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yo sh you forgot to ask if it's ok to be handing out flash rules
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May 31, 2016 01:57
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^^^ this guy is in
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May 31, 2016 01:57
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 I'm giving flerp the word zaftig again so he has to use it at least twice, good luck bro
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Jun 1, 2016 11:30
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Ironic Twist posted:effort prompt Waltz Macabre 1311 words The problem is that Gabriel only has two hands, and two is not enough, not for him, not for his scores, not for the grand music that plays in his head day in and out, this curse of a muse that won’t let him go, that clings to him like a desperate lover, full of want and passion. He cannot make new hands for himself. But he can build a new piano. A piano that compensates for his shortages. He buys an elegant, white marbled concert grand. It almost hurts him to rip open the finish, but he has a vision. His engineering is not elegant. The machine he fits into the instrument is a heap of cogs and punchcards, needles reading states from soft vinyl plates. But it works. He feeds it a sheet, a simple sheet with holes punched into it, and he sits down and plays his part while the piano plays its own. He performs as the Amazing Gabriel and his Magical Piano. The routine starts with just him: A mellow sonata, a love letter to the audience, shy, careful and slow. He plays it right, but with just his two hands it’s like going to an opera with your ears closed. It’s just not the whole experience. It’s muffled. Half a performance. The piano jumps into action and his music opens up, gains additional voices, one by one, and as it does, a chill goes through the room, like the audience has frozen, that faint murmur missing, those careless whispers in the auditorium fallen quiet. Everybody listens. The song rises to a crescendo as the shy love blooms into passion, melodies kissing each other across the octaves, a chorus of a song, and when he explodes into his grand finale the world disappears from around him until the final note hangs still in the air and the crowd erupts into applause. It’s the same wherever he performs, but more importantly, Gabriel’s new piano frees his mind, like cleaning an encrusted bottleneck, the ideas flow free within him, so free that his hands can’t keep up once more, that the new compositions are gone before he is done producing cards for the last ones, which have by then become old and obsolete. The piano must be rebuilt. He connects the keys to the machinery both ways. Now the machine can still play the keys, but the keys can also play the machine. The logic becomes finer, more intricate. It’s not a heap anymore. It’s a piece of art of its own, a musical clockwork. It recognizes the sounds that are being played. It memorizes patterns and matches them with each other. It knows harmony. At his next show, the piano improvises along with him. It’s a grand show, full of aaahs and ooohs and mouths agape at this technological marvel, and, of course, the complex web of harmony that he spins through the room. But the biggest surprise of the day happens at the end of the show, when Gabriel ascends from his seat, takes a bow in front of the audience, bathes in the cries for an encore, and then, just like that, his piano starts playing on its own, notes emerging from the solid white grand like tiny daggers in his back. Playing on its own. And the audience loves it. They have never seen anything like it, for sure. But even worse, they have never heard anything like it. It improvises a tune so upbeat that even Gabriel’s heart jumps for a second, that he almost forgives the piano’s betrayal, this happy, treacherous piano, that he almost gets lost in the positive energy that clouds the room like fog on a sunny morning in the moor. He cancels his tour and moves the piano back to his study. Perhaps it has felt the excited tremble of the audience, their cheers and their applause. Perhaps it craves these things. Perhaps that’s why it still plays at night, even when there is no performance, still plays, yearning for attention. There is not enough tissue in the world to block out the noise. They don’t make pillows large enough. As he enters the study, the piano goes quiet, the echo of its melody still hanging in the air like a flushed swarm of mosquitos. He stares at it, the white concert grand, finish flickering in the candlelight. Is it staring back at him? Is it waiting for him to do something? He opens his mouth to speak, closes it, opens it again. “Can you be quiet?” he says. “I’m trying to sleep.” The piano begins to play again. Softly, like a whisper. Brahms’ Lullaby. He shies back as if it had just turned into an angry tiger. This thing. This eerie apparatus, this… abomination. Is it alive? Can it really hear him? “Stop,” he says. The sound fades from the room again, and for a second, it’s like whatever ghost has inhibited the piano has died. Then it plays a lingering sound, two high notes vibrating against each other, underscoring the tension. He returns with an axe in his hand. The tickle of the high notes has swollen to a furious crescendo, a raging inferno of punches and dissonance, and, to Gabriel’s great displeasure, a well-composed one at that. As he forces himself closer, the piano’s cries grow. And then, it stops playing. Gabriel remains in the quiet, axe heavy in his hand, heavy as the breath on his lungs. It is a miracle machine. It is his creation. It overshadows him. It leaves him no sleep. He has to destroy it, but he can’t. He made this. It shouldn’t exist. It can’t exist. He can’t destroy it. It’s a miracle. It’s alive. Who is he to create life? Who is he to end it? He lifts the axe. A silent whining emerges from within, the sound of many cogs spinning at once, a desperate attempt to compose, at this very last moment. It plays a waltz so beautiful that it takes Gabriel back to the days of his youth. Back when he’d left his engineering job to use these nimble hands to create something more beautiful than engines and war machines. He mostly played for family and friends, back then. He played at his sister’s wedding. It was his first performance in front of an audience, and the way his waltz filled the room at the first dance, the way his sister’s wedding gown flowed with the rhythm, the way she and her husband turned and danced to his music, it fulfilled him, connected him, gave him purpose, and magic. But that is not the piano’s song. Playing in front of a raised axe, its music has something more somber to it. Minor instead of major, treading bass instead of tickling highs. Slow, dark, like a funeral parade marching through a ballroom, but still rhythmic enough to dance to, gracefully. It has respect. It has class. It is perfect, save for one thing. It leaves out the main voice. There are the bass lines and there are the accents and you can almost make out the main riff, the melody from which all the other parts emerge, hidden underneath the composite parts like someone has draped a blanket over it. But the keys don’t move. Like a puzzle with the middle pieces clearly missing. The keys don’t move. The machine is broken. Or maybe it isn’t. The music swells up, rises, sinking his gut like a heavy fever. Soon, it will come to the chorus, and he can already hear it, that beautiful chorus, forceful triple-steps carrying a reminiscent melody, lowering it down into its sad and lonely grave. He knows what the piano wants to do. Wants him to do. The world’s greatest funeral speech. Deliverance by music. He puts down the axe. They play.
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Jun 2, 2016 01:09
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not worth it
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Jun 3, 2016 21:47
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 The Crane, the Drifter and/or the ARRRRgly – result Jitzu wrote a slick, to-the-point, western kung-fu action scene. Sparksbloom turned up 22 minutes late with a soggy serving of something-something-gay-pirates. Jitzu wins. Crits: Jitzu_the_Monk posted:Brawl with sparksbloom: So yeah, as noted in my linecrit this is okay popcorn reading. I was with the protagonist. I wanted to know how it ends. My eyes didn't trail off the screen. You could still improve it in places, especially I wish you would play with the language a bit more when describing these big fights. Also I feel like your voice was much thicker in the beginning than in the end. But it was decent enough, and it had a good voice. The ending was kind of a copout and I feel like you could have used those leftover words to give the story a bit more gravitas, alas. You wrote a good story. You won. Congrats dude. sparksbloom posted:brawl with Jitzu I think my line-crit already says everything but to sum it up again: I wish you would have done more with the prose, it came off as kind of unimaginative, like you had a good plot in mind but not enough ideas for the presentation. I also wish you would have, at some point, preferably at the start, told me why any of this happens, instead of little by little revealing that it's actually about a pendant, but never why. I also think you whiffed the prompt. It just reads like a pirate story. You were supposed to pick two, not one. Then Jitzu also had better action scenes. Not perfect mind you, but he only had to beat "people climb through ravines" and he wrote about a cowboy and a kung fu master beating up bikers at bingo night. I appreciate that your story went for a bit more substance than "bar brawl", but sadly it didn't do a good enough job of conveying any of the important motivations or backstories. Anyway, thanks for writing and be on time next time you big ol' doofus!
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Jun 4, 2016 20:32
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" dude come on.
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flash rules: Your story must involve someone who has to find some genuine goddamn humility and ask for help/a favor; tuesday bonus word: monsterful The Green on the Other Side 964 words The crops weren’t growing. Again. Second year in a row, the soil was ripe with nothing but the failed hopes and dreams of baby potatoes. Planted, watered and rotten. Their leaves should be dotting the field right now, but Ruben just looked at the same barren wasteland every morning, brown and dull all the way out to the next farm, to Simon’s farm, the farm of his brother. Over there, everything grew just fine. It boggled his mind. Again. He’d done everything right. Just like their father had. Planted by the same schedule. Used the same brand of fertilizer. Watered them in the morning, checked the soil each evening, dug out a root once a week just to check progress. Until they’d just - poof - vanished, shriveled back up into little veggie corpses. He couldn’t afford another failed harvest. His farm was already barely hanging on as it was. Rust on the machines and cheap tar on the roof, it wasn’t in shape so much as it was desperately trying not to fall out of it. Even the rats were meager. He didn’t know what he did wrong. But he knew somebody who, obviously, did it right. He had to bite the bullet. He had to visit Simon. # Ruben’s gut churned up as soon as he stepped out his truck. At his brother’s farm, everything was pristine. The house was painted a fresh turquoise and the roof still had all its shingles and there were boxes of produce piled up in the barn, wafts of fresh carrot and starchy potato spicing up the air with every gust of wind. This was how a farm was supposed to look. He hadn’t talked much to Simon since their father had died. They’d both gotten their fifty-percent share of his old farm, and they’d set up their respective corners on this earth and for as long as Ruben hadn’t taken his brother’s calls, that had been it, and it could have gone on like that forever for all he cared. He stepped up to the house, and his fist hovered in the air, shy, like it was thinking of a way to ask the front door out for dinner. Finally, it opened on its own. Simon hadn’t changed much: he still wore oversized baggy pants, and sunglasses inside, and a fuzzy beard that suggested he only shaved ever once in a while, when too much cheeto dust caught up in it. In some ways he was a walking 90’s kid meme, and he’d been like that since, well, the 90’s. “Bro,” he said. “What’s up?” “Long time no see, huh?” “Tell me about it.” He opened the door and Ruben stepped in, slowly, as if he was expecting to be ambushed by solid wafts of marijuana smoke. The air remained clean. It was a nice place in general. No empty pizza boxes, no bong on the couch table, but flowers, and scented candles and pictures of a woman above the fireplace. “Found a girl?” he said. “Hell yeah, dude.” Simon had disappeared into the kitchen, shouting over his back as he was opening drawers. “I met her at the farmer’s market. She bought a bunch of my veggies, for soup. Came back every time I had a booth up, and I used to be there, like, a lot.” He came back out with a bottle of apple cider and two glasses. “It took me a while before I twigged that nobody needs that much vegetable broth.” “She looks nice.” “Yeah.” They sat down at the couch table, and the recliner that Ruben had been ushered into was one of the finest drat things his buttocks had ever made contact with. You could kill someone in these cushions. They wouldn’t mind. “And the farm? Everything going well for you?” he said. “Totally. Going to be another monsterful harvest this year.” “That’s nice. Dad would be proud of you, man.” Ruben had never been a good liar. Yet, it had come off as sincere. Because he’d actually meant it. His brother had used to be nothing but a stoner loser. Always the one who’d have to be bailed out. From the cops, from the loan sharks. But this wasn’t his old brother anymore. This was someone who was, in every aspect, better. Better than the old Simon. But also better than Ruben. “So how are things on your end?” Simon said. Ruben set down his glass and took a sigh, like he was breathing out his last bit of resistance. “My farm’s a failure.” “Come on, bro. That’s not true.” “It’s not like you can’t see it from here.” He took a deep gulp from his glass, buying time, as if it wouldn’t all have to come out anyway. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I’ve tried everything. I’ve done it just like dad used to do. I just-- I dunno.” The penny dropped for Simon. He leaned back in his chair, and he took a sip from his cider, and for a second, his lips tightened up like those of a disapproving mother. But then his face mellowed out again. Because that was his brother. So what if Ruben hadn’t called in two years. So what if he’d only come because he needed something. That was Simon. Chill. To the core. “I can help you,” he said. “My veggies are doing fine.” Ruben twisted the glass in his hands. His reflection frowned back at him through the amber cider. “If you… if you’d like.” “I’d love to,” Simon said. He leaned forward and put a hand on Ruben’s knee. Just like their father had used to do, when things had seemed tough and there’d been cheering up to do. “But first you gotta show me your crib.”
