The 100 Word Stories Podcast

• Richard
• Lizzie
• Tom
• Serendipidy
• Norval Joe
• Planet Z

The next topic is Pulse

RICHARD

Roger
Let me introduce my dad, Roger.
He’s eighty-eight, and can be a miserable git some of the time. Well, an awful lot of the time actually. To be fair, he struggles with getting about, which is frustrating, and with his heart, digestion and a catalogue of other medical issues, who can blame him? I’d most likely be pretty grumpy too.
He does have his good moments though, and playing cards with him is always fun.
I don’t think he’s ever wanted fame or attention: but now, I’ve made him internet famous. Well, just a bit.
That’ll make him really grumpy!

SERENDIPIDY

The great thing with locking flight deck doors is that if the hijacker is already the wrong side, nobody’s getting in to intervene.
That’s why I learned to fly a plane, and now the life of 420 passengers and a dozen crew was in my hands, or as we like to say in the industry, four hundred and thirty one souls.
That doesn’t include me.
I have no soul.
And I have no qualms about what I’m about to do.
Air traffic control are begging me to do the right thing. I listen, but ignore their plea.
Roger, and out.

LIZZIE

Wrench, he said. Roger, she replied. Screwdriver. Roger. Spark plug gapper. The what? Spark plug gapper. What did he mean? She searched the tool box and couldn’t find… what exactly? Quick, the spark plug gapper, he shouted. She looked at him in a panic. The what, the what? And then, it was too late. He had lost his human form. Well, now you know, he said. The spark plug gapper was the code to reset her brain-vision connection. For some reason, it hadn’t worked this time. He would have to complain to management, because he did like his human helper.

TOM

A voice in the darkness

Timmy loved old WWII movies. He would go around the house talking in to a microphone in the most monotone voice: Rodger Wilco Out. Had no idea what it meant, but it sounded cool. When New York fell to Harvesters he joined the resistance. He rose to senior signal operator for the upper Hudson river valley. Timmy’s call code was: Rodger Wilco Out. Late at night some grunt in makeshift recon bunker would hear those words and feel less alone. At the end of the war Timmy learned what the world conveyed: I have received your message and will comply.

NORVAL JOE

When I saw Roger’s name on caller ID, I wondered why he was calling on a Saturday morning.

The person calling was the community service officer from Loomis to tell me that Roger had died in a hit-and-run.

The driver was messing with his phone.

So, he called his wife and said he hit something and needed to hide his car in the in-law’s garage.

Roger was alive when he was found, but he was too severely injured and died at the hospital.

The driver got ninety days. The judge didn’t want it to be a hardship on his family.

PLANET Z

Everybody knows Johnny Appleseed, but do you remember Freddy Chainsaw. While Johnny planted apple trees, Freddy cut them down. Of course, they’re both legends and not quite the real people they represent. Johnny was planting apples that could be mashed into cider and not the delicious ones we eat today. And the chainsaw hadn’t been invented during Freddy’s time, he probably used axes and saws. But the principal is still the same. And the tall tales that preserve their memory, twisted or not, spark, the imagination of children of many generations. And we are grateful that Johnny came out victorious over Freddy .

When the truth came out about Bob, the town was horrified. The class president, the captain of the high school football team, the valedictorian, the most popular kid in school was nothing but a bunch of pillows shoved under a sheet in his bed. Steve, Bob’s alleged, brother, was trying to sneak out one night and his parents caught him and he said oh that’s not me under the covers. It’s your other boy Bob. His parents, both suffering from short term, memory conditions, fell for it. No one wanted to tell them otherwise. Bob got expelled the next day.

Heather was a wild one. She got in all kinds of trouble, and did crazy things. But she never got hurt. Her parents said she must have a dozen guardian angels working all shifts. And not to anybody surprise, she did. And when Heather was 16, the guardian angels went on strike demanding holiday pay in overtime. The archangels passed the buck off to the big guy, and he let it sit on his desk. Meanwhile, Heather broke her legs and arms, and lost an eye in a skateboarding stunt going wrong. After that, she didn’t need so many angels.

The layoffs were brutal. Hundreds of production staff at the media company lost their jobs, while the executives and anchors and star reporters got raises and bonuses to keep them around. Mindy wanted to fight back. She remembered when agencies would send boxes of donuts as a gift to the staff and the anchors and executives would hoard them and admonish the staff for accepting gifts. And they’d eat them. She put on a disguise and delivered a stack of poison donuts to the office. The death toll was massive. The company went bankrupt. And Mindy’s severance was never paid.

Most kids in kindergarten get their art taped to the refrigerator. Alonzo had his art framed and hung in the museum. His parents were curators in. They take down a Picasso or a Cezanne and put up an Alonzo. And art historians and critics and the public would come by and stare at it. Students would write up many doctoral thesis about Alonzo. His rudimentary and Puritan styles were all the rage. Other artists became jealous of Alonso, which only served to keep him in the spotlight. Nothing enhances, an artist like a scandal. He died young from ingesting paste.

When I go for my walks, it’s always amusing to see lawn sprinkler systems and irrigation running when it’s raining. I know it wastes water and its ecologically unsound, but it’s still amusing. I mean it used to be you had to run hoses and sprinklers around and turn them on manually at times. Then there were buried pipes and sprinkler heads that would pop up. And now you have systems that detect if it’s raining or talk to a weather bureau for forecast. As I approach my house, I see my sprinklers are on in the rain. Stupid Internet.

A tornado wiped Hamilton off of the map. The handful of survivors thanked God for sparing them. Little did they know it had been God that had killed their community. The mayor of the adjoining town Bowden regularly conducted animal and human sacrifices to convince God to spare his city. And God would send his wrath to Hamilton. However, the humans and animals the mayor would sacrifice had come from Hamilton, and as the survivors abandoned the runs, another storm was brewing. Nobody wanted to volunteer for a ritual sacrifice. By the time they drew lots, the tornadoes were coming.

Agent 12 accidentally tripped an alarm. The office he was in was surrounded and there was no exit. He didn’t have anything useful in the office that could be use as a weapon to fight his way out. His orders were blunt? Do not be captured alive. He took out a pill from my pocket and looked at it. Then he put it in his mouth and put down on it. He’d heard that the poison would taste like almonds, but it taste like watermelon. Then he wondered. And felt bad for the kid he’d given some candy to.

Insurance auditor checked the statistics of Highway 10 and noticed a dramatic increase in the number of accident claims. He drove down to Highway 10 and didn’t notice anything unusual. No construction, no dangerous on ramps or off ramps. So he turned around and was coming home when he noticed a billboard with one of those codes you scan with your phone on it so he did and promptly got into an accident. When he came to in the emergency room, he picked up his phone. Through the cracked screen, saw the code was for his insurance company’s website.