Water Flows

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If you insist on looking back, fine – Let’s all look back.
Water spreads in the ocean.
Water flows down the river.
Water runs through the sewer.
Water runs down the pipes.
Water collects in the drain.
A teardrop rolls down a face, falls into a drain.
Another. And another.
A painful memory recalled.
Drinking a glass of water.
Water flows into the glass.
Water flows through the pipes.
Water flows through the treatment plant.
From your perspective, it’s a painful memory.
But the water doesn’t know or care.
It just flows from place to place, unaware of what it does.

Salt and Pepper

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Her collection started simple – a dog and a cat. The dog held the pepper and the cat held the salt.
Then, she got a bride and groom set. The Bride’s dress used to be as white as the salt inside it.
Year after year, shelf by shelf – the shaker collection grew.
They kept her company in her old age, surrounding her with gleaming beauty.
When she died, she asked that her ashes be poured inside the shakers and her house turned into a museum.
Instead, the ashes were lost at the mortuary, and the shakers are sold off on eBay.

The H Word

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“To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Ever hear that?
I have. And I saw something similar to it carved into the bathroom stall: “To the man with a tree and a rope, everything looks like a nigger.”
Disgusting, isn’t it?
Know what’s worse? It’s carved into the bathroom stall of a church.
My church.
I close the Bible and look up from the pulpit.
“Which one of you fuckers wrote that?” I shout.
They stare back. Nobody responds.
Oh well. No sense beating a dead horse.
Potluck Sunday, you know.
Pass the potato salad, please.

Atlantis Rises

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Poseidon raises his mighty hand, oceans boiling with rage.
An ancient land rises from the deep once more.
“Atlantis,” growls the sea god. “How long has it been since I saw you fall?”
He wanders the water-logged streets, rotten wood and cracked piles of marble that were once stores, homes, and temples to his glory.
What was once beautiful and majestic, left in ruin by time.
Poseidon weeps, lowering his hand. The lost continent is lost once more.
He wonders aloud if he’s done this before.
Oh, Senile Sea God, like your temples, how the ages have ravaged your mind.

I’ve Got Spurs

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I’ve got spurs that jingle jangle jingle.
I wish I didn’t. Damn things are a dead giveaway for a cattle rustler.
They used to belong to a rancher, but he tried to catch me rustling his cattle and-
That’s right. I heard the spurs from a mile off.
They looked so nice, couldn’t leave them behind.
I should have sold them off, or dug a hole and buried them.
The Rangers have me pinned in this canyon. It’s night, but I can’t escape.
Bullet in my shoulder, bleeding slow.
I’ll die with my boots on.
And these damn, noisy spurs.

Weekly Challenge #62 – How I spent my summer inside a Turkish prison

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Welcome to the sixty-second Weekly Challenge, 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 selected by Tom of Footnote: How I spent my summer inside a Turkish prison.
The excellent theme music is by Guy David
Go ahead and listen to them by clicking on the grammophone thingy there in the left column and then vote for your favorites (multiple selections are allowed):

Which were the best stories of Weekly Challenge #62?
Rocky Torok of Edloe Island
Jenny of The Bloggess
Caleb from Black Tie Martini Club
Guy David from Guy David dot com
Tom from Footnote
Houston Keys from Tater Tots For The Masses
Daphne from Going Broke
Chris from Platypus Society
To4m from Tom’s Podcast
The Ghost of William Z. Burroughs
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com


WE GOTS PRIZES:
I will be sending the winner a prize… it’s refrigerator magnets for the podcast. Massive amounts of fridge magnets were mailed out in the past week… watch your mail, and let me know if I’ve missed you.
It is your voting that determines who wins. So listen, vote, and tune in next week to find out who won!

ROCKY

The charge was cruelty to farm animals. I was sentenced to 6 months in this facility. So far it hasn’t been so bad.
I have met a lot of pretty nice people. Over there, that’s Snake. We have a lot in common. We both love cats. We traded recipes.
That guy over there is Big Willy. He doesn’t say much. He must be a clean freak because he spends most of his free time in the showers.
Hey look! There’s a shiny quarter. Someone must have dropped it. They say here, finders keepers, losers weepers..
Right Big Willy? Big Willy? BIG WILLY!!!!

JENNY

Dear mom and dad,
When you said I should summer at Gramma’s house in Turkey I figured it
would be good for us to spend some time apart after the tensions of last
semester.
I realize you’re disappointed that I failed Algebra II. Most parents
would ground their child or take away their phone but I’m pretty sure they
would not plant a kilo of heroine in their kid’s suitcase and then warn
the Turkish officials that a dangerous drug mule would be arriving that
day. Oh and wrapping the drugs in my report card? Nice touch.
You guys are assholes.
Love, Karen

CALEB

It’s no spring picnic spending your summer vacation inside a Turkish prison. The falafel is just awful. The kefir inspires fear. And the baloney sandwiches aren’t very good either. Knowing all this, I decided to win the hearts and minds of my fellow inmates and smuggled in a nice hard sausage for them. Of course we had to hide it from the guards but everyone enjoyed my sausage so much it wasn’t like being in prison at all. Honestly, I can’t wait to go back next summer. Just so long as I get to go to a women’s prison again.

GUY DAVID

I was hungry. Really hungry. I know you’re supposed to save the turkey till Christmas, but it was my summer vacation, and I was in Turkey after all, so it somehow fit. I was just about to put it in the oven when I figures I forgot to put the paprika, and, that I didn’t actually have paprika in the first place. Fortunately, I had a very nice neighbor next door, so I told her the whole story, only, somehow she heard the word “Turk” instead of “Turkey”. I spent the rest of my summer vacation inside a Turkish prison.