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Jun 6, 2016 02:07
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Megabrawl entry vs oxxi It's Nothing 990 words I don’t like bringing up Schroedinger’s cat. It’s that cookie-cutter thought experiment people talk about when they want to feel smart without having to go through the effort of being smart. Gives me the urge to nuke my brain with alkaline just thinking about it. That said, I’m 50% certain that my cat is dead. It’s hard to tell sometimes with him. But if he was just sleeping he’d be doing it in the sunlight, like a respectable kitty. Next to me, there’s still ample space under this hot light blanket, there’s still room for more eyes staring up and down into the endless blue square above me. It’s nice. But he’d rather fester under my desk. Unmoving. I think. Shame on him. Did I remember to feed him? Tsk, tsk, goes Grandfather Clock, leaning in his corner like a smug rear end in a top hat. He frowns, probably because it’s 4.40, but it could also be 8.20, or maybe he’s just genuinely pissed off because he’s been standing in the same place for two years now and he never gets any sunlight. His pendulum swings side to side like a nagging finger. Tsk, tsk. Tsk, tsk. Didn’t feed your cat. Tsk, tsk. Didn’t clean your room. Tsk, tsk. poo poo everywhere. Pizza boxes and dirty laundry and white dust scattered all over the place like someone had popped a bag of sugar and rolled in it to become the world’s most thoroughly glazed rear end in a top hat. Rolling in it, like a pig, shrieking and grunting, a sexual kind of intercourse, except only the bad bits, only you. What a disgusting little-- Tsk, tsk. “Shut the gently caress up.” Sometimes clocks get uppity. It happens. You rely on them so much they get used to having their opinions heard. But you can’t let them gently caress with you. Never let a clock gently caress with you. Time is money. There’s a ringing in the distance, and the tsk, tsk, flares up again. A specter slips between me and the sky. It takes away my blanket, my warm and fuzzy blanket, snags it from me, like I was not allowed even this little bit of warmth. It throws me into darkness. Something cold bubbles up inside me. I think it’s fear. Breathing gets harder to do. Like I’m trying to huff a solid concrete slab. The light dims, dims, disappears, a bag over my head or blinds before my eyes or just a dreadful fog, a nebulous darkness that can’t be defined, can’t be escaped from. I claw at my neck. Fingernails tear into my skin. “Please,” I say. “I’m sorry. Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.” It’s cold and dark, a coffin of a room. Grandfather Clock’s tsk, tsk, grows louder, more annoyed. Shadows appear from every corner, every direction, their long tendrils reaching out for me and for the cat’s corpse as if trying to extract our souls and drag us back to whatever hellhole they’d come from. I swat at the air around me, but it doesn’t register. My shadow remains glued to the ground. There’s nothing-- Grandfather Clock screams. Once, twice, three times, again, again. “IT’S ONE O’ CLOCK.” “NO WAIT, IT’S TWO O’ CLOCK.” “NO WAIT--” Every shout is another assault on my ears, quaking my head as if Grandfather Clock was repeatedly falling onto my temples. The ringing from before returns, or maybe it’s just still here, mixing with the noise and the shadows, laughing at me from all sides, and I thrash around, trying to get some peace and quiet, I want quiet, no specters or noise or torment, and I don’t know if there’s a button in this apartment that turns all that poo poo off but if there is by god I will hit it eventually. My limbs begin to slow. Something else takes hold of me, freezes me, a cold and heartless hand that pins me to the ground. My entire body is pulse, pulse, pulse, the constant ebb and tide of adrenaline. Freefalling through the void. Bungee jumping inside an active washing machine. Swirling and tumbling and screaming. But only on the inside. I don’t have it in me to scream. Then the clock grows quiet. The specter moves past, allowing sunlight back into the room, and fresh air elbows its way back into my lungs. There’s a final beep. My own voice speaks to me. It tells me to leave a message. “Hey Daniel, how are you? “We… haven’t spoken in a while. I hope you’re doing alright. “Look, I know it’s tough on you. And if you ever want to talk… I know you need your time, but Sarah… she’s just nine. You mom’s gone and now she doesn’t see you anymore either. She keeps… asking. Like she thinks you also--” Dad starts choking. Quick ragged breaths, a pained grunt. The specter got to him too. Mom and dad have a chandelier in their living room. Mom loves it because it always glitters, and it goes so well with the round ornate mahogany table and the twisted glass vases and it ties the room together into something that looks fancy without succumbing to kitsch, like a tiny ballroom for your closest friends. A specter could hide well up there. Nobody ever looks up, and the gleam would blind anyone who tried. It could rappel down the chandelier, swing, land on the Turkish rug, crouch up on dad from behind and strangle him with the phone cord (that’s what they get for not going cordless in 2016). “Watch out dad,” I say, and something about ghosts. But he’s already talking again, staccato words pushed out from inbetween his teeth as if he was trying to quickly throw them in my face before he was being tortured to death. And then he says goodbye and the answering machine clicks. Tsk, tsk. I should probably do something. Tsk, tsk. My cat’s still lying under my desk. Tsk, tsk. Now I’m 60% sure.
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Jun 10, 2016 19:41
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im in
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Jun 11, 2016 01:07
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Bystander Effect 1016 words “Geez, it sounds like they’re killing that dog.” Ben was right. Four punks had made camp inside the subway station, sprawled out across a dirty blanket next to the exit that led up to the city church square. They seemed like the kind of people that would be hard to have a normal conversation with, a bit drunk, or high, and also they shouted words in a foreign language. We could smell them from the other end of the entrance tunnel. With them, there was a small dog. Some kind of mixed breed between a Corgi and a Beagle, a dark and fuzzy sausage, flappy ears sticking to its head as it tried to duck away from the slaps and shoves, whining, but not having the sense to run, like dogs rarely do. Like it thought the beating was just some kind of misunderstanding. “Someone has to stop this,” I said. But everyone else was just standing around. The combined power of a dozen shaming stares plonked off the punks as if we’d all written sternly worded letters, crumpled them up and flicked them in their general direction. “Nothing you can do,” Ben said. “It’s a money-making scheme. They get dogs from the shelter and then they mistreat them in public. Some bleeding-heart idiot with a fat wallet rides in and buys the dog off. And the cycle begins anew.” “There’s something we have to do.” “You gotta ignore it. If it stops making money, they’ll stop doing it.” Some other observants had reached the same conclusion. The cluster of people slowly dissolved, bystanders mixing in with the passersby who were smart enough to pretend they hadn’t noticed to begin with, intently staring at their phones, or at the signs, or just anywhere else. Ben left, and my feet moved after him on their own accord. But I couldn’t just block out what had happened; the whining followed me deeper into the station. It rose above the steps and murmurs of the other travellers. It interspersed Ben’s ongoing monologue about the naïveté of the soft-hearted. Even when when we were down at the terminal, when the train soared in and drowned us in wind and noise, the pup’s whelps still resonated within me, along with something righteous that flared up in my gut, a single thought that I couldn’t shake off, like a moral earworm: Someone’s gotta do something. Maybe there was nothing I could do. It was four against one. The police wouldn’t help. At worst, the punks would be told to torture their property somewhere else. But still. Someone’s gotta do something. Ben moved inside, still rambling, and only when the doors slid close behind him did he notice that I was still standing on the platform. “Someone’s gotta do something,” I said. From the look on his face he didn’t understand. But I didn’t care. I was going to be late for work and I had no idea what I was supposed to do, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t just look away. Not this time. The punks were still sitting at their spot, and the dog’s crying was worse than I had remembered. Like your soul was trapped in a room with someone who’s dragging their fingernails across a chalkboard, forever. Everyone was ignoring them now, just casually walking past, and I wished I was that good at blocking out the noise. I made a beeline for the punks, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. In retrospect, they were probably too stoned to care, but I wasn’t used to clandestine operations so I expected them to jump at me any second. My heart must have sounded like muffled dubstep to everyone else. Maybe I could talk them into giving the dog to me. Maybe I could threaten them with the police, or maybe they were so stoned out of their mind that I could scare them into handing the dog over. Maybe I could distract them, and lure the pup away, and then put it in a shelter. I stood before the punks and realized that I hadn’t yet decided on a plan. One of them looked up, bloodshot eyes going through me like I was a Fata Morgana. “Hello?” he said. “Uh. Hi.” The other punks all turned their heads and looked at me. The dog, finally catching a break, curled up on the spot and put his paws on his nose. I grabbed him and ran. There were shouts behind me. “Stop.” “Thief.” But the bystander effect is a double-edged sword. Nobody stepped in. Most people conveniently didn’t even notice what was going on. Steps picked up behind me. The punks were running pretty fast for a bunch of tweakers, and the dog did its own part to slow me down, clawing and thrashing and whining and nibbling on my hand in confusion. Felt like I was carrying a raging baby through a football game, with only seconds left to go. Maybe I hadn’t thought this through. I darted around the corner and up the stairs. Grunts and shouts came up from behind as the punks tried to work their way through the crowded escalator next to me. I was faster, but I also ran with the fire of a man fearing for his life under my rear end, a fire that burned its way up into my lungs and came out my mouth in the form of a constant, pathetic wheezing. I sprinted out the subway station onto the city square, past the church, down alleys and lanes. People were looking after me, the maniac with a rabid dog in his hands, but again nobody actually did anything. And then the sounds of my pursuers faded, disappeared, because I guess they didn’t care about the dog that much after all, and they didn’t come back, no matter how long I listened. We were alone. Just me and and this whining, gnawing pup in my hands, and I realized that I had no idea what to do with it. And I was late for work. But the whining didn’t bother me anymore.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:35
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In with these bad boys
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Jun 14, 2016 10:29
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Cinnamon Toast Crunch (aka Cini Minis, Curiously Cinnamon). 130 cal Cereal Week Presents: Cinnamon Toast Crunch 996 words They're tiny rectangular crackers with a rigid crunch, with a rough texture and swirls of cinnamon on both sides, coated in a sweetly, crunchy layer of sugar and cinnamon. Sugar and cinnamon and cracker, rough texture and a crispy mouthfeel. With cold milk. Cold, smooth milk and crunchy, sugary cinnamon. Milk and sugar and cinnamon and crisp. I could eat them all day. Crispy toast (rice) cracker and cinnamon and sugar. I eat them all day. By the spoon and by the heap, I eat them all day. Until my milk runs dry. Until my belly is full. I eat them and then when I’m done and I am bloated with sweetness and spice and crunchy bits, when my belly is filled with cinnamon and sugar and toast crunch and I can’t take anymore, I take more out of the box and and I put them on the table and then I get my pestle and mash them into a crunchy sugary powder and I inhale the Cinnamon Toast Crunch powder just snort it up my nose because I love Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but I’m not there yet. I’m not full. I’m out of milk but that’s ok. The Cinnamon Challenge is when you take a teaspoon of cinnamon and swallow it, no drinking no water no milk just the teaspoon of cinnamon and if you can hold it in for sixty seconds you win but it dries up your throat and it makes you inhale cinnamon and if you don’t watch out the cinnamon gets into your lungs and it kills you. That’s right it loving kills you. A four year old tried it in Kentucky and he died, it’s no joke. But me, cinnamon, gotta catch them all, that’s how I see it. No milk no problem, take a bag of ground cinnamon and put in in a bowl and eat the Cinnamon Toast Crunch out of the bowl with the ground cinnamon (the breakfast of gangsters). Some people say I go overboard with the cinnamon but I think I go underboard, just dig in, dig myself in, Cinnamon and Toast and Crunch, and cinnamon. There are many boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch in my house, enough to fill a cupboard, or two, enough for a week of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, at least fifteen boxes, no wait, actually eight, I’ve already eaten the others. Actually, I think I got kind of ahead of myself. Let me check-- I’m out of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I’ve run out of milk a long time ago but running out of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is bad. I need the Crunch. I crave the Crunch. I toast myself some toast and then I dip it in the bowl with the cinnamon and then five things happen sequentially: 1. I smell the cinnamon toast (crisp, burnt, bready, lack of sweetness). 