Cold Feet

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The last thing you want at a wedding is for the groom to have cold feet.
Or the guests.
That’s why I keep the feet warm when I cater to cannibal weddings.
I made a special tray that keeps them at just the right temperature, but doesn’t dry them out.
I’m sure it would pass the Health Department’s inspection, if cannibalism didn’t throw up a red flag.
Or the fact that this island doesn’t have a Health Department.
Just cannibals.
Either I cater their weddings the way they want, or they will want me.
I’d rather serve than be served.

Printer

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The printer is jammed.
The printer always jams when I need it most.
Somehow, the printer knows I’m in a rush, and that’s when it chooses to jam.
Chooses. Yes, I said chooses.
In fact, I bet there’s a chip in the printer that tells it when I need it most.
It syncs up with the chip in my head. The X-ray resistant chip.
I know that you don’t believe me, but if you’d just let me open up my skull, I’d show you.
It’s not buried deep. Just a little hole, and you can peek inside.
Here’s a drill.

Weekly Challenge #189 – Smoke

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Welcome to the Weekly Challenge Number One Hundred And Eighty-Nine, where I post a topic and then challenge you to come up with a 100 word story based on that topic.
The topic this week was… was…. um…
It’s Smoke!
The excellent theme music is by Guy David.
VOTING

Which stories were the best this week?
Steven
Norval Joe
TJ
JRadimus
Justin
Lynda
Zachmann
Planet Z
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Go ahead and listen to them and then vote for your favorites (multiple selections are allowed):

Steven

The demons came from the campfire’s smoke. Jonah woke at Reyald’s
scream. Boyd slept until Reyald’s head bounced off his stomach.
“Last time I let Reyald stand watch,” Boyd grumbled, drawing his sword.
“You know,” Jonah said as he parried a claw, “I think that someone
wants us dead.” He thrust upward, drenching himself in demon blood.
Boyd dodged a tentacle. “Nah.” He stabbed the tentacle before it
could grab Jonah.
“Thanks,” Jonah replied, pouring holy water on a demon. “But disagree?”
Boyd sliced open the last demon’s abdomen. “Yeah.” He sat down. “I
think someone wanted these demons dead.”

Norval Joe

All Larry wanted to do after High School was join the military. He was big, strong and played on the football team until cancer took his leg.
He liked to smoke Camel no filters. He called them coffin nails. It wasn’t the cigarettes that killed him, though.
He had bi-polar depression. When he didn’t take his pills he could get pretty angry and depressed.
One day he didn’t come in to work. One of the guys went to check on him.
Larry had put a .45 through his head.
Some say he’d quit, given up.
I say he was beaten.

TJ

Winters were the worst, and the best. Sure, we had to go outside and it was cold. But the taste of crisp, frosty air firing a rich, savory mentholated Marlboro light, that was magnificent. It’s been three years, three months, and I can still taste it, the flavors, the feelings, that tingling sensation in the tips of the fingers following the first cigarette of the day, and privation giving way to a sense of instant fulfillment flooding through one’s entire being. Watching the smoke drift away and carry with it all of one’s troubles … GOD do I miss smoking.

JRadimus

With the sun’s rising, the chirps and calls of insects, frogs and birds rise through the forest. Collectively, the dewdrops lend the grass a velvety glow, resolving into tiny diamonds close up. The sunlight mixes with smoke hanging across the meadow; they become solid liquid vapor, and give the shadows crisp 3-dimensional shapes. A doe and fawn wander out of the forest canopy’s cover into the meadow’s openness. The sharp crack of a breaking twig snaps the silence. The doe freezes, ears swiveling and nostrils flaring, alert for the source of the danger, and the fawn bolts instinctively for cover.

Justin

In ancient Japan a young samurai warrior saw smoke upon the horizon. He ran to see what was happening. Upon arriving he discovered a Catholic monk rushing back and forth between the bubbling river and the burning trees with a bucket, extinguishing the flames. When the trees were saved, the monk said that God told him to come to Japan and preserve the certain forest from flames and burning. This happened many more times over the years in that forest. Anytime the trees burned, the monk appeared. The young samurai learned that when there is smoke there is friar.

Lynda

Don’t smoke, she told me. She doused me in gasoline, told me the next cigarette would be my last.
I put arsenic in her donuts. She locked herself in the bathroom for three days.
I offered her a truce. I’d take her out to eat if she let me take a shower.
How could I know she’d been hooking up the bathroom plumbing to a tank of acid?
As I soaked in the cooking oil she was so fond of drinking, I told her she’d have to find another man.
“Did that five months ago,” she said, lighting a match.

