The 100 Word Stories Podcast

Welcome to the 100 Word Stories podcast at oneadayuntilthedayidie.com.

This is the Weekly Challenge, where I post a topic and then challenge you to come up with a 100 word story based on that topic.

We’ve got stories by:

• Tom
• Jon
• Jeffrey
• Charlie
• Richard
• Lizzie
• Serendipity
• Duane
• Norval Joe
• Tura
• Planet Z

TOM

Ladies and Gentlemen, Please ….

Rhapsody Hope was a pole dance from Barstow. A perennial favorite of the Marine Corps Logistics Base jarheads. Oorah. The money she earned in her youth paid for her degree at UCLA. The strength she gain server her well and brought home the gold in her back to back Olympic showings. In the end she return to Barstow to work with troubled youths. Dr. Hope exemplifies the best of Bastow, and tonight we call all present to stand to acknowledge her contribution to this city and nation. We confer upon Doctor Rhapsody Hope the Barstow City Council’s Medal of Honor.

JEFFREY

Genetic Washing
by Jeffrey Fischer

In 2017, Iceland announced that it had nearly “eradicated” Down Syndrome. This was a lie. A more accurate description would be that nearly 100% of women carrying a child with the Down gene had an abortion. Delighted with this success, the government “eradicated” hemophilia, cancer, hair loss – you name it. Pregnant women were happy to participate – after all, who hoped for a child prone to teenage acne?

One day in 2037, the government proudly announced the eradication of all “defective” children. The press conference took place in an elementary school, where youngsters had once thrived. Now there were plenty to choose among, as no child had come to term in two decades.

CHARLIE

While tasked with all the washing and pesky maintenance for the summer writing workshop, I was hoping that my downward plummeting mood would be nixed. One little lie, and I would thrive again. There would be joy in my life, and I could henceforth spin only rhapsodic yarns as I did before I joined up with this dull group of radish growers and feet pickers that fancy themselves a writing salon.

I lied and told them that I had been asked to teach at the local university, and my pay would be what I asked for the special, fall workshop.

RICHARD

In memoriam

I won’t lie to you… Since I did away with the other half, contrary to expectations, all the joy has left my life.

Now it’s just one long downward spiral of washing, cleaning and housework – how could anyone hope to thrive on that without something fun to redress the balance.

Things were going nowhere until I discovered an old pair of her nix, tucked behind the bedroom dresser.

I still have to put up with the housework, but it’s much more fun when done to a backing of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, wearing nothing but my dead wife’s undies!

LIZZIE

Letter to Nobody

My eyes roam the land, the short golden grass dancing in the wind as the purple clouds fly away softly, caressing a bright blue sky. A lonely seagull makes its way out to sea while the waves lap gently on the shoreline. I stand against an ancient tree and try not to blink fearful this picture-perfect moment would fade away too soon. I thought the busy, fast-paced life would suddenly gain some sort of meaning. I thought, one day, things would change. They never did. And a picture-perfect lie ends now at a picture-perfect place.
Signed,
Hope

SERENDIPITY

You find me sitting in the darkness, lost in my thoughts, a widening pool of blood spreading from my latest victim.

The tools of my trade – ligature and knife – rest in my lap; their work, like mine, complete.

Whilst I wait, the rain comes, cooling and refreshing; it’s rhythmic patter mingling with the blood, washing it slowly away into the darkness.

It is a perfect moment.

The sound of the rain, the red stain of blood and the calm quiet as the adrenalin slowly drains from my system combine…

I call it my symphony: A rhapsody of death.

JON

Be Careful What You Wish For

By

Jon DeCles

Washing my hands came first, then my clothes, in the hope that the blood would just go away.

It had been a downward spiral ever since my husband suggested we might kill the king. At first I tried to nix the idea, but it began to lie more easily on my conscience. I thought how we would thrive once he had the crown. What joy we would experience. Soon the vision of being queen sang like a rhapsody in my dreams.

After the deed my dreams were not so splendid. My hands felt sticky, and I took to sleep walking.

DUANE

Hair of the Downward Dog

I found a half dozen of those little bottles of whiskey pushed way back in the cupboard. They’d been there about five years.

I finished them off in a few minutes. A warm sensation washed over my body. I felt the tension leave my shoulders and my muscles began to relax. My breathing soon calmed to a steady rhythm. My mind was floating from one thought to the next without getting stuck. For a while all the worries and troubles of the day disappeared. I had a wonderful night’s sleep.