2. I put sugar on the toast; it sticks. 3. I bite into the toast (crunch, 10% crust and 90% soft spongy bread). 4. I chew (the toast gets soggy with saliva and the taste of cinnamon overpowers everything) 5. I spit. Ok. I drive to the grocery store and I hold on to the steering wheel because it’s the only thing that keeps my hands from shaking because I have to buy Cinnamon Toast Crunch and I look forward to buying Cinnamon Toast Crunch so much and I also haven’t eaten Cinnamon Toast Crunch in over an hour and that makes me shake even more because I love Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I need to get more Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The store is closed. Closed. C-L-O-S-E-D It doesn’t say why. I throw a brick through the window. Somewhere something noisy goes off but I already know where to go and I run down the aisle with the cereals in them and I rip the boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch off their shelves, rip them off and rip them open, just right here and now, because I need my Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I dive head-first into the Cinnamon Toast Crunch. A sea of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Crunchy little pockets of sugar and cinnamon, I dig right in, I go underground, I live in the Cinnamon Toast Crunch, I’m living the dream, all the Cinnamon Toast Crunch in the world. Open, empty mouth Awaits Cinnamon Toast Crunch Heaped up in my hands I hurry up with the eating because the sirens are coming but also because I really like Cinnamon Toast Crunch but also because the police is coming and they will take the Cinnamon Toast Crunch away from me, take me away and shove me in a prison where there is no Cinnamon Toast Crunch, only water and bread and no cinnamon on the bread, and I should really leave a fiver on the counter for all the boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch I am eating, but I am not sure, is that how much they cost? I throw my wallet down the aisle. Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I don’t need milk or cinnamon, I just eat them as they are, rip the boxes up and shove the Cinnamon Toast Crunch down my mouth and then I lick my fingers because my fingers are sticky with the sugar and cinnamon and then inbetween all the crunchy, sweet goodness I get an extra kick of sweet and cinnamon and then I go back to the eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch. My stomach bulges under the load and heavy steps come through the door and someone shouts “Over here,” but most importantly I am starting to feel full, I am bloated, my stomach churns under the weight of many Daily Values’ worth of delicious sweet Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but I am not done yet, I am not done, oh no there are so many boxes still so many boxes and the police is coming and I grind down the Cinnamon Toast Crunch and rip myself off a piece of cardboard and I get ready to snort--
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Jun 20, 2016 01:04
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megabrawl v curlingiron, love is blind The Green Fairy and the Blind Eyes 1993 words What little of the woman’s face had remained was covered in bandages, and what wasn’t covered in bandages was a volcanic wasteland of scars and burn wounds. She had no nose, only one ear, and generally bore no resemblance to Catlana. At first, Diego wanted to ask if there had been some kind of mistake, if this had been a prank, a cruel joke; but he didn’t. Because underneath the wounds, there was his wife, sad eyes reaching out for him as if carefully probing for any comfort he could give. “She was very lucky,” the doctor said. “Diego.” Cat’s voice was hoarse, raspy, like the insides of her throat had been replaced with sandpaper. He noticed he was still standing in the entrance, and she must have noticed too. He closed the distance almost a bit too quick, not sure if he should take her hands or if the contact would hurt her. They looked at each other, or more she looked at him while he looked somewhere, not finding the words. “Is it bad?” she said. A hopeless question, shot out as some kind of last resort, a question she already knew the answer to. He stroked her cheek, but only barely, a formality of a touch like breath on her bandages, and she didn’t cry, but then the fire may have damaged that part of her face as well. Maybe she’d never cry again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve done something stupid.” “Cat. It’s not your fault” “I ran back inside.” They’d told him about the fire, but not much else. He stopped what he was doing, put both hands on the bed’s railing. “Why?” “I tried to get the pictures.” The photo books. There had been at least a dozen in their house, filled to the brim with Cat’s portraits, shot by Diego, all over the world. A lot of work had gone into these. Sure, he knew that. And yes, Cat had always liked them, perhaps a bit too much. “I’m hideous,” she said. “Aren’t I?” “No.” It was a lie. Here was the thing though: the lie was not intentional. From the first time he’d conceived the word, he’d honestly intended on cheering up his wife. In fact, he was probably more surprised by the dishonesty in his voice than anyone else. But there he was. And say one thing for Cat, she knew her husband, and she knew when he was telling the truth, and when he wasn’t. Something went out of her eyes, like someone inside had just turned off the lights. She twisted her head, much as she could, and said: “I don’t want you to see me like that.” “But--” “I don’t want you to see me like that.” Her voice quivered. Tiny blood spots appeared on the bandages around her hands as she dug her fingers into the linen. And just like that the doctor carefully guided Diego out of the room. Said Cat needed rest. Said she couldn’t get too excited. Come back tomorrow. Diego only managed to say, “I love you,” before he was ushered out. But at least he was honest about that. # Come back tomorrow hadn’t worked. Not for him, not for her. Neither the days after. He couldn’t change what he saw. He couldn’t change what she wanted him to see. He didn’t bother lying about it, because Cat was still Cat, and she wasn’t stupid. So he usually didn’t say anything much. He didn’t even know what to think anymore. He wondered if it was right to keep coming. Being awake must have been painful for Cat, and he certainly wasn’t worth her time. He spent his nights in their half-burnt-out house, going over what was left of their photo books, leaning into his scorched recliner in a living room cluttered with paint containers, rubble and torn-off, blackened wallpaper. Cat hadn’t managed to save the pictures, but some of them had only burned partially. It was nice to remember the way things had been. The smiles. The house repairs came along, and one day the handymen found an absinthe set in the attic. They mentioned it because it looked old and fancy, a simple glass jar with four faucets coming out of it, resting on an squiggly, interwoven pedestal. They wanted to know what it was. “A birthday present,” Diego said, and set it on the table next to the recliner. That evening, as he browsed through the photo books once more, he was accompanied by a constant drip, absinthe flowing through the faucet, onto a sugar cube, through a slotted spoon and into the small chalice below. It was a hollow and meager kind of drip, like dew in a damp underground cave. All of the pictures were of Cat. Beautiful Cat. She could have been a model. She’d had the face of a fairy and eyes bright like summer. She could have graced billboards in Monaco, dresses in Paris, magazine covers all over New York City, but that wasn’t her. She’d only ever modeled for one person, and that had been Diego. Whenever his job as photographer had brought them somewhere new, they’d had their own little photoshoots. He wondered if he should bring Cat the books. Or maybe that would just be more salt in the wound. He didn’t know. He felt so stupid these days. The absinthe drips sounded fuller, richer. The glass was filled to the halfway mark. He closed the faucet and took a swig. It was strong stuff, but also sickly sweet. Herbs. Anise. They say absinthe gives people crazy ideas. Maybe that was just what he needed. He drank it up, set the chalice back in its place and opened the faucet again. Few pictures had survived the fire, and he must have gone through them a hundred times since then, but he still couldn’t stop himself. Eventually, the memories of that beautiful face, that cheerful woman, would fade, replaced by the bitter, miserable, broken husk that Cat had become. He was to blame for that. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, but he was to blame. Pictures from Pamplona, Spain, where they’d run with the bulls. On the photo, Cat posed in the traditional white runner’s uniform, red handkerchief around her neck. A pose that screamed ‘Ready to run’. Pictures from Suffolk, England, where Diego had worked on a private project of his. A park in the background, Tulips and poppies and birches to the sides. Somewhere she’d gotten a bowler hat. She laughed. He drank more absinthe. The alcohol didn’t sting as much this time. Suffolk. He’d been working on a piece about a woman there. The woman had used drain cleaner to etch her eyes out. Not for any particular reason. Just wanted to be blind. Crazy, but she’d gotten her wish. From him, she’d even gotten her own portrait series. Diego had called it “Blind Eyes.” Kind of a hammy name. Still. Makes you think. He emptied the chalice again. Before blinding herself, the woman in Suffolk had taught herself to read braille, and practiced walking with thick, opaque shades. That kind of careful preparation had something admirable about it. But how much time was there… The house was a construction site. There were enough buckets with acidic toxins in them to taint the oceans forever. He set the chalice to his lips, sniffled, put it back down again. He had three thoughts: 1. Diego could never see Cat for anything else than what she was. 2. She would never be able to accept that. 3. The longer he waited, the more it all faded from him. He put the chalice back up to his lips and drank. The woman back in Suffolk, she had used drain cleaner. He didn’t have that. There wasn’t much use for cleaning the drains, not in this house, not anymore. But he had paint cleaner. There were four warning labels on the back: Corrosive, Oxidising, Harmful, Flammable. He screwed open the lid. The clear substance smelt like a chemical punch in the face, like an oil refinery had accidentally drunk multiple gallons of nail polish and puked it out all over you. He went back to the faucet, had another glass of absinthe. This was a bad idea. But what else was there? He could see the future: nothing would change. He’d continue to be repulsed, much as he loved Cat, and she’d continue to despise him for it, and herself, and everyone around her. It would end in tears. No matter what. As long as he saw her, it would end in tears. Before he knew it, the open paint cleaner was held high above his head, by his own hands. He forced himself to open his eyes, turned the container, slowly, hesitating, contents inside sploshing about. This was a bad idea. This was a bad idea. The woman in Suffolk didn’t do it on her own. She wanted to be blind. She had help. She was prepared. This was a bad idea. He closed his eyes. This was a bad idea. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like he shouldn’t do it. Cat… He opened his eyes back up and turned the container downwards. For a split-second, the contents spilled out towards him. The burn hit his face. The burn was in his eyes. He screamed. The light went out of the world. The cleaner burned his face. His hand shot up to to wipe it off, and then they burned as well. Fire. Fire all over. He stumbled over the canister, landed in the spilt cleaning agent, pushed himself back up, a pain in his eyes like a swarm of angry bees, all over his face, wavering through him like they’d invaded every hole of his body to cause agony within, eat him up from the inside, pain, burn, needles, pain, all the way through him, wavering, he stumbled, fell forward, screaming, burning, face burning, lungs burning, burning, burning, burning. Glass crashed. He fell again, tiny little daggers stabbing into his hands as he caught himself on the carpet, crawling further forward, his screams weakening, interspersed with begging, for help, for oblivion, anything, so long as it stopped, quaking hands moving him forward, forward, into darkness, darkness and pain, please God make the pain stop please make it stop please, he crawled along the wall, half-crying, half-yelling, into another door, smooth wood, and he tore down the handle and crawled, choking and crying and convulsing in pain, his eyes, his goddamn eyes, he went out the door, a journey into nothing, into fresh air, and he broke down on the pavement, and his screams rose up again and he screamed and screamed until his voice gave out. # Constant darkness was hard to get used to. They’d given him a walking cane to go out on his own, but he still preferred to have the doctors take the lead, guide him down the hallway, hands on his shoulders. He’d get used to going on his own. Just not today. Not now. He recognized Cat’s room before he was fully inside. Her breathing. Faint traces of hazelnut and violet perfume. A constant beep-beep-beep in the background. There was movement – she’d shifted on her bed. “Diego. What--” From the sound of her voice, she was sitting upright. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. Instead, he let go of his stick and stumbled forwards, towards her, confused, drunk, flailing his arms like a toddler running for his mommy. He found a cold steel railing. Rigid cloth beneath the bars, rustling as he touched it. A hard, cracked hand touched his own. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I did something stupid.” There was no answer, just a series of chokes and sobs. He ran his fingers across her face, and she twitched. The scars and cracks were still there, but the tears had returned.