Zachmann

Little Betty, Your getting older but you still look good
I wish you would quit smoking.
I don’t like it when you smoke.
I spend all my money on you and I think you should not smoke.
Are you angry with me for driving too fast?
Why are you acting this way?
It’s like you have blown a gasket or something.
Little Betty, please stop smoking and take me home.
I wish you would not act like this.
I fear we will be waiting for the auto club.
Little Betty you’re my true love because
because You are my car.

Planet Z

Early robots would get trapped in Ethics Loops.
Ask them a question or give them a command that caused an unresolvable conflict, and the robot would halt, take on an odd expression, and their circuits would heat up.
If you didn’t purchase an auto-restart or a sufficient cooling system for your robot, you’d have a meltdown.
The late poet Ruby compared the smoke to a soul escaping from the body, released into eternity.
I knew it was an expensive repair. But Ruby kept blowing CPUs
Why? She liked inhaling those “robot souls.” Good for a cheap, albeit toxic buzz.

Pennies from Heaven

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Every time it rains, it rains pennies from Heaven.
Falling like bullets, they pierce umbrellas and shatter car windshields.
Dozens of people don’t make it to shelter and lay in the streets, bleeding or dead.
Birds, too.
After the storm passes, ambulances pick up the injured and dead, and we sweep up the broken glass, tow away wrecked cars, and bag dead animals.
We used to gather up the pennies and head to the bank, but now we bring them to the foundry.
They melt them down for the zinc and copper.
One day, they’ll finish the giant protective dome.

Roller Coaster Therapy

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I have this friend in the hospital that has a unique way of releasing all their frustrations and anger and fears.
They call it “roller coaster therapy.”
You get on a rollercoaster with your therapist, and you spend the next three minutes working out your problems while screaming and waving your arms and getting loop-the-looped.
By the time you get to the end of the ride, you’ve pretty much gotten everything out of your system.
Well, that’s assuming you get to the end of the ride.
Sometimes, they fall off of the sofa.
And that’s why they’re in the hospital.

Thong

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Professor Hastings began his Nobel Prize acceptance speech with a softly whispered “My thong is on backwards.”
I was all downhill from there.
Before Hastings could be subdued, he had stripped off his clothes and was dancing on the podium.
“What category did he win again?” asked a security guard.
“Chemistry, no doubt,” said a hostess, only just now realizing that it was Hastings that had offered to uncork and pour the champagne for the attendees.
Her throat felt warm. Her vision blurred.
And, like everyone else in the room, she started to worry that her thong was on backwards.

Turning Blue

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Tracey shouts that she’s going to hold her breath until she turns blue if she doesn’t get her way.
Fine, I say. Go ahead and do that.
So, she does. She holds her breath and after five minutes she turns a bright shade of blue.
She stares at me, her eyes bulging.
I stare back, sticking my tongue out at her and breathing normally.
“This air sure is delicious,” I say. “Since you’re not using any, all the more for me.”
I walk around, taking deep breaths, sighing with satisfaction.
Tracey’s passed out on the floor, turning pink again.
Dumbass.

Dr. Frankenpizza

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Every evening, after Dr. Frankenstein would fail to bring his creature to life, Igor ordered a pizza and have it delivered to the castle.
“What would you like on your pizza, Master?” Igor asked.
“Does it really matter?” Dr. Frankenstein sighed, sweeping the ashes off of the lab table, mopping up blood with a rag.
“Right, Master,” said Igor.
Thirty minutes later, a knock on the castle door.
Igor carefully sneaked behind the delivery boy and brained him with a club.
“Will this one do?” said Igor.
“Certainly,” said Dr. Frankenstein, smiling.
“And about the pizza?”
“Ugh. I hate pizza.”

The Death of Walter

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Walter ran with a tough crowd.
They were the Boston Mafia, jogging through their Framingham neighborhood in the morning, bodyguards forming a protective cloud.
Once, Walter was out jogging on his own, and he crossed paths with that Mafia group.
The bodyguards checked him for weapons, recognized him from the travel agency, and invited him along.
Now, in an era of online airline reservations, Walter still got steady business from this group. Cruises and extended vacations, a little something extra for a private villa for a week.
And Walter never testified against them.
They killed him anyway.
It’s only business.