TOM

Last year Mom and Dad took us to Disneyland. It sucked. It was phony and silly and the food was really really bad. Dad said he was tired of our bitching and moaning so he said we would be going on a real vacation this year. We had to choose from three fun filled packages. The Shank Shaw Redemption Road Gang Experience, Escape from Alcatraz Marathon Swim and the Midnight Express Turkish Delight. I voted for Burning Man, but we went to Turkey instead. The best part of the trip was Kat Steven’s inmate concert. Folsom Blues in Arabic rocked.

HOUSTON KEYS

No privacy, no peace.
It’s like work without the cubicles. I was pleasantly surprised that the man with the rubber glove was amazingly gentle.
So how did I get here? Who really knows? One minute I’m watching “What’s my Filafil?” and the next I see a woman without a burka. The entertainment police bust in and BLAMMO!
The good side is my mustache is growing in nicely and the torturous screams of my cell mates provide a nightly soundtrack for insanity.
So once I get out I’ll recommend a Turkish Prison to all my friends. Along with the carpets, those are really, really nice.

DAPHNE

Mom said I needed a summer job. It would build character and make some money for school. So I took a job working for my Great Aunt at her turkey farm. I fed the turkeys, cleaned up the barn when they were out in the yard and made sure they had water. One morning I got them all out to the yard and was sweeping up after them when the door to the barn closed. I was locked in.
And that is how I spent my Summer Vacation in a Turkey Prison.

CHRIS

Last year, Shawshank prison was selected to take part in a prisoner exchange program with other prisons around the country. Having earned the warden’s blessing after doing his taxes, my good friend Andy Dusfresne was one of the first prisoners selected for the new program.
But there was a mix-up; instead of going to Anchorage, Andy wound up in Ankara at a maximum security Turkish prison, where he was repeatedly sodomized by packs of horny Turkish bull queers. It was September before the mistake was realized and Andy was brought back home.
That was the longest summer of his life.

TO4M

Ok So I forgot smuggling hash was against the law. I saw Midnight
Express but that was years ago. During the summer in prison I learned
a lot of things. Grubs and water are a good meal once you’ve forgotten
about cheeseburgers. Daylight is overrated. So are showers Stench is
the new Axe . A great way to entertain yourself is to take maybe 10 or
12 dead cockroaches (or snacks as I called them) and toss them to the
cell’s silent darkness then spend hours finding them. It wasn’t so
much fun when they landed in the chamber pot.

WILLIAM Z BURROUGHS

April 14th, 1965
Lincoln died a hundred years ago today.
I have ingested half of a Turkish street market, snorting swirling iridescent powders, rubbing quivering jellies on my flesh, quaffing elixirs from ornate vessels and inhaling ancient magical incense. The cops descend upon the bazaar like a plague of locusts, wrestling me to the ground.
To struggle is futile. But I do so anyway, hurling bodies from me like a wet spinning pinwheel hurls away the damp.
A truncheon falls, and all… goes… black.
The devil inside me pulls at the bars of his prison cell, screaming and belching flame.

Thanks to everyone for sending in their stories, and I look forward to what you’ve got to write (and say) next week.
The theme for next week’s Weekly Challenge will be posted shortly.

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Blue Ear Wax

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Everybody knows you’re not supposed to stick a cotton swab down in your ear canal to dig stuff out, but we all do it anyway.
You gently swirl it around in there, even though eardrums will rip no matter how gentle you are.
The cotton swab comes out and…
It’s blue.
Usually, you can expect some yellow or tan ear-wax, but blue?
What could you have stuck in your ear that was blue?
Why don’t you remember?
Do you dig in there deeper?
Do you call the doctor?
Or…
This is why there’s cotton at either end of the swab.

The Trail

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I walk the mountain trail, my rage builds as I pick up each and every empty candy wrapper or soda can.
This path was once beautiful, just a simple trail winding its way upward.
Then, someone got it in their mind to simplify it and pave it and stick vending machines at either end.
The trash barrels are always full, so every so often the wind blows off the top layer of trash back into the trail.
It’s quiet right now, just before dawn. There’s a faint breeze blowing through the leaves.
Pretty soon the tourists will come.
Damn them.

Childhood Squid

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When I was little, my grandfather took us to an old-fashioned Merry-Go-Round. It had hand-painted horses and lions and elephants and…
And a squid. A bright purple squid, its tentacles waving about, and its beak snapping along in time with the calliope.
My brother and I would fight over who’d get to ride it. My grandfather wasn’t much help, because he was Old School. He thought kids ought to fight over such things.
It took thirty-five years, but I’ve found that squid. It’s in a museum.
Keep an eye out for the guard, dear.
It’s my turn to ride now.

Spotters

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The last time I went to the beach, there were lots of watchtowers along the shoreline.
In every watchtower was a spotter, looking over the ocean for swimmers and surfers in danger.
The moment they spotted one, they raised the alarm.
Pretty soon, every watchtower raised their alarm, too.
Then… nothing.
“Don’t you have any lifeguards on duty?” I yelled up at the tower.
“Lifeguards?” yelled a spotter. “We’re too busy spotting. Besides, the public is all about perception of vigilance, not action.”
Since then, I’ve stayed the hell out of the water.
But then, so have the spotters, too.