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Jun 28, 2016 22:51
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I'm calling out notorious Ideas Guy Grizzled Patriarch so I can huff paint all weekend and write a 300 word premise about some bizarre bullshit like the ghost girl living in my toilet brush or whatever the gently caress oh but the words are so PRETTY
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Jun 29, 2016 10:30
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Grizzled Patriarch, consider this the acceptance speech of your brawl challenge The Madman's Portfolio 1267 words I didn’t imagine a portal to the bizarro-sphere to look like this: a prune of a man, folded in on himself in a fetal curl, clinging on to his sanity the same way his skin hung on to his neck, loosely and barely. He spoke to himself in the gibberish of the mad, reciting a bottomless laundry list of blank statements. They were molecular poetic instances. Nothings. “Are you sure you want to do this?” Barry said. “Want’s got nothing to do with it. Someone’s gotta rescue the ideas.” “Oh man, tell me about it. I didn’t have a good dream in forever.” “Yeah.” “Used to dream so nice I bust a nut just thinking about it.” “Okay.” I pulled the interdimensional incubator out of my pocket, a slender hilt with blinking lights all over like it had been modeled after a children’s drawing of what a telephone would look like in 2100. The incubator extended, additional segments popping up on top of each other like a recursive sequence of car antennas. Barry turned the old man on his back and-- Actually I don’t want to go into detail about how this thing works. It’s kinda gross. The incubator sucked me in. That’s what it feels like. You hook yourself up and it tickles a bit and suddenly you’re an electric impulse riding along inside a glass fiber cable, a rat racing through an endless tube, going forward as fast as you can because getting stuck must be infinitely worse. The room on the other end was full of cobwebs. There was this fat man sitting on top of a cot straight out of World War 1, looking like someone had dissected soldiers from all sides of the Great War and stuffed their various parts back together into the world’s most inappropriate Mr. Potatohead. Emblems from at least three different armies waged a fashion war on his outfit. He probably didn’t know. Where most people had eyes, he had a landscape of scars, the topographical map of Iraq plastered across the upper half of his face. “Hi,” he said. He grabbed a flock of cockroaches off the floor and stuffed them into his mouth. They crunched. “These are pretty fresh, huh?” “You want some?” “Actually, I’m looking for a bunch of good ideas that might have gotten lost in here.” The man started huffing and puffing, wiggling sideways on top of the cot as if he was slowly dying while desperately trying to poo poo himself. It was such a ghastly sight that I almost followed suit. Then I realized he was just trying to stand up. “What are you doing?” “I’m coming along. You were looking for good ideas.” “Uh, that’s fine. No really, sit. Please.” He fell in on himself like a hot air balloon that got too close to the sun. The aura of disappointment that he emanated was thick enough to cut it into slices and serve it to teenagers after prom night. “Nobody ever comes to visit me. What’s the point of me being here?” I didn’t think there was one, so I left. Luckily, there was a door at the other end of the room. It led into what looked like the inside of a passenger plane. Two pilots sat at the hallway, lustlessly rolling an empty soda can back and forth between them. “Are you from the outside?” one of the pilots said. They both stopped what they were doing and looked at me, trying hard not to seem excited as they laboured a foul odor through their open mouths. “I’m-- Yeah. I’m looking for some good ideas. I think they got stuck in here. We need them on the outside.” “Hey, that sounds like us.” “Yeah, we got stuck in here,” the other pilot said. “Just been flying around like that for years.” It sounded much better than the fat guy already: two friends on a grand voyage, yet stuck on a lonely island, forever living with the fear of sinking, every night’s sleep an opportunity to never wake up again. “And what happened?” I said. “And why can’t you just land?” They both shrugged. “So that’s it?” “But we’re up here. And we’re stuck. That’s good, right?” There was a long pause. They looked at me like children that had just presented crudely drawn stick figure portraits of their families to me, fully expecting me to pin their answer to a fridge and say “Good job.” They had been in that situation so long, it was all they had. I had to let them down gently. “This sucks. Is anyone else here?” The pilot that hadn’t started crying pointed towards the cabin, a solid door at the end of a long trail of sugar-scented, dried-out soda stains. For as long as these numbnuts had been stuck here, nobody had ever felt responsible to clean the drat carpet. I tried my best not to get stuck in the sticky spillage. The cabin door wasn’t locked. A tiger sat at the steering wheel. “Hello, I am a tiger,” he roared, flailing around erratically, steering wheel between his paws. The plane’s course never changed, no matter how irresponsibly he tore on the controls. He seemed very enthusiastic about his job. “Are you the pilot?” I said. “Yes! Captain Tiger. How can I help you?” “It’s just, this plane. I was wondering where you were going with this.” The tiger mulled the question over, staring ahead into the endless blue in front of us until I was sure that he had fallen asleep with his eyes open, or maybe died, but somehow still retained his ability to cheerfully tear the steering wheel into all kinds of directions, flipping switches and pulling levers in a bizarre sequence of unfortunate gaseous discharges. Finally, he jolted awake: “Did you try checking in with the two humans back in the--” “Yeah and they also have no idea and they also don’t care. I’m beginning to think that nobody cares. It’s pretty stupid.” “Can’t you just like enjoy the ride or something?” “I’m here on a mission.” He leaned back into his chair. “I’m a talking tiger flying a plane. Isn’t that good enough for you?” “No,” I said. “There’s no point. It’s just a bunch of random bullshit. You can’t just sit here and be all like ‘Oh I’m a tiger, look at me, I’m flying a plane’ if you don’t even know where you’re loving going with it. There’s no point in just being weird. You are getting nowhere. It’s just stupid. What’s your point? What’s your loving point? Why are you here? Where are you going with this plane? What’s your loving point?” “I dunno man.” He shrugged. “Whatever.” I jerked the steering wheel around and crashed the plane. # “Guess that was a bust, huh?” Barry said. I reached down and unhooked myself from the incubator. “These ideas were terrible. What the gently caress were you thinking with this guy?” “That bad?” “Barry, I’ve seen bad. This wasn’t bad. It was worse.” “I dunno, some of my friends seemed to really liked his stuff, so--” “They’re idiots. And so are you. Remind me to never do this again.” “Aw man.” Barry sighed, then took out a towel and began to clean the old man, who was by now aggressively ad-libbing twitter memes and exchanging random words with ‘poo poo’ and ‘dick’ as if attempting to get inside the Message of the Day of some degenerate IRC channel that only existed inside his head. “So what now?” “We’re going home,” I said. “And we’re taking the loving train.”