Weekly Challenge #188 – Impact

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Welcome to the Weekly Challenge Number One Hundred And Eighty-Eight, where I post a topic and then challenge you to come up with a 100 word story based on that topic.
The topic this week was… was…. um…
It’s Impact!
The excellent theme music is by Guy David.
VOTING

Which stories were the best this week?
Steven
Norval Joe
TJ
Justin
Zachmann
Anima
JRadimus
Katharina
Planet Z
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Go ahead and listen to them and then vote for your favorites (multiple selections are allowed):

Steven

In 2012, the whales told us they were intelligent.
Then they told us they were causing global warming.
My roommate giggled as the whale songs were translated into the
details of the libertarian Federation of Ceteceans. He laughed harder
as the whales revealed their ongoing plan.
Carbon dioxide was the first step. Next, they would free methane
trapped at the ocean floor, spiking the temperature and turning the
Earth into… well, the Water.
“That’s horrible,” I said.
“Don’t you see the irony?” he asked. “They’re libertarians. They
don’t believe in environmental impact statements!”
I thought I could smell salt water.

Norval Joe

“Mr. Caldwell, you need to take responsibility for you actions,” the social worker had told him, just before they released him from the city jail. “You have a wife and children who want you to come home. You had a well paying responsible job. You can’t just walk away from those things.”
The words had no more impact on his mind than the cold, wet, mist that beaded on the old, filth encrusted, army field jacket.
“Responsablity is a curse. I have all of it I want,” he muttered to himself as he shuffled away down teh dismal empty street.

TJ

In the airlessness of space there’s no real sense of immediacy. People dismiss the concept of a clockwork universe absent a caretaker, but in all reality, the supernovae responsible for forging our uranium, gold and lead spun out a disc of heat and dust some 4.5 billion years ago. There was the smash that gave us our moon, then we were nudged gently into place by one or two genocidal meteors until one day, something that’s just been silently zipping along out there all this time presents our more curious primates with a dazzling lightshow and an “Earth-shattering kaboom.” Oooooooo.

Justin

“Knock-knock, it’s Johnny Copperwire!”
“Hello there Johnny, and Dex, good to see you! I’m working on this Numbing Ray. It will revolutionize the use of anesthetics in medicine and dentistry!”
“Sounds capital Professor Winston, can I try it?”
“Sure, I’ve stand there…”
“Dex’s mother isn’t going to yell at me for this, will she?”
“Now, touch your face, feel anything?”
“Nope, nothing. I can even slap myself over and over and I don’t feel anything at all!”
“It works!”
“You mean you’ve never tried it before?”
“Oh, good point. I’ll power it down… feel anything now?”
“Owwwwwww, my face hurts!”

Zachmann

I started to wonder what the impact on my life would be if I read a print book since it has been a long time since I read a book.
1) Would I pick the right book
2) Would it affect my writing
3) Would I be able to read some of it at work
So I picked a book thinking if I was not going to write a book I could read one.
1) Started reading
2) Brought to work and it had impact as it fell on wet pavement
3) Should have expected problems since book was CURSED

Anima

It’s a simple question: Paper or Plastic? Little did I know what impact my actions could have.
Choose paper, and I destroy the rainforest that holds the answer to the cancer that I now carry, unbeknownst to me. I also cause 7 people to lose their jobs; Chose plastic, and I am a heathen that honors the wishes of big oil, sucking on the teat of megaindustry. If I tote everything home in the bag that I wove out of the hemp fibers I harvested, I risk living a life of criminal farming, and of being too politically correct. ARRRGH!

JRadimus

Wind whips past his ears, thundering out everything but the snapping of his nylon suit. Pure exhilaration: that’s why he dives. Kyle never tires of the initial thrill of leaping into open air. But that thrill was immediately crushed by an icy horror tearing through him. He had pulled the rip cord, but nothing had happened.
The mental impact of his new reality would be nothing to the physical impact of the ground’s reality, now rushing unnecessary, unwanted detail at his eyes. He whispers a prayer, hoping being closer to Heaven will help. He grips the emergency cord, and pulls.

Katharina

I remembered this feeling… It was like a wonderful memory, so amazing that it almost felt unreal. This overwhelming feeling of excitement and tension was creeping up behind me. Oh, I knew exactly what it was.
My hand reached carefully behind me, unsure what it would grasp. Even though I expected naked skin, it still shot an electric shock through my body.
“Turn around”
I felt my feet being swept away.
The force that I hit the bed with took my breath away.
Still, it was nothing compared to the sheer force of the impact he had entering me.

Planet Z

The team chartered a luxury jet from an Dubai businessman, who was once a high-flier but now looking to make a quick buck to repay some shady loans.
The players sprawled on the sofas and lounge chairs, throwing footballs around and laughing.
“This is way better than that shithole that’s sponsoring the Super Bowl,” said the coach, holding a glass of brandy and a cigar.
Except that hotels don’t crash.
Everyone died on impact.
The league declared a forfeit, Vegas paid off big for the underdog.
And the businessman bought a smaller jet with his winnings and insurance settlement.