Short story challenges
Alice:
Title: The World's End
Word: jelly
The World's End
Smothering strawberry jam jelly on his small slice of French loaf bread, the way they used to do back when she was still alive. They used to just wait out rainy days and watch the clouds go by, her soft, slender legs touching his, the wooden floor bare with nothing but their warmth.
As the earth started to crumble in front of him, first the mountains, those peaks he used to see every day, slowly sinking down underground until it couldn’t been seen anymore, and then the desert before it started falling, the sand falling down in such a continuous rate, that it reminded him of the waves of the ocean, when oceans still existed, when Earth didn’t start imploding upon itself, sucking everything in due to the black hole created by a curiosity in silence, one that will probably, eventually, suck the whole solar system in, maybe even the whole universe itself, if given enough time and chance.
But, still, even with the world ending in the way it was, he still couldn’t get her off of his mind.
Her last words were to keep smiling, to keep laughing and believing that with everything down, there must be an up, there must be a rainbow at the end of every rain.
Chewing on the piece of bread, the strawberry flavor swiveling on his tongue, he smiled.
Everything that begins must eventually end, but that doesn’t mean that it all have to be miserable when it ends.
Zyvienna:
Ooo~!
You're good -
ok, ok, I also have one for you
"Manual Guide (into an): Assasin's World" - word to use...uhh...let's see..."Trigger"
I want action! Whenever you're ready.
Manual Guide (into an): Assasin's World
The click resonated through the empty art gallery, announcing to himself and the bastard just a few feet down the hallway that he had reloaded new clips into both of his guns, telling the other guy that unreturned shooting range time had ended again.
“You know that everyone has a trigger inside of them,” that bastard yelled, his voice echoing on the now almost empty gallery, the picture frames all shot up or already crashed on the floor, the statues all shattered into pieces and huge dents, even the walls and columns are full of bullet holes from the gunfight itself. “Everyone has something inside them that makes them able to perform things that nobody else could have believed you could do.”
“Really?” I screamed, as I blindly shot towards the column he hid behind, as I quickly shuffled myself onto another column across from it. “Tell me more.”
He laughed at it, knowing pretty well what I was trying to do. “What we do is not that unusual, you know? It just another job. Another way to pay a bill. Another way to survive.”
“Right.” I blind shot again, jumping in closer to him.
“It is just the way the world works.” He continued. “We have to kill a living organism in order to live ourselves, so if you think about it this way, this is really not that much different at all.”
“So what you’re saying is that this is normal?”
“Yes.” He said. “As long as you can accept that, you’ll be fine, everything you do will be fine.”
“That’s bullocks, you know that?” I said, spinning out, shooting towards him.
“I know, but it makes it all sound so much better.” He smiled, spinning out of his own cover, blind shooting as he tried to get closer himself.
shesilia_agnesti:
wonderful...
okay here it comes...
title : root of insanity
word: simple
Root of insanity
It is quite easy, quite simple, indeed. You just kind of take a man or woman, either gender can be as easily bend, help them to reach the goals and dreams and all the things they ever wished for, all the beauty that the world can offer if it tried, if it wanted, if it could.
Give them that, let them enjoy and roll themselves in all the joy that they could get, that they could absorb, and watch them at the happiest moment of their lives, at the best that they could offer, the best anybody could offer.
And that’s all that you need, all the first half of the whole fun.
Just like all the best of jokes, it takes a while to set up, to get the momentum, to get the audience all riled up.
Before they could realize what had happened, before they could figure out where they were really at in that moment in their lives, you take it all away, you destroy everything they thought they had, everything they believed held.
You can smile at the moment, maliciously, benignly, whatever creeps those lips up into a curl of satisfaction.
And with that, you move on, to the next one, and the next one, and the next one again and again.
This is how you break mankind.
This is how you reach to the root of insanity.
Mbr:
Title: Made not to care
Word: sentimental
Made not to care
Feeling sentimental, even though he knew he shouldn’t, Mark felt weird.
He shouldn’t be feeling that way, because of all the chemicals that should have been leveling even his emotions, because of all the neutral colors and feng-shui items placed around in his environment, because of all the therapy that should have cured it all these years ago.
Yet when the song came on, the one they used to hate, the one whose video used to be plastered all over MTV and any music video show on television, he remembered, he felt something beating inside his heart.
He had forgotten her name, he had forgotten even what her face used to look like.
She was there, somewhere, somehow, yet he could not recall the way she used to be, the way she used to sound, the way she smelled when they awoke naked on Sunday mornings.
Feeling his breath taken away, he didn’t really know why, he wasn’t even sure why he felt sad, lost, forgotten.
In those seconds, as the chorus of the song went on, the backup singers tuning in symphony with the main singer, he could feel the tears somehow escape from inside of his eyes, somehow slip its way down near his nose, somehow blend its salty taste onto his lips.
That’s when he knew, that’s when he broke down.
All the memories shouldn’t have cared.
shesilia_agnesti:
Title: Hurting each other
Word: friendship
Hurting each other
Grace looked around nervously, her head swiveling back and forward between the windshield to the side windows to the back, as Trent felt the sparks as he tried to hotwire the car, these old models easier to break into than the newer ones, yet still hard enough for the amateurish hands that he held.
“Hurry up,” Grace almost screamed, her fear evident in her tone. “Hurry, hurry, hurry!”
“It’s not like I’m sitting around sipping tea, you know?” Trent retaliated as the engine finally roared into life, sputtering as if choking on its intake of fuel and oil.
Sputtering the tires into gear, Trent twirled the wheel with no effort.