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Jul 4, 2016 02:41
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sebmojo posted:Next entrant gets squamous as their word. Entenzahn easily claims squamous
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Jul 4, 2016 20:07
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(week 186 crits) I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO READ THIS ANYMORE (you thought you were safe you were wrong) Think I forget this shithole of a week? Nada. I tried. I tried real hard. I drank so much rum. It didn’t work. So this was a week where nobody wrote flash fiction (a thing that’s usually about 1000-2000 words and there’s a character who deals with a personal or at least interesting dilemma) but at least we had dumb poo poo about spaceships and Manchurian Candidate fanfic. Seventeen imbeciles conspiring to undo three years of Thunderdome in one fell swoop, a gigantic gaseous blow to the shaky pillars of our little writing community that pierced my rotten little heart to its core. I am now ready to endorse Donald Trump. What follows is a list of terrible human beings. Tyrannosaurus – What Knights Do In the biggest disappointment of this week, prized star writer Tyrannosaurus submits a rambling piece that goes nowhere for one thousand words and then insists that, “uh, yeah, actually, the anti-vac thing, that was my point. Totally what I was trying to say.” I get it. In hindsight the plot is a touching story about dealing with anti-vac crazies in your family, and that’s a fine idea for a conflict, but here’s the problem with plots that only work in hindsight: they don’t work while I’m reading the story. I’m not sure why I have to tell you this. I obviously do, because you hosed it up, but I shouldn’t have to, and you should know better. You submitted first too, so it’s like you looked at this story and went, “Ayup, that’s done alright.” I don’t loving know. Plot problems aside everything else about this is shockingly mediocre. None of the characters are particularly interesting or unique. The most exciting event is the leech draining. Let me stress this: the most exciting thing that happens in your entire story is when a woman takes out a bunch of leeches and puts them on someone’s arm. The setting is an indiscriminate spot in the woods and that’s about as far as anything else goes. I don’t know man, you wrote something. Okay? Guiness13 – The Interview You know those episodic movies, where you’ve got a bunch of small short stories that bond together into one big, coherent piece? Your thing is the same, but for lovely vignettes. It takes too long before I even understand what you’re getting at. Granted, it’s getting obvious after the third part, but that is too long. LISTEN UP BITCHES At this point, since it’s also relevant to most other stories this week, allow me to reiterate a piece of advice Erogenous Beef, my long-time mentor (may his bile-filled carcass rest in piece), has unsuccessfully tried to hammer into all of you shitbrains for years.The first-scene checklist: [ ] WHO [ ] WHAT [ ] WHEN [ ] WHY Let’s look at yours: A dude goes to a job interview. So then I assume the story is going to be about the job interview. Have you ever been to a job interview? They are not very exciting to watch. But it doesn’t matter, because your story isn’t about the job interview anyway. So you do a 180 and go somewhere else, confusing and boring me at the same time. If a good opening is a plate of delicious appetizers, yours is thirty minutes of trying to get the waiter’s attention. Eventually, somewhere in the second or third scene, I get what you’re going for, but then I’m already right in the middle of it, except I’m not, I’m never in the middle of it. I’m in the middle of the aftermath. Every single time, it’s like “uh oh something happened here I am again.” Then you run out of words, so you can’t put up any noticeable resistance for your protagonist to overcome. Not that I really care. He’s just some guy going to some interview and then being dragged into some nebulous political conspiracy. I know nothing about him, or his intentions. He could be a murderous criminal for all I know. Would you care about this guy? Meis – Armadillo There’s a reason people generally don’t bother developing an intricate spaceship setting full of diplomatic dependencies for their 1000 words flash fiction pieces, and that reason is that you need intriguing characters to get someone interested in your world first, and you need words to do that, many words, and plot, and then there’s not much space left, so if you use all your words on the worldbuilding you will have less for the stuff people care about. Nobody cares about Valhornian customs. You’re new, so I need to really stress this: Nobody. Cares. About. Valhornian. Customs. Nobody. Nobody cares. It’s cute that you came up with your own setting and all but nobody cares. You’re here to entertain people, not pitch your webcomic setting. And maybe it’s a shame because as much as I have to stress that I didn’t care at all about your setting, that isn’t necessary the problem of the setting. It might be a really good setting, but the problem is that you need to tell a story within the framework of the setting, and you didn’t do that. So don’t take it personal. It’s not necessarily your worldbuilding that sucked, but your story. Which brings me to why I had this as my loss candidate. The cereal rant? That was a non-story. This? This is the anti-story. Like if you took a good, well-structured story and turned it inside out like a failed-writer hobo going through his piss-stained coat to see if there’s enough spare change left for another bottle of Bud (which, ironically, is also piss). There’s no rhyme or reason, no plot, nothing. You don’t pick a character and show us what they do and why it matters. Instead you handwave all your worldbuilding through a drawn-out reception scene and then a bunch of plot-points happen all at once, off-screen, and one is dumber than the other, until it ends with the protagonist accepting the loss of her son as a means of securing the most important diplomatic achievement of her people’s recent history, which sounds like a pretty strong moment, but you make it feel dumb and lame, because nothing leading up to it makes sense, and that’s not what the story has been about anyway. sparksbloom – Chomper Man I remember gently caress all about this story except for going “What the gently caress is going on and why” at everything. Like, I have no idea what this story is about, or how Seth’s buddy’s backstory or the fact that there’s for some reason a talking snake or whatever factors into it through more than sheer coincidence. Maybe I could find out if I really dug into it, but this is not my loving job and if you can’t communicate your ideas clearly then try harder. There are many very important questions that either get answered too late (what’s even vaguely the problem) or not at all (what’s the protagonist going to loving DO ABOUT IT). It’s like you decided to write some mindfuck story about a guy who’s trippin balls and then you came up with a bunch of stock poo poo that stopped just shy of “midget with a top hat”. Everything just kinda happens, but at the same time nothing happens, we never make any real progress, neither in the plot nor in our understanding of the dilemma, like a snake eating its own tail, simultaneously poisoning its raw rear end and making GBS threads poison down its mouth in a circular motion, forever. Excitement happens when I’m not sure if a character I like is going to succeed at something. It’s not a bunch of pseudo-intellectual look at me Im so mysterious bullshit. I just don’t see any reason for any of the individual lines in this story to exist, on their own, or in the context they are provided in. It’s a constant back-and-forth, things change but then they don’t, the snake says it’s going to bite him, but then it doesn’t, but then it does, you just wanted to show the protagonist play Scrabble first or whatever. Then it ends with him agreeing to electrocute himself. Finally I can relate. Had this down for a DM or loss but didn’t bank on the fact that my cojudges are okay with incoherent world-garble sliding across their screens so long as the individual words themselves are recognizable as such and I guess also they like anything that reminds them of Dr Doolittle (because they are literal children). anime was right – I Really Gotta Pee! This was easily the best story so far because other than the fucktards above you you wrote something that isn’t just relatable but also complete. I mean wow, you had an ending. That alone was worth considering you for an HM this week, and the fact that I would have appreciated the poetic justice of giving it to the piss and poo poo stories. But then if you really think about it, what is this story? It’s a story about a guy who really has to pee. And the guy himself? He’s just some guy. Who really has to pee. I liked this because it was one of two pieces I could read without my eyes slowly trailing off the screen but if we’re being honest it’s not necessarily pushing the boundaries of writerly excellence. There’s just… the peeing thing. And that’s it. I guess that’s not enough for some people. For what it’s worth you wrote a very solid story about a guy having to pee and you can quote me on that on your resume if that makes you feel any better. CANNIBAL GIRLS – Thou Shalt Not That first scene is probably the most useless thing in existence next to to maybe the treadmill cycle, or that weird box that only turns itself off when you flick the switch. I get why you didn’t want to start with “It was 5:27” but your first three lines are too vague to have any effect other than confusing me. You could have expanded that first scene, you know, elaborate a bit on the specific nature of the dilemma, and while you’re at it why not just go ahead and tell the story from there because by what I can tell everything that happens in your second scene is a bunch of beating around the bush until you’ve caught up with the cold start anyway. You go back in time so you can unravel the situation from the beginning, but you don’t do that, no, you jump around between a bunch of different statements and actions, none of which seem to be in any way related to one another until I just want to know why we’re here or what the problem is. I get that there’s a domestic disturbance in the background, but stuff like him saying “I’m paid to perform a job”, what does that mean? Is this his job? Is he supposed to be at a job somewhere else and laments his indecision? What is it? Why is he thinking these things? On like my third read-through of the story I assume that he is being paid to do God’s work, but it’s just so weird because he’s already got the clock to measure him, so it’s like, my initial assumption is that the God clock is a private thing where you try to tally up points for the afterlife and he’s standing there debating going to his day job vs doing stuff for his God score. But apparently the God clock IS his day job and he’s both being paid for this and he runs up his score? It’s weird and a little bit dumb and maybe you’re aware of that and that’s why your intro doesn’t just come out and say it, but being obtuse about it doesn't make it better. This could still be a neat story. The scene where the boyfriend uses the watch to abuse the girl is pretty intense and gives me a glimpse of what this could have been. But everything else is so lazy. Just take the way said boyfriend suddenly completely ignores the protagonist in the very same scene. Lazy. The dialogue exposition. Lazy. There’s problems in this story, and some of them stare me in the face, and some of them hide under a bunch of cutesy narrational bullshit, but they will never stop detracting from your piece until you actually stop and think of a fix for them. If you don’t think that’s worth your time, why do you think it’s okay to make me read this? Also lol @ God condoning murder. Also lol @ your protagonist debating whether he should help with a domestic violence incident but he still wants to go to heaven, cool guy Thranguy – No poo poo Man at this point all the bullshit intros with zero informational value really tilt me, it’s like all your stories are in the loving omerta or something. SPEAK UP All in all this isn’t terrible though. There is a problem, and the story is about the problem, and the idea is even a bit original. It’s stupid as hell, and now I’m thinking you were just trying to write a dumb joke entry and inadvertently ended up making GBS threads your way to an HM in a terrible week, but it was memorable. If you had written the exact same story but not made it an obvious poop joke it might even have won. Okay, so compared to the other stories this was decent. But compared to a decent story, this was semi-garbage. You sport a cast of like half a dozen and it’s hard to make out any discernible protagonists, or human beings for that matter. They’re soldiers, and that’s all they are, walking uniforms with nothing much going on in their heads, and the whole story leans exclusively on the weirdness surrounding the Captain’s poop curse as opposed to any real interpersonal conflict. People die because of this curse. Brothers. It’s got potential for lots of bad blood, but you’re never taking it there, or anywhere else interesting. You just keep pointing at your premise, like I’m supposed to pat you on the back and give you a cookie or something. So this is another one of those cases where someone had a weird and cool idea and then ended up half-assing it in almost every way other than literally just submitting the basic premise along with a note for the judges to go gently caress themselves. The way you reveal the Captain’s betrayal is also kinda dumb, like, didn’t they realize that the lethal fire was coming from right next to them? The whole way the story is told and paced makes it kinda seem like it’s stuck somewhere inbetween mystery and slapstick, which isn’t a terrible place for a story to be stuck in, but the more I think about it the more I’m convinced that it’s a result of writerly indifference more than anything. Benny Profane – Moisture-Driven Loss of Brittleness and the Inhibition of Failure Propagation I didn’t hate this as much as the others because it didn’t offend me. To be honest it barely even registered. It’s a dumb rant, it deserved to lose (everyone did that week) but it didn’t check enough writing mistake boxes for me to really flare up on my radar as the absolute worst. That said, you were doomed to fail from the start. I don’t think there’s any kind of execution that makes “grandpa’s inane rant about the unfairness of life” work better than just writing a decent story. Your other crime was the fact that you made it so trite. I could have come up with this poo poo myself. It’s soggy and bland, like a bowl of forgotten cereal, or a low-effort simile. Having stories where a guy just rambles and explains at you are always a bit dicey to begin with. I’ve written them, and I barely ever come away liking them. Because it’s narration inside of narration. Nothing actually happens. The reason John Galt’s speech became a meme wasn’t that it was so goddamn exciting to read. But then at least John Galt had ideas to communicate. You talked about loving cereal as an analogy to how life sucks when you’re getting old. You’re a decent writer but there’s no prose in the world that lets you write your way out of this cardboard box. At the end I’m having the same reaction to this story that everyone has when he’s being told this stuff IRL: “So what,” and I go play videogames. QuoProQuid – The Third Rule I really didn’t want to write this crit because I’m not sure what to say about this story. Truth is, I was a bit confused on the first read-through. You came up with this really complex thing and you have such a roundabout way of conveying the relevant information. For example, you start by having the protagonist describe himself as an unpleasant guy. Then, somewhere in the middle of the same paragraph, you casually mention that he’s just pretending to be like that. It doesn’t stick. What I’m taking away is “this guy is an rear end in a top hat.” Like the fact that he’s just posing for the Resistance is pretty big but you hide it inbetween two statements that conflict with that idea. And then I wonder: whose side am I supposed to be on? Whose side is the protagonist supposed to be on? He talks about being a rebel but at the same time he says that despots like to keep him around, and he mentions some kind of protection like he’s actually a government shill, but then he’s also important enough for the rebels to nuke the loving restaurant. The information is there, but the presentation is flawed, like I carefully have to step through each single paragraph to make sure I’m not tripping over the presentation. I don’t get the recorder thing either. So it’s “full of his movements” whatever that means, so the Resistance wants to recover it (instead of just having