I had forgotten how much better booze is than yoga.

NORVAL JOE

Axelrod took the stairs, downward, to the lower levels of the Galactic Battle Base. Maybe he could find an unguarded airlock and freeze out.
Hope of becoming an Assault Frigate Commander had fled with his poor Astrogation final scores.
There was no joy in daily labor as a mechanic, launch technician, or one of the other menial jobs he’d qualled for. Not like the rhapsody the pilot feels when a frig streaks out from the Base and reaches point-two-eight of light speed or jumps through a gate to a star system light years away.
No lie. Axel’s future looked bad.

TURA

Hope; Downward
———
The elevator doors opened, and I found myself looking down an impossibly long liftshaft. I fell forwards… and awoke on the floor of the elevator, surrounded by anxious, unknowing colleagues.

The vision obsessed me. How large is the world? The elevators never go more than a hundred floors, but one can take another. How far up, or down? How large is the Building, the Universe?

Our scriptures preach a Foundation and a Penthouse, but now I see that these stories are to dull our curiosity, not sharpen it.

I must continue ever downwards, hoping one day to find the truth.

PLANET Z

Medieval life was hard, but Jane had it harder.
Raped by her father, pregnant at sixteen, kicked out of her home.
She stole a tub from a nunnery and took in washing.
When the baby came, she drowned it in the tub and secretly buried it in the cemetery.
Her last hope was to lie her way into that nunnery.
She couldn’t read or write, but she listened to their prayers and songs and memorized them.
Crushed by an oxcart, she died in the road.
When they dug a hole to bury her in, they dug up her baby’s corpse.

Welcome to the 100 Word Stories podcast at oneadayuntilthedayidie.com.

This is the Weekly Challenge, where I post a topic and then challenge you to come up with a 100 word story based on that topic.

We’ve got stories by:

• Tom
• Jon
• Charlie
• Jeffrey
• Richard
• Duane
• Lizzie
• Serendipity
• Norval Joe
• Tura
• Planet Z

TOM

Bodhisattva

Phil liked to drive at night. Less people. He wasn’t much for freeways, liked the city streets and county roads. Wasn’t into speed, just cruising. Rarely drove with anyone. Never saw him with a girl. It wasn’t because he was the anti-social type, hardly, party hardy as any of us. Driving was a deep meditate, he’d say. When blank stares and wobbling eyes met his words, he just order a round of beer, up went the cheers and everyone thought he was messing with them. I was stand outside Dunkin’ Donuts the night he and his car reached total enlightenment

JON

591

The Peloponnesian War, Part Two
By
Jon DeCles

“Now, looky here, Jack, it mightn’t be bad, Athenian women adopting some of the fashions of the Spartan women.”
“Are you out of your bleedin’ mind? We’re already forbidden to even mention their names without consequences! They keep to themselves except when they decide they want us! We have to hire hetaera if we want a woman to talk with. Imagine if, in addition to all that, they start taken’ off their clothes in public! This whole bloody war will turn into nothing but one enormous erection!”
“It’s pretty much like that already, down at the gym,” said Tom stiffly.

CHARLIE

The massive drive whirled away for a week, copying everything from the implant. The chip was tasked to collect the previous year’s data. The data included sound and images. This was the equivalent of storing about three million television shows.

The drive had to be cooled with extraordinary apparatus, including liquid nitrogen and elaborate heat sinks.

After the drive was filled and subsequently indexed, it was shared among the existing female members of the tribe and stored safely away for future use.
Stain McMillen was the oldest McMillen son, and was chosen to care for and maintain the storage cluster.

#2

Stain stored the cluster in the trunk of his Buick Electra. The top weather seal of the trunk had deteriorated and rain and the car wash allowed water to seep into Stain’s car trunk. In a short time, the family data was jeopardized and the danger was not discovered until Stain opened his trunk to check his spare.

Stain panicked, and took the bulky unit to his local computer store for inspection. The cluster was dried and packed in desiccant.

After powering up the drive, the techs ran integrity tests on the data and found everything intact. Thank you, God!

JEFFREY

The Right Prescription
by Jeffrey Fischer

I kept seeing ads for people with “Low T.” They caught my eye. I’m not saying I can’t… you know, but my sex drive hasn’t improved with age. Maybe I did have low T.

