He walked down the street, head down and diagonal to his current direction. Every now and then catching dim reflections of himself in the windows of parked cars. He patted and smoothed his hair, clinging to fragile perfection.
Just then a gust of wind blasted it into disarray.
He cried.
Will Dawson is an art student from Reading, UK.
“How long do you think it’s been since the waitress last stopped by our table?”
“I dunno. Twelve minutes?”
“Wrong. Try nineteen.”
“Wow, really? Nineteen minutes?”
“Nope. Try thirty-seven.”
“It definitely hasn’t been thirty-seven minutes.”
“True. You don’t have to keep guessing the numbers I’m suggesting.”
“…I hate this game.”
“Taco chips taste just about as exciting as being in Mexico would be.”
“That is a ridiculous statement,” said Angie.
“I don’t think so,” said Alice. “I’ve been to Mexico, and it wasn’t very exciting.”
“This is probably the lamest conversation I have ever transcribed,” said Harold Garfinkel, the ethnomethodologist.
His cold silhouette was hunched over. He wasn’t even enjoying his cigarette. It was like a chore to him. He took his stabs at it quickly while he paced around on the balcony.
He always blew the smoke upwards. This was probably the only time his eyes looked towards God.
Charlie Dunn is a college student who also wrote Full Count and Tracer Bullet.
The big grey wolf was very lonely, but its howling scared away all of the other woodland creatures.
One day it came across a chubby little baby bunny, which had gotten lost after a farmer killed its family.
The bunny and the wolf became BFFs. No one got eaten. Yay!
“Which way is the wind blowing now?” sneered the chimney to the weather vane.
The weather vane just waved left and right a little.
The chimney huffed grumpily. “You cost ten bucks at a hardware store, but you act like you’re made of gold!”
It was the height of vanity.
Our Hero stood resolute in the middle of the rain-soaked, corpse-littered asphalt.
Zombie earthworms.
They inched closer, exuding sinister inevitability, crushed, broken, bloated, wasting away, and hungry.
Our Hero calmly set a bowl of oatmeal on the ground, flavouring it with his own blood.
That should keep them. For now.
I asked, on Twitter, what I should write a fifty-word story about today. @dotsam wrote, “Saving the universe with a bowl of oatmeal.” @RacoonResidue wrote, “Zombie earth worms.”
Valerie the vegan decided to spend a week eating nothing but baby carrots and drinking nothing but water.
After one day she felt funny.
After three days she felt strange.
After five days she felt weird.
After seven days she felt… orange.
That evening, while she was sleeping, she sprouted.
Evan Edgelow punched Timothy Thicke in the face. Hard. “TELL ME WHAT I NEED TO KNOW!” he screamed.
“I don’t know anything!” choked Thicke.
“Just tell me and I’ll stop!” shouted Edgelow. “You have my word!”
“I didn’t take your candy bar!”
“Oh, it’s in my pocket,” said Edgelow. “Sorry.”
The only difference between this torture scene and any given torture scene in 24 is… Well, nothing, really. Marginal justification? Check. Personal relationship or history with the victim? Check. Unrealistic success rate? Check.
Claude and Clod watched as the farmer scraped the floors of the barn with the tractor and pushed the manure into a pit.
“He looks sick,” mooed Claude. “Think his milk has gone sour?”
“Don’t try to assign a cow’s traits to a human,” mooed Clod. “That’s just plain foolishness.”