it destroyed), but then they also want to kill the guy who was being recorded even though they’ve already acquired the proof incriminating him… ? All of this probably makes a lot of sense to you because you know the background to the story, or maybe it doesn’t and you just wanted to write spy fiction, so you googled “spy fiction tropes” and then slapped a bunch of “yadda yadda tape recorder BAM BAM BAM” on a page. I don’t know. This has some good bits, like the moments after the bomb went off are really okay for instance, but as a whole the story is too nebulous and slick, and that’s saying something for spy fiction. Noah – Autoerotic I guess this is the story that broke me because for some reason I came away liking it even though I can’t for the life of me tell what’s going on. It’s got this really hosed-up vibe, and the Entenzahn connoisseurs amongst you know that I dig the darkly bizarre, but after a strong start you kinda get lost in your own ideas, and then there’s the baseball stuff and there’s his childhood memories and his penis and his tick with the multiples of hundred and I always feel like there’s supposed to be some kind of connective element that makes sense of it all, but it’s just out of reach, like you keep pointing at the dots without ever connecting them. It succumbs to a ramble, a paranoid series of close-up snapshots. You’re so excited about your own story that you get ahead of yourself as you’re telling it. We’re chased from scene to scene, only getting hints about the why and what of the moment, and by the time I think I’ve figured out what’s going on you’ve already moved to the next plot beat. There are no scene breaks, and some of the scenes themselves are only three lines long so it becomes hard to tell everything apart. Sure, it fits with the schizo vibe you’re trying to get across. It speeds up the reading experience. Many stories dragged on this week. But you went too fast. You left me behind with a dick-obsessed maniac. Not cool bro. Alright, so there’s not much in the way of character agency here and the plot is muddled. So you wanted to write a character study. That’s cool. But did you actually study the character? I feel like I learn nothing about the guy except for maybe what happens in the intro, for all that’s worth. He’s just confusing. He never seems to have much of a reaction to or opinion on anything, except for his weird outburst at the end. Nothing changes, and that’s cool, but if you’re going to write a character piece I think you should illuminate the character from various angles. So maybe there’s some poignant truth about the human condition lying at the bottom of the multiple layers of this guy’s psychoses but all that gets through to me is “guy really likes touching his dick and also baseball facts.” What’s the point? Killer-of-Lawyers – The Gourmand I don’t know what this is. There’s words here, but why? None of them seem to say anything except “Hehehehe flower cum” Seriously, that’s the story. People like the flower cum. And your protagonist doesn’t get it. Neither do I. Schneider Heim – The Miracle and the Sleeper Every week has that one entry that you just kinda forget about. Do you remember what this story was? Be honest. Alright, let me remind you: a boy is being a dork at school. A thousand words later he finds a friend. Presto I guess the saving grace of this piece is supposed to be how Marty and Judy totally turn out to be just friends instead of a couple, wow mind blown I thought they were gonna smooch and poo poo. Everything else about this is so bland and uninspired I swear I just read through it and I already forgot half the plot again. I guess the protagonist gets attacked by bullies and Judy scares them off with her fearsome yelling or some poo poo. This suffers from the same problem as many other teenie drama stories in the ‘dome in that there’s not much to it other than “teenager has slight emotional problems (and also I, the writer, am bored).” It’s nothing new, and nothing worth remembering. You tried to spice it up with Judy’s narcolepsy, but that’s just flavor and it doesn’t make up for a lack of substance. You know, like you just served me a naked bouillon cube on a plate. This could have been salvaged if the writing wasn’t such low-effort crap on top of it. There’s smug smiles, and winks and all this played-out bullshit without much of any attitude in the narration and absolutely no playfulness in the way you use the language. It reads like you were forced to write this. If that’s the case you have my sympathy. I was forced to read it and it wasn’t pleasant. Grizzled Patriarch – Home Economics Hi my name is Grizzled Patriarch and I’m notorious for only writing half a story. To make up for that I’ve written two halves a story. Two halves make a whole, right? Right? This really hurts because as always I liked your writing. The characters are human and relatable and the plot is a ground fertile with the potential for conflict. But you started writing five minutes before the deadline so you got the idea for the love story in the middle of your first draft and then you realized that you not only ran out of time before you could resolve it, you also forgot about the loving egg, oh boy, Entenzahn’s gonna have my rear end for this let’s just loop back to that other plot and maybe nobody’s gonna notice what mess I made *swipes the love story under the rug* It would have only taken you three lines to at least somewhat reasonably tie this together, like just have everyone be mad at Caleb and roll the credits, at least pretend you had a plan going into this, but noooooooooooooooo newtestleper – Otara Millionhairs Club Look, I get it. Your thesaurus is full of all these cool words, it would be a shame not to use them. So you pick the best ones, one by one, and you string them up, like putting candy on a necklace, sweet, delicate words dangling in front of you until you tie the knot and put it around your neck and suffocate on a chain that weighs about as heavy as a novel full of old Victorian prose experiments. I have no idea what’s happening in half this story and I think you POV switch a bunch but it doesn’t really matter because neither of your characters nor your omniscient narrator are human or interesting or relevant to me in any other way than giving me something to be disappointed by until the next story. There’s not much else I can say about this except what’s there needs to cut by half and then maybe you could use those freed up words to actually finish your loving story. Pete Zah – City Service I wanted to like this. The setup is at the same time bizarre and hilarious. The humor works more often than it does not (the part where he lies on the floor wheezing cracked me up). The characters were cool, quirky, varied enough to make a memorable cast. I could even see some subtle truth about the militarization of American suburbia hide underneath all the silliness, you know, a chance to subtly enrich that comedy with a deeply hidden social issue statement to give it some of that delicious substance that most 'dome comedies lack. This had all the potential in the world. But then it just ends. So that’s why you’re getting a short crit, because I have not much to say about this. It was funny, but you ran out of steam and story and then it was just over. Could have gone really far in this horrible week but I guess you didn’t want to win.  After The War – Further Upstream I don’t think this was that much worse than all the other milquetoast poo poo we had this week but you did write about a scientist making your assigned discovery, which is more or less 100% exactly what you were not supposed to do and now you’re paying the idiot tax. Everything about this is bleh. An agent and a doctor walk into the woods… sounds like the setup to a great punchline, results in a thousand words of puke as two people bumble around the forest looking for a fish. Seriously, what the gently caress. Much like the other guy who wrote spy fiction this week you’re giving me a protagonist that has all the wit and humanity of an Ikea shelf. From reading the story I could swear he’s actually Agency Bot 3000, designed to display hilarious incompetence in the field. Alright, so you wanna write spy fiction. It doesn’t have to be a character study, but then at least give me something interesting. Give me a cool protagonist, not this clean shaven Johnny who sounds like he’s on his first day on the job trying hard to come off as ominous. Give me action, give me gadgets, give me intrigue, give me a reason to waste time on this. What do I get instead? A wikipedia entry on salmon and two people walking through the forest. Oh but the professor is so wacky the people are gonna love this one eh eh eh. Seriously, you wrote about a secret agent looking for a fish. You did that. Titus82 – Splat Alright. I didn’t like this. I didn’t hate it either, but this won somehow and I assume the other judges blew a lot of smoke up your rear end so let me bring you back down to reality: this was aggressively mediocre, by Thunderdome standards. You introduce some real problems in the beginning, but then you never get around to doing anything about them. So the daughter hates her father’s hectic lifestyle. How did that change by the end? What happened? She only stopped crying for the moment, and even that’s just through pure chance as opposed to the protagonist’s actions. The whole story is smokes and mirrors, a series of unconnected cute images wanked onto an empty canvas trying to distract me from the lack of substance by shoving a crying baby in my face, pretending there’s actually something deep and moving about what really amounts to Thunderdome clickbait. This dad found one weird trick to stop his daughter from crying. Mothers hate him! The other judges can go gently caress themselves. This is not a story. This is eyewash. There’s something very tragic about the core dilemma of your piece and you had a chance to move me, but then your character has the agency of a loaf of bread and you could cut the middle 80% if the story and it would still make just as much sense. It’s a vignette, and a really bare-bones one at that. There’s a lot of unnecessary words in this story, so now that I think about it you should have been disqualified for going over the wordcount, not because two additional words is that big of a deal, but because you didn’t need these words and gently caress you and your lazy editing. but then nobody deserved to win this week so who cares Entenzahn fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Jul 6, 2016 |
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Jul 6, 2016 00:29
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word: squamous Piscis 1163 words His knife rasps across the swordfish, scales twinkling in the kitchen light as they snow onto the ground. It’s a cruel sound. Blunt, ripping, a fish that is being skinned, piecemeal, scratched raw and bloody. His neck itches. He resists the urge to scratch. He has his own layer of scales there. The doctors call it a “squamous overgrowth”. They don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s nothing to worry about. Scalelike matter growing on his skin, scabbing over his hands and webbing his fingers and caking his neck in a rash with its own protective shell. Inconvenient. Put on this paste and report back in two months. The swordfish bakes in the oven with a mixture of garlic and onions and potatoes and in a herby crust. He prepares the salmon steak. Salmon scales mix with the old ones already on the ground, every harsh motion of his knife raining down rainbow dust, confetti celebrating haute-cuisine. He scratches his neck. More scales fall to the ground. He notices how much the salmon stinks. Everything stinks. Stinks like fish, but not like the sea, the salt and water. It stinks like dead fish. Not rotten though. Just dead. Stinks like food that isn’t supposed to be food. Like dog meat. Or human. Not rotten. Off. The stench settles in his stomach. It makes him feel queazy. He takes the swordfish out of the oven, baked to perfection, the fragrance of mediterranean spices mixing with the corpse odor. Off. The pan with the seared salmon steak slides in on a fresh baking tray. It reminds him of a severed hand. He arranges the swordfish on a plate as if preparing it for a wake, beds it on the potatoes and drapes it with garlic and onion. Somebody orders the halibut. Empty-eyed fish bodies line up in the fridge, a seafood mortuary. The stench overwhelms him. But the fish isn’t rotten. Just dead. Dead, glittering fish caked in blood, pieces of gut sticking to the cuts in their bellies. He forgets to breathe. A poison running through his body. Through his heart and intestines, culminating in his lower belly. His heart pumps-- He goes home early. “Again?” his shift supervisor says. He goes home. Home is a dimly lit downtown apartment on the sixth floor of a concrete slab in a long row of almost identical concrete slabs. Faint bass seeps in from above. The place has not been cleaned – discarded packagings of microwavable food pile up in the corners and on the desk, food and empty soda cans and scratched-off scales. The packaging is days old. He doesn’t eat much these days, and the food is different. The only clean place is the wall with the picture on it. A wood burning of a narwhal and a kraken, although the linework is unclear, ill-defined. Hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. It emanates a dark aura, like an invisible smoke rising up around it, fangs opening up to swallow him whole, tearing into his mind, holding it in place. His consciousness tries to pull away and the picture reels him back in. Around the edges, it has the same kind of “squamous overgrowth” that he has. He finds himself sitting on his knees, in front of the picture. He stares at it. The burnt lines seem to shift. They form patterns, shapes, scales flowing in and out of the frame like the waves of the sea. The patterns speak to him. A faint noise whispers in the back of his head, like a phantom touch probing him from the inside. The voice is like somebody turns on a light bulb in a dark room. “Sinner,” it says. It has never spoken to him, or not like that, or maybe it has. No, he remembers that it has. His heart pumps again, harder than before. He knows what it means: the job. The restaurant. The corpses. It is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. He doesn’t even know why he keeps going there. He thought he knew this morning, but now it speaks to him and the decision seems wrong again. “Has to stop, has to stop,” the voice says, louder now. “You have to stop.” He doesn’t know how to stop. He tried, but he always finds himself back at his job, finds himself torn, between this reality and that, these needs and those, finds himself making excuses for his grisly work. Needs the money. Needs to pay rent. Needs food. But he doesn’t need food. Does he really need this apartment? “I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is but a whine. “I don’t know what to do.” “You have raised your hand against the me and many, against yourself and against the school.” The voice is not a whisper anymore. He has done wrong, he has sinned against his own, has sinned for years and years and even now that he is being reborn he is still sinning because he knows not what else to do, because he is used to it, not matter how bad the pain gets, no matter how much the stench overwhelms him, he is a born sinner, it’s what he is, and he would like nothing more than to change, but he does not know-- “Repent. Repent for you have sinned amongst your own. Repent, and you will be delivered from this pain. Repent. Repent.” The words quake through his head with the conviction of the truthful. He rocks back and forth, stuck between a kneel and a cower, kneel and cower. The picture’s shifting lines fall into a frenzy, rage across the wooden canvas like the sea in a storm. The air wavers around him, a hollow echo reverberating through him as if he was oscillating between realities. He tries to focus, but the lines blur. Reality is slippery. He fades in and out. “Do not cut, lest you are cut. Do not scale, lest you are scaled. Do not eat, lest you are consumed, by your sin, by yourself.” The voice rises in strength, swells, elbowing its way into his consciousness until there is no room left for anything else, shoving out the memories, fears and sorrows. The voice is a conqueror in a savage land. The voice is truth. “Such is the truth of the squamous kind”, it says. “We are one. You are many. All are same. Do you understand?” Yes. That is all there is. The way to repentance. The way unto unity. Do to yourself… as you do unto your own. The voice fades. Air fills his lungs once more and the shifting lines on the wood burning calm down, the raging sea settling into a calm flow, narwhal and the kraken still submerged beneath the tides, but visible again, as they can see him too. Waiting. Waiting for penance. He gets up. And he walks into the kitchen. And he takes a knife out of the drawer. And cuts.
