When Grace asked me out I was already in the limousine pouring gin, feeling her fingers on my cheek. That blood-red dress—like she was poured into it and some splashed on my skin.
Later I saw her kissing Alex. People said she played games. I thought it was love.
This story earned an Honourable Mention, with a $10 prize, in the Mere 50 Words contest.
When you’re in love, everything looks like a butterfly.
That was Barry’s experience, at least. He’d just met The One: she was beautiful and smart, and she had an amazing voice.
Unfortunately, Barry discovered, not everything was a butterfly, and blue jays like him can’t digest candy wrappers very well.
The helicopter buzzed over the city like a truck-sized mosquito.
“I can see my house!” cried little Jeremy.
“You’ll never see it again if your parents don’t pay up,” grunted one of the masked men.
“You want money?” said Jeremy. He gave them his allowance, and they let him go.
It’s Friday. I hate Fridays.
Some Fridays I have nothing to do, so I sleep through lunch and gag down cheap booze at the diner all evening.
Today, I have a job. It’s a freebie. I hate myself.
She’s a brunette. Thinks her husband’s lying to her. She’s probably right.
It was so oppressively hot outside that I could’ve fried an egg on my forehead (so long as I was wearing a camping stove as a hat and had a tank of propane and some matches handy).
So I went inside, turned on the air conditioning, and took a nap.
“You should try to write more neatly,” Miss Gillian said to Little Joey. “I can’t read what you wrote!”
“It’s a secret language!” said Little Joey. “I call it Scribblinglish! I just scribble something, and it turns real!”
“Very imaginative,” said Miss Gillian.
Teacher-eating flying killer whale, wrote Little Joey.
After the incident, they told him riding the merry-go-round would give him some needed perspective, but so far the only discovery he’d made was that yes, you can throw up when your stomach is empty. (He’d also discovered he kind of liked the taste of bile, but that’s another story.)
Grampa rolled his rocking chair back and forth, back and forth.
He rubbed the twin barrels of his shotgun with the polishing rag, up and down, up and down.
He spit a wad of chewing tobacco into a jar, stood, and said,
“Missy, don’t you never–ever–kiss no boys.”
When the smoke cleared, she felt… different, somehow. Her skin tingled, her biceps bulged, and when she squinted at her hand she saw right through it!
“Wow,” she thought. “I should choose a name for myself. Glory Girl? The Menacer? Peace Defender? Hot Commodity?”
She decided to stick with Melanie.
“Ow! Oooooow!! Ouch! Ooh… Aah… Huuuaaaah… OH!! Woooow… Whoa! Aaaah! It burns! Eeeeek! Aaaaargh! Nyyyuuuurrgh… WWWAAAAAAAAUUGHH!! Hoooly mother of painburgersssss… GRROOOOAARGH IT HURTS SO BAAAAD!! No, why, why!?!? Ooow!! Never again! I swear on your grandmother’s grave if you ever even BHAAAAAUGH!!! OW OW OW!!”
“…I said I was sorry.”