his bounty.
“Jake? How long have we been gone?”
“Dunno, Abner. You recognize them metal things there?”
“If I was drunk I might think the one looks like somebody figgered out a way to make a really small locomotive that don’t need rails.”
“It’s all rusty and fallin’ apart.”
“Yup. We been gone longer than we should’ve been.”
Once upon a time there was a little turtle that lived under an abandoned car on an abandoned plain in an abandoned corner of the whirl.
His little house was cozy and warm, padded with fragrant prairie grasses and decorated here and there with brightly colorful shiny treasures he’d found on his walks.
The turtle’s name was Kenneth, and he was very happy.
It was a cold day, the kind of day he only liked to go outside if he had to poop, and Kenneth sat quietly and listened to the ferocious winter winds careening through the plymouth’s husk.
He hoped he wouldn’t have to poop.
“Well, Mother, I guess lettin’ them Eye-rainians have them atomic thingamabobs wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
“Shut up, Clem and hand me the iodine.”
editor note:
Um…. 100 word stories are 100 words… no more, no less.
then you shoulda put a math trigger warning Darleen.
Note to Darleen:
Please insert 74 iterations of the word “damn” between “the” and “iodine” in the last paragraph of my story.
Thanks.
Note 2 to Darleen:
Alternatively, you can insert 74 iterations of the word “very” between “a” and “good” in the first paragraph.
Editor’s choice.
For the flow, man.
I do math cuz of its oppressing Patriarchal Heteronormativity.
“It is not like he didn’t warn us,” the old man wheezed. “He even told us he was going to destroy the coal industry, and raise energy prices.”
“Somebody shut the old man up so I can get some sleep”, Greg complained.
“He hadn’t been out of office three years before Iran started World War three…”
Greg threw a pillow at the old man, “Shut up old man! The first call to prayer is in four hours, and the Iman will expect us all to be there.
“Fundamental change indeed” the old man whispered, as he cried himself to sleep.
In the early days of the internet here used to be a site that did these on a daily basis. I have long missed it.
gahrie
Yeah. I loved participating … it was a little over 10 years ago.
Think of my story as worth 1/10 of a picture.
Um…. 100 word stories are 100 words… no more, no less.
OUTLAW!
jeb – “so what went wrong?”
grover -“karl didn’t give me enough”
jeb – no i mean destroying the country with common core and the wetbacks and the iranian emp?”
grover – “karl didn’t give me enough”
jeb – ” look ‘fast and furious’ was fun and you did get huma.”
grover – “karl didn’t give me enough”
jeb – ” i need to start the ’46 chevy”
grover – use 7th century technology!
He smirked and said, “I don’t know why you’re complaining. You didn’t build any of it.”
Good stuff.
That photo is insanely evocative.
Notice the house with two brightly lit windows. Notice the lines in the sky that look a bit like ghost tornadoes or black lightning (but are probably just old-school physical effects?).
Given the constraints of the challenge I feel I’ll FAIL but what I was thinking was how this striking photo could be contrasted with the banal or mundane.
So maybe we’re listening to the internal dialogue of the set designer on a movie who is putting the final aspect just right but for her it’s just her normal everyday job. For her it’s all about this dickhead production assistant who is new to the job and keeps leaving anachronisms or continuity errors in this quick panning shot that should take all of about 30 minutes. So it’s beautiful and all but she can’t help but want to murder the kid for leaving a can of Mountain Dew on the car they had to cut from this panning shot.
Also on the vaguely comedic banal side you can likewise imagine a sorta fat dude who works at a Route 66 Ghost Town joint sort of struggling to make it in Branson.
And it’s hotter than hell and he has to wear long pants, wool shirt and vest and he’s delivering a Hot-Rodder burger to this annoying couple from Toronto but then for just a second he turns and suddenly sees the immediate beauty of this weird faux Americana construction when the sun is just right.
Mike looked intently at the old, fading, beat-up photograph from the mid-20th Century, then out his window at the scene before him:
Rundown houses with all the paint practically peeled-off or worn-down by the bitter winds that never ceased, it seemed to blow by here.
An old Plymouth Belvedere, that had been called back into use after the EMP, lay rusting in the foreground, it’s tires recently removed for use in making weapon parts.
‘History repeats,’ he whispered, ‘this time as farce’. He let out a bitter laugh and downed two fingers of bourbon. And the Tragedy continued to play-out….
Nature quickly took back what man had walked away from. Spiders, wasps, bats, lizards, fungi and moss occupied the lonesome hollows of the leaning rickety structures. They slowly filled it with their waste and remains. They brought with them parasites to plague them and now and then predators found them in their new shelter to stalk them them, then lie dead beside them.
Oxidation festered behind breached walls of paint. False stone was cleft by feeble chutes. It was as Democritus had prophesied millennia before. What came together fell apart, was torn apart, or ground down to components greedily harvested.
“Look upon my works, ye mortals, and despair!”
I wish I would have typed “fissures” or “fistulae” instead of “chutes.”
Or maybe “All is vanity sayeth Qoheleth” might have worked better than Democritus’ blind idiot mechanism theory that tiny particles of stuff within a void randomly aggregates and decays only to aggregate again without any meaning beyond occasional repetition.
Democritus tends to point one towards fatalistic nihilism while Ecclisastes is about channeling the horror and futility of the meaningless material grind into seeking meaning with the spiritual.
them them ?
darn it.
oh it’s spring again again
like that kind of unending occasional?
I was thinking more of how much ichthyosaurs resembled fish and dolphins resemble ichthyosaurs.
<snort>
Yeah well, I’m deep compared to most neckbeard crackers raised on MTV and cheap pickles.
Someday, I’m sure, Palaeo, you’ll write what turns out to be an American Vlasic.
<snort>
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.
Two can be as bad as one,
It’s the loneliest number since the number wuh-un.
Three is the third loneliest number that you’ll ever do.
Four can be as bad as three,
It’s the loneliest number since the number thruh-ee.
Five is the fifth loneliest number that you’ll ever do.
Six can be as bad as five,
It’s the loneliest number since the number fi-ive.
Seven is the seventh loneliest number that you’ll ever do.
Eight can be as bad as seven,
It’s the loneliest number since the number seh-eh-ven.
Nine…
<paws dust>
The sun would be up in a little less than three hours and the lights were still on. That bothered him enough to make the back of his head itch.
Did they sleep with the light on? Regardless, soon he was going to have to do something about the pain.
He crouched in the scrub, wincing and plotting his route to the space between the wagon and the car, unsure if he could make it undetected.
His body made his decision for him. Seconds later he was squatting in his new hidey hole. He glanced left.
“You too?”, She asked.
Toni? Can you hear me? It’s Mummy. I know you can hear me. Your father sends his love. He told me this morning how much he loves you and misses you, but I think he is having a difficult time adjusting to all of this. I don’t know how much longer he can endure the sorrow of losing you. I have told him you aren’t really gone, just not here. I have to go now so please, Baby, for Mummy, blink once for me. Ok. We’ll try again tomorrow. Mummy loves you, sweet dreams.