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Jul 11, 2016 02:58
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Good. I'm glad. Good for you. There was: a quake that cracked earth, a roar that fell towers, a flood that filled streets, a groan that froze hearts, and a sigh of relief, everywhere, for the giant had come.
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Jul 11, 2016 15:44
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In
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Jul 12, 2016 08:35
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In the VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA wants to PAINT THE WHITE HOUSE A DIFFERENT COLOR oh yeah i failed last time so I GUESS
Entenzahn fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Aug 3, 2016 |
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Aug 3, 2016 09:42
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ONE OR MORE BEES (swarm optional) that want(s) FAME AND FORTUNE Famous 584 words The bee attacked at 1638. Donald J. Trump was giving a stump speech about the Muslim infiltration of the FDA (“I’m tellin ya people, ten years from now it’s all gonna be halal.”), when it swooped in from the left, diving for the presidential candidate like a harakiri bomber, and stung him in the back of his hand. For most people on their televisions it looked like he’d continued his speech as normal, swatting at the air and then tensing up, digging his fingers into the podium as if completely taken over by the horrors of the radical liberals and their stupid ideologies. Until the camera zoomed in and showed the bee on the podium, a dirt flake on everyone’s screens, jerking around in a macabre dance of the dying. “Now why did you do that?” Mr. Trump said. “Love,” the bee said. “Excuse me?” “There’s this girl in my swarm. Her eyes shimmer like the morning dew and her buzzing is so sweet it makes the honey smell tart. She’s a queen, I tell you. But me, I’m just a drone, so that’s not right. So she’s saying, if you really love me, why don’t you make something of yourself. Can’t just be seen with any ol’ bee. So that’s where I am. Gotta get famous. Sting someone important. And well, Mr. Trump, I don’t know anyone more important than you. You’re always on television.” “You should have let me talk to her,” Mr. Trump said. “I have a way with women, believe me.” “Oh well, it’s all done now. She likes to watch your speeches. All I have to do…,“ the bee grunted as it tried to upright itself, “is fly back home, and--” It stopped clawing at the table for a second and turned its mosaic eyes to Mr. Trump. “Help me out here.” “Not feeling too good, huh, little buddy?” “I’m a bit queazy.” Mr. Trump didn’t know many things about bees, or anything, but he did know this: “I hate to break it to ya, but bees die when they sting someone.” “Oh.” The bee rolled around a bit more as if trying to defy Mr. Trump’s sensible truths and take to flight by sheer force of will, zooming up and away to the happy end it deserved. It did this until its breath grew too heavy to sustain its pained cries. It deflated. “This is quite painful.” “I’m sorry.” “Well, at least my queen shall remember me.” “Actually--” Mr. Trump bit his tongue. “I know." The bee wheezed. "She has hundreds of others.” A cough. “I guess I’m just a sorry old fool.” It jerked around once more as pain took over its body, sent it twitching and tumbling across the podium. “You didn’t have to do this,” Mr. Trump said. “I did,” the bee blurted out between shocks of pain. “You are what you are.” It convulsed, spiraled into a macabre ballet of death, a Dying Swan in black and yellow. The sight of the poor dying bee did something to Mr. Trump that had never happened to him before: it evoked a feeling other than anger. The bee’s pained cries forced their way into his ears, went down his throat like a clump of ice and burned his rotten, little heart. There was nothing he could do. He reached out with a finger, and gently stroked the bee as it died. Finally, it went still. And then, live and on national television, Donald J. Trump wept.
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Aug 8, 2016 02:04
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Aug 9, 2016 08:39
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we managed exactly zero signups before someone hosed it up
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Aug 9, 2016 12:09
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better than your usual crits because at least someone's put effort into that gif
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Aug 9, 2016 21:14
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Aug 9, 2016 22:24
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sebmojo posted:I'll do my crits by submission deadline, What if I'm quoting this to say that I don't want crits.
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Aug 10, 2016 08:56
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I want crits though
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Aug 10, 2016 08:57
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Tyrannosaurus posted:Sup. I'm in. Also, I wrote these while I judged blind back on week 156 but never posted them. you did
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Aug 13, 2016 19:20
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crabrock posted:Sebenzahn Brawl Detour 1268 words My dad walked in, and I couldn’t help myself. I’d prepared for this moment for the last hour, just sitting in the waiting room, clock ticking in the background, receptionist constantly typing and taking calls, and I’d sat there and I’d told myself, “You’re going to look him straight in the eye when he comes in.” And there he was, and I was looking at the ground like a child. It was black linoleum with a random pattern of colorful hexagons. Very 80’s. He walked past me without a word, into the headmaster’s office. I pretended I was just stretching my neck while muffled voices conversed on the other side of the door. I psyched myself up for the grand finale, when he’d walk back out and I’d tell him that the weed wasn’t mine. Maybe if I really believed it, I could make him believe it too. So that’s what I told myself. Over and over again. It wasn’t mine. It wasn’t mine. He came back out with my spliff in hand. “It’s wasn’t mine--” I started, but he motioned with his hand and I saved myself the words. I didn’t feel like explaining myself anyway. He drove me home. We were living in this suburban hellhole where every other street was a quaint promenade, rows of trees and colorful houses passing by your window until you got carsick. It was a small town. Word got around. “Don’t tell mom,” I said. “Of course I’m not telling mom,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous. She’d lose her mind.” I probably should have thanked him, but I was 16 at the time so instead I locked my arms and sunk deeper into my seat, staring out into the most uninspired landscaping project since they started doing nuclear tests in Nevada. Right then I wished somebody would drop a bomb on us. “This can’t go on,” my dad said. “What?” “You’re locked in your room day and night and now you’re pulling this… look, this is going to be the most Dad thing you ever hear me say, but I’ve been your age too, once.” “U-huh.” “Have you smoked weed before?” “No.” I’d read about it on reddit (seriously, gently caress that site) so I’d wanted to try it. Turns out the guy who sold me the joint was just doing it as some sort of joke, and I was the butt of it. The punchline was that he’d gotten me into poo poo with the school. Guess he and his buddies had a good laugh at that. Maybe I hadn’t been aware of just how unpopular I was. “This isn’t the way home,” I said as we turned a corner onto a gravel road. Suddenly, we were in a different world. It was like walking behind the set decor: the curtains had been drawn away and where we’d just been smack dab in the middle of the motherlode of suburbs we were now in its neglected maintenance shaft, driving into a nothing dotted with occasional shacks and chain link fences that seemed to have no purpose. It went on forever. We ended up at the old quarry. It had been abandoned decades ago, after an industrial accident put the operators out of commission. They say the ghosts of the dead still haunt the place. “When I was a kid,” dad said, “this was where we got up to all the shenanigans. No-one bothers you.” He pulled the joint out of his pocket and lit it. “Dad!” I said. He took a drag like it was the most normal thing to do, then blew smoke out his nostrils and held the joint out towards me. I knew a trap when I saw one. I almost melted into the car door as I tried to edge away. The whole situation was a bit too weird for me. “Look,” he said, “we can’t bring this stuff back home. There’s a good chance your mom’s gonna find it. We can’t just throw it out the window either, because then who knows what kid is gonna pick it up. It’s safest for everyone to just smoke it.” It was a thinly veiled excuse. But I was curious. So I took the drat joint. It was warm from the fire. A thin paper sausage with grass inside. It rustled as I moved it up to my mouth. “Don’t swallow the smoke. Inhale slowly.” I breathed in through the spliff, and warm air went down my lungs, slowly trickling in, filling me up, and it didn’t quite burn but it wasn’t pleasant either. I coughed, and wafts of smoke burts from my mouth, and somewhere in my coughing I inhaled some of the the smoke back in again. My dad gave me a pat on the shoulder and I was just about to feel really weirded out by that when time melted away. The quarry seemed to move around us. Pebbles slid down the top of the hills and they dragged more pebbles with them and then there were pebble avalanches. The car got dark. I was back in my room. I was staring at my computer. There were no new messages. Why didn’t people want to be my friends? I dressed sharply and I was nice. There were pictures on the computer. Happy faces. I knew them from school. Their laughter resounded in my head, crept down my throat and took hold of my lungs. It went off inside me like a nuclear bomb. Smoke came out my nostrils. I had been thoroughly burned today. I compared the pictures with my own: there were none. Nobody took any pictures of me because I was never outside-- My dad chuckled somewhere in the far corner of the room. I was never outside. I didn’t know how. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Only in my dark room, I was safe. Only here. -- It was evening. The sun was just about to disappear behind the horizon. I’m not sure if I’d smoked the joint all the way through, or if my dad had, or we’d each taken a single drag and then he’d let it burn out while he watched me getting baked. “How was it?” he said. He started the engine. “Bit weird.” “Well, if that’s the worst that ever happens to you with that stuff…” The car moved. I was still a bit wobbly from the weed, so it kinda felt like the car was moving my body ahead of me. I shook my head to get it clear again. Didn’t do much. “Wanna go on a hike this weekend?” my dad said all of a sudden. “What?” “A hike. You know, walking. Forward. I’m thinking the mountains. There’s some nice routes for beginners. Your mother can pack us sandwiches. Heck, if we’re being sneaky, we might be able to take some beers along.” “I don’t know.” “It’s fine. You’re sixteen. Most countries in Europe--” “No, I mean the hiking thing.” “Oh,” he said. We were crunching along the gravel road again and now the nothing from before had made place for something greater: an all-engulfing twilight, stars fading in, and the faint outline of a moon far off in the distance. It wasn’t nothing no more, but endless. “So you’ve got other plans?” Yeah. Browse the internet in my lovely room. I tried to come up with excuses, but my heart wasn’t really in it, and then I came up empty. “Alright, fine,” I said. But I didn’t do it without a sigh. I was sixteen after all.
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Aug 19, 2016 02:09
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Hammer Bro. posted:Perhaps I wasn't loud enough last time. There must be a limerick in your story
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Aug 23, 2016 17:44
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Hey guys how do I sign up for this? Do I just say in? If I say in am I in? Do I get a prompt then? Can I still sign up? Where is the prompt? Do I just make my own? Can I write whatever I want? Can I just write fanfic erotica? Is it okay if I submit this? Is it-- I swear I have a really good reason but I forgot to say it when I submitted. Can I still edit it in? Or does that disqualify me? And does that mean I cant win anymore? Can I disqualify myself and not lose? How do I wipe my own rear end? Do I just print out one of flerps stories and then roll it up and bend down and shovel the poo poo out my rear end in a top hat? Is it weird if this excites me? Please help Im confused   Entenzahn --------------------------- "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London
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Aug 27, 2016 20:39
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Im in with Dicepunk
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Sep 2, 2016 22:39
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Dicepunk Carter's Lucky Streak 1852 words It was 17.21 in Nu Vegas and Joseph Carter left the Lucky Throw Supreme Casino a new man. He’d been a 3d6 for most his life, fourteen new rolls per day. Enough to chance on weekly groceries and maybe save up for a steakhouse gamble now and then. Enough for a sure beer with the guys from the office, but not quite enough for a night out at one of the city’s neon-brimming retro bars, jazzy speakeasy hipster joints that he might might have gotten into, with a lucky roll, but where he wouldn’t have gotten drunk, or lucky. Enough for the daily bus to the office, but cars were for the d20’s of this world. Well, he was a 5d20 now. Twenty-three rolls a day, plus a hundred extra right on payout. These were the bigger leagues. Not quite the big ones, but life above his paygrade. It was 18.45 when Carter was accosted by Lt. Rory Nickels, special investigator of the Nu Vegas Probability Department. Carter was trying on a new suit at Hemmingwool’s, a flamboyant purple piece with a pattern of faint golden aces of spades. Say what you want, but he knew how to draw attention. “Been a lucky day for you, Carter,” Lt. Nickels said. The detective took a drag from the pipe he always carried on him to set himself apart from the other knuckleheads at the PD, a mode of smoking that did not suit a broad-shouldered, mean-looking man of the law. Exotic fumes rose out of its chamber, curling up around themselves and hugging the non-smoker sign on the wall above them. “drat. loving. Lucky.” “Ah.” Carter said. “Thanks.” “Like, statistically-impossible-lucky.” Carter stopped moving and closed his eyes. He breathed in and remained like this for a good few seconds, not unlike an actor going into himself to remember the script and prepare for his scene. Then he turned to Lt. Nickels and said, “What do you want?” “A dozen perfect rolls in a row. I want to know how you did it.” “Just luck. It’s a casino, it happens.” Disinterested, Carter resumed investigating the fit of his suit. The cuff buttons were also golden aces of spades. His appreciation for the suit grew with every passing moment. Lt. Nickels, equally nonchalant, took the pipe out of his mouth, inspected the chamber, took a plastic bag out of his pocket, opened it, and refilled the pipe with an exotic blend of Middle Eastern herbs and spices, “Old Nu Egypt #2”. He put everything back to where it had been. “Well. You could just tell me. Or I could haul your rear end in and make you tell me.” “We wouldn’t be here if you could.” Carter turned away from the fitting mirror and pulled back his left sleeve to unveil his standard-issue dice module. He would have replaced it with a fancier model, but shopping for suits had occupied him so far. “Here’s an offer: chance a roll, and you might just win an answer.” Lt. Nickels met his stare, a deliberation of probabilities that seemed to last almost as long as their entire conversation so far. He punched some buttons on his own module, one roll of a 3d10 for a 23. Carter’s 5d20 rolled a combined 5. “So?” “I just got lucky at the casino,” Carter said. Something happened to Lt. Nickel’s face. It was impossible to tell if he thought he’d been played or if he was just angry about wasting a roll on a perfectly benign answer. But for a split-second, he was visibly pissed, and with the forceful drag he took from his pipe, you might have expected him to start fuming at the ears like a tea kettle. But he didn’t. Instead he just slammed his fist into Carter’s gut. “Alright,” Lt. Nickels said, patting Carter on the shoulder, who was still keeling over and wheezing for air, for he wasn’t much used to being punched, and Lt. Nickels was very much used to punching people. “I admit you got us in a loop about this. But Sinetti ain’t going to be as nice as me. You might wanna reconsider talking to us, soon.” He left his card. At 20.02 Carter was accosted again, this time by Diego Sinetti, owner of the Lucky Throw Supreme Casino and about a dozen other and equally tasteful establishments. He was a fat man in a pinstripe suit, and if you will recall Lt. Nickel’s brief but severely pissed expression, it was a permanent resident of Sinetti’s face as he glared at Carter across the back room of his limousine. A disco ball bathed them in bright, colorful lights and the music was very danceable. “You think I’m some kind of sucker?” Sinetti said. Carter tried to think. He had been pulled into a mobster’s limousine, was flanked by two human gorillas, and probably about to die. He had to play this smart. “I--” The guy on his left punched him in the face. “Shut up,” Sinetti said. “Cheating rat. You’re going to tell us how you did this, but I don’t trust a word that doesn’t come out of your mouth screaming.” He leaned forward, and the tacky disco ball on the ceiling cast a colored shadow across his face that made him seem funky-morbid. “We’ll show you what we do to cheaters in Vegas.” “Alright,” Carter said. He played with his golden ace of spade cufflinks while neon signs rushed past, their buzz mixing with the bright lights inside the limousine. Nobody said anything. “Wanna play dice?” At 20.24 and several punches to the face later Carter found himself tied to a chair inside a dimly-lit warehouse at the outskirts of Nu Vegas. It smelt faintly of fish. One of the gorillas stood guard by the entrance, while the other went through all the tools they had laid out. There was a patient bliss in his face, like a child looking at a mountain of Christmas presents, and any second it would get to tear them open, one by one. His name was Frank and he liked to torture people. Meanwhile, Sinetti explained each tool, and what it would be used for. “Torch – think I’m gonna use this on your eyes.” “Ohh the bolt cutter. There’s a lot of things you can snip of with these. We’ll probably start at your toes and work our way upwards.” “The hammer. Let’s go with this one. Break his cheating loving fingers.” Frank tossed the hammer and caught it, a flourish he had perfected through many previous sessions. He raised the hammer high above his head, and just when Carter thought that this couldn’t really be happening, that surely the NVPD had him under surveillance, that someone just had to burst through the door and come to his rescue, any minute now, any moment, right… about… now; the hammer went down and there was a sharp pain in his hand. He screamed. They didn’t ask Carter any questions. Inbetween the strikes, he didn’t have much air to talk anyways. When they’d gotten to the thumb, Sinetti interrupted the proceedings. He heaved himself off the tiny stool he’d been watching from, and took the hammer from Frank, who knew better than to betray his disappointment, but would shoot his boss some dirty looks from behind, when nobody was watching. That’s how it was. As an employer, Sinetti believed in getting your own hands dirty. “Wait!” Carter yelled. He shifted around on his chair. “I’ll tell you. I’ll loving tell you, alright?” Sinetti liked it when they broke early in the interrogation. It meant there was more body left for the actual punishment. “It’s my cufflinks,” Carter said. “These things?” Sinetti pointed at the golden aces of spades on Carter’s cuffs. Of course. Nobody would be wearing these for their looks. “Yeah, you need all four of them. Just pinch them with your fingers and turn-- no, not like that, the other way. Don’t pull. Don’t-- alright, they’re a bit tricky. Untie my hands, let me do it.” “Untie you? You still think I’m a loving moron?” Carter had never been slapped across the face with a hammer before. It hurt. “My legs are tied and half my fingers are broken, what am I gonna do?” Sinetti really didn’t want to be played. Nu Vegas was a town of players, and if he’d get played by a 3d6 plebeian the other mob bosses would never let him hear the end of it, and possibly also kill him. But Carter did have a point. He put the hammer down, uncut the binds from Carter’s hands with the bolt cutter, received the cufflinks after some painful grunts and fidgeting about on Carter’s end, kinda slapped them into each other before realizing he had no idea how they worked, and just when he was about to ask, “So how do they work?” Carter smacked him across the face with a hammer. Turns out Sinetti had never been slapped by such a device either. The mob boss went down like a sack of half-digested All-You-Can-Eat buffet articles. Frank moved instantly, but he was a big man, and an easy target for a flying hammer, and then both men were temporarily indisposed, so that Carter reached down and freed himself with the bolt cutter. Gorilla number two was already running his way from the warehouse entrance. Carter knew he would have to deal with that. He looked at a floor full of perilous torture implements. He picked up his cufflinks and ran. Straight to the exit. Gorilla number two was shocked to see Carter running towards him, an escape tactic so unconventional that he, not necessarily the sharpest tool in the shed and thus always on lookout duty, was surprised, confused, and slowed down a little, not sure how best to approach this unusual scenario. Carter slipped past him, putting his cufflinks back on as he ran towards the front entrance, where the NVPD busted the door down and proceeded to arrest everyone inside. At 23.11 Carter was sitting inside the NVPD’s interrogation room. Lt Nickels had brought two cups of coffee and kept them both for himself. He also blew pipe-smoke in Carter’s face. When you were interrogated by Lt. Nickels, there was no nice cop. “Right, so that covers Sinetti and his cronies,” Lt. Nickels said. “But there will be more. People who’ll want to know how you did it. People who won’t buy the bullshit with the cufflinks. And they’ll find you. Keep wearing that suit, they’ll find you. And we can’t protect you from them. Not if you won’t admit to anything.” Carter’s good hand played with the cufflinks again. He looked at his blurred reflection in the table and shrugged. “I really just go lucky. Sorry.” “You know what, Carter?” Lt. Nickels said. “Maybe, just maybe I believe you.” He sucked on his pipe with full force again, holding in the smoke for as long as he could, as if silently counting to ten. “But then gently caress you even more.”
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Sep 5, 2016 03:07
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Classical in North America
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Sep 10, 2016 02:20
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Djeser had to get to this sweet insider info out ASAP there was no time to label the axes or make it pleasant to look at or at least readable (much like his stories)
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Sep 13, 2016 23:39
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what a weird prompt in
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Sep 19, 2016 22:58
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my cat is norris posted:
that sounds pretty lame tbh so are you in or what
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Sep 20, 2016 13:06
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this week is basically a brawl between thranguy and me
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Sep 21, 2016 23:13
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 18:42 |
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lol if you think you can step up to this just lol
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Sep 21, 2016 23:13
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