If it wasn’t for their long history friendship, Trent would have already ran away and refused Grace’s crazy plan, her crazy way to get back at the government, her own crazy way to show her alliance to the rebellion group.
With the remote controlled detonator beeping its red light in the back seat, Grace looked at the rearview mirror nervously, fear gasping as she asked “you sure nobody followed us?”
Breathing “you sure everything is alright?”
Trent shrugged and just calmly drove the car around the streets.
“So what are you going to do when this is over?” He asked, his tone and emotion not changing.
“Don’t know.” She answered. “Is there ever a plan conceived for after the plan?”
Trent smiled. This was the way she was.
The bomb blinked on, they drove closer to their destination.
She was the spark that led to his evolution.
Mbr:
Title: iPhone, gold or silver?
Word: constitution
iPhone, gold or silver?
Jake hated iphones, he hated seeing them around in everyone’s hands, as if one’s constitution were based on whether you had one or not, as if everyone’s soul was connected to one and we were all leashed by it through its porcelain white headphones.
Now it got even worse, as they started releasing the upgraded, premium versions of the iphones. Gold and silver, the ones for the selected ones, the ones for those rich enough to afford its high tag of over a thousand dollars for one.
They were worth it, he guessed, if you were into that sort of things, for the iphones were made with a heart of gold or silver, depending on the version that you got, and that heart would actually beat if you chose it to do so, pumping on and on as if it were alive, as if it were trying to deceive you into believing that it was alive, a pet, something that wanted to become someone.
Feeling curious, he eventually waited around till he saw one, one carried by some wanna-be hip guy with a scarf in the ninety-two degree afternoon, walking around displaying it as if he held the power of the universe in his hands.
He wasn’t so powerful when Jake beat him up in a small alleyway on the side of the street, taking the iphone and running away from the victim.
When he was finally away, Jake tore the cursed apparatus and tried to take the heart out.
That’s when he realized why the iphones were so expensive.
Inside the iphone, there was an actual heart of an animal, the fake silicone blood pumping through the circuit arteries and veins, the green color of it almost enough to make Jake puke.
In order to make something into gold or silver, they tore the heart out and kept its soul in a case.
In order for us to make something gold, we sacrificed a life just to see it beat to our rhythm.
shesilia_agnesti:
how bout
title : sunflower beside my head
word: capacity
Sunflower beside my head
The wind blew through her hair as the car flew through the last tunnel of the road, the one that felt the longest because it was the only one of the tunnels without a light in it. It always felt like going into deep sleep when they drove through it, without lights on, plunging into a darkness that was darker than the night that had preceded and succeeded it.
When the light hit them, at the end of the tunnel, as it momentarily blinded them, reminded them that they were still awake, that they were still alive, they would always rub their eyes as if they were just waking up, as if the day had just came by.
He sucked the blood that had dropped from her thumb, a cut accidentally when she tried to snap down the sunflower outside their garden, their ex-garden, their ex-house.
When you have nothing else in this world that could be used to keep a roof on yourself, you run and leave everything behind.
She smiled with her eyes closed as he did so, her blood tasting sweet and salty, like cherry syrup mixed accidentally with a pinch of salt.
She laid the sunflower between them, she said that they’ll eventually eat the seeds when they need them, that the sun that the flower had absorbed to full capacity would liberate them from their depression, just like a sunlight piercing through the gray rain clouds.
She felt the wind through her widespread hands.
Mbr:
Title: last wizard of Alaska
word: inflation
Last wizard of Alaska
With the inflation of the cash bills pumped into the economy in order to boost economy itself, people seemed to have gone back to the way their lives were before they were laid off work, before they were losing their jobs and unable to find any, before they realized that life truly, truly sucked.
It was as if nothing had happened at all, it was as if they’d either already forgotten about it, or had just pretended that it had never existed in the first place.
People drove their cars even though it was ten dollars a gallon. People bought milk that were almost twenty dollars per gallon. People drank and ate their life away at restaurants every night and noon and whenever hunger stroke them.
The only thing people didn’t seem to get back to, was playing wizards and dragons at the University of Alaska, a club that once had an almost fledging number of members, almost close to fifty.
Most of them left Alaska once they realized that the money was elsewhere, most of them left the club when they were forced to work at jobs they hated because their parents had run out of funds.
Looking at the empty room, waiting in his costume, the president of the empty club sat down on a hard folding chair, waiting, hoping.
Maybe, just maybe, someone would come in and play dragon to his wizard character, play a threat against his magical prowess.
Maybe, just maybe, he won’t be the last one waiting in the room when this all ends.
Wildpenguin17:
here is my challenge to you--
title: Where is Japan?
word: bottle
Where is Japan?
Floating around in the glass bottle, looking over the little circular opening at the top, Luther the roach wondered how much longer it would take for him to finally reach Japan. He was on the movies and television shows those giants played and saw the wonders and different cuisines that he could be enjoying if he was just scattering around the sinks and kitchens here and there in the land of the rising Sun, yet he really didn’t know how far it was to even get to that country, or how much longer he could hold up.
He had horded as much food and droplets of water that he could find, loading it into an empty glass jug that used to contain wheat beer, before waiting for the rain to wash up and dump him into the storm drains, which eventually met the river, washing out to the sea in a day or so. It had been a wonderful trip with great sights that he’d never seen before, but once he reached the sea and went past the shores and the pecking crazy sea gulls, the sights had disappeared and all that he could see was waves and waves of ocean, the sun and the sky and nothing else.
Still, he was sure Japan was there somewhere, that he would eventually reach it if he stayed longer.
Just a little longer.
He just had to try.