“Yaarr! Where’s me rum?!” cried Captain Chubbeard.
He looked in his hammock. He looked on the poopdeck. He looked in the treasure chests. He looked behind the bulkheads.
His rum could not be found.
He asked Mister Scurvey, who said, “I think you drunk it, Cap’n!”
And so he had.
There has been a little bit of confusion over the copyright system as explained on the Submissions page. I’ve clarified some of the language a bit and tried to make the system a bit more transparent.
Essentially, any story you submit to the site, whether via email or in a comment, becomes the property of www.FiftyWordStories.com. If that story gets posted to the site, it is copyrighted by the site under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. This means that anyone is free to repost the story elsewhere, so long as they give credit to Fifty-Word Stories and to the original author.
However, the story is still the property of Fifty-Word Stories, which means that if you submit a story and don’t put any extra limits on its use then I have the option of using it in a retail compilation or a calendar or however else. (If you don’t want me to use your story that way, then please say so when you submit it. I will definitely accommodate any requests of this nature.)
Also, the site’s ownership of submitted stories is non-exclusive. That means that you are free to repost your submitted stories elsewhere, so long as those other locations do not claim exclusive rights and recognize that Fifty-Word Stories has the right to use the story, as well.
Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about this process! I’m definitely not out to steal anyone’s work, and I don’t want to confuse anyone about how I intend to use submissions.
Thanks,
Tim
They stood back to back, gripping their handguns nervously, surrounded by a leering ring of well-armed henchmen.
“We’re so going to die!” Thicke sputtered, his eyes clouding with tears.
“Hush!” commanded Evan Edgelow. “No one is dying tonight!”
He paused, looked around, then grinned eagerly. “Ok, I take that back.”
His face was covered in bumblebees.
“Lookit me!” he shouted. One of the bees crawled into his nasal passage. “I’m gonna be the first human honeycomb!”
I shook my head. He was really stupid sometimes. “It won’t work,” I told him. “You aren’t hollow.”
We solved that problem easily enough.
It was raining.
I had spent years dreaming of and working towards that day. My creation was blood, sweat, and tears mingled with iron, wires, hope, and steam.
I had great plans for the technology I had built. I was all set to change the world.
But it was raining.
I sit here, tense. The clock counts down my last seconds. My fingers fly, in a flurry of keystrokes. I have only a moment to complete this final task. Hammering the keyboard, I execute the command.
I head home, and my computer shuts down behind me. The day is over.
This guest story comes from Matt Wiggins. Matt is a member of LoadingReadyRun, an internet sketch comedy group that updates with a new video every Monday.
There was a cowboy in my closet.
I told him I had to store my clothes there and he was going to have to stay somewhere else, but he laughed.
“Why do you need more than one set of clothes?” he asked me.
And that’s why I never go shopping.
George slaved beside a roaring fire, a wild look in his eyes.
“Fool me once, shame on you,” he mumbled, dripping sweat as he steadied the anvil.
“Fool me twice, shame on me!” he cried, swinging the hammer above his head.
He held his creations high. “WHO’S THE FOOL NOW!?”
“This is a massive, worthless pile of junk.”
“Don’t call my priceless rare collectibles ‘junk’!”
“They’re only ‘priceless’ because no rational-minded, intelligent person would ever agree to pay money for them.”
“Hey! I paid money for them!”
“And you’re incredibly, unbelievably stupid. Thank you for making my point for me.”
After evading terrorist capture, two men checked into a backwater motel using pseudonyms.
“Are you married?” Timothy Thicke asked Evan Edgelow.
“No,” said Edgelow. “Everyone I get close to ends up dead.”
Thicke thought about this. “You wouldn’t call us… friends, would you?”
“Not really.”
“Thank goodness,” said Timothy Thicke.