Several doses later, I was a new man. My wife didn’t know what overcame me, but she didn’t seem pleased. My mistress wasn’t happy, either, and both my girlfriends, while feigning delight at my regained prowess, were clearly more interested in nights out than nights in.

I complained to my doctor that the drug wasn’t helping. He squinted at the label and switched prescriptions. He said the original was in error. I now get endless refills of Lipton for my low tea. Decaf, of course.

RICHARD

#1 – Safari

You always get one on every game drive… The irritating, know it all idiot who ruins everything for the other guests, makes constant unreasonable demands, and thinks the whole experience revolves around them.

Today’s was the worst… Everyone in the vehicle hated him with a passion.

There we are, surrounded by a pride of lions, and he comes out with the inevitable question: “Are we safe?”

“As long as we stay in the vehicle”

I turned the key, with a secret smile, and nothing happened.

“So what do we do now?” he sneered.

“You”, I smiled, “Get out and push!”

#2 – Interview

“We’re looking for someone with drive and enthusiasm to be an inspirational leader in this company” said the guy behind the desk.

“Are you that someone?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but he cut me off…

“Don’t even answer that”, he barked, “I can tell already you have what it takes. Y’know, I’m going to take a risk – and I’m going to offer you the job right here on the spot”

“So what do you say?”

I placed the parcel on his desk…

“Package for you”, I said, “Sign here, and I can get back to my deliveries!”

#3 – Taxi

“Follow that car!”, I shouted, throwing myself into the back of the cab.

The driver, took off, tyres screeching – “I’ve waited years for someone to say that! So, are you a cop, or a gangster, or what?”

“No questions… Just drive!”

We tore through the city streets gradually gaining on the vehicle in front of us.

Finally, at a red light, I wrenched open my door, flung a handful of cash at the cabbie and calmly walked away.

No idea who was in that car, I’d just always wanted to jump into a cab and shout “follow that car!”

DUANE

Drive

This time I am going to get it done. I’ll finish it and submit it.

But I need a clean desk so I can concentrate. So, I’ll clean my desk and, then, I’ll get it done.

How did this desk get so messy? There sure a lot of icons on my desktop too. Messy. I guess desks and desktops have that in common. I’ll have to clean that up too. Clean my desk and my desktop and then I will get it done.

Okay, right after lunch I’ll clean my desk and desktop. Then I can finally get it done.

LIZZIE

She couldn’t walk but she had a very nice bike. It was parked outside the house and it was covered by flowers, violet, red, blue, and white. And she smiled. The bright colors made her smile. And the bicycle rusted away parked outside the house. Every now and then, she’d look at that bike. She’d close her eyes, and ride it, her legs completely paralyzed, but moving freely in her imagination. Whenever she got home and parked the bicycle outside the house, the flowers would sway back and take hold of her bike, becoming the sole guardians of her dreams.

SERENDIPITY

It was a long drive through the night, during the course of which the muffled thumps from the boot grew gradually more faint, until they ceased altogether.

Finally, in the grey pre-dawn light, I pulled off the desert road and found the spot I’d previously chosen. It was cold, but digging would soon warm me up.

Three hours later, the sun was climbing over the horizon and i was packing away the shovel and brushing the dust from my hands.

That was the potatoes planted… I’d be taking the body home with me to brew into fertiliser for future use.

NORVAL JOE

When I was a kid, my parents saved money on movies by piling us all in the station wagon and taking us to the drive in theater. You paid by the carload and not by the individual person.
On warm summer nights we would sit on the hood of the car and watch the latest Disney flick–like, The Love Bug, The Teenage Professor, or Song of the South.
I saw the beginning of a lot of movies. Since they couldn’t start until it was dark and the sun set around 9 pm, I was usually asleep before the show ended.

TURA

Drive
———
It began with the gene drive. It’s a mechanism to make a gene pass itself to all your descendants, even if you only inherited one copy. It was used against mosquitos, to stop malaria.

Trouble is, those genes can get mutations, like any other. The mosquitos evolved to handle it. Then it got into humans via mosquito bites. It incorporated retroviruses to copy itself between your cells, and learned infectiousness from the common cold virus.

The endgame is something that can turn a crowd into a giant blob of cancer in the time it takes to watch a football game.
———

PLANET Z

In Hebrew School, the rabbi taught us about The Golem of Prague.
“When you put a prayer in its mouth and whisper a name, the golem will hunt down that person.”
Every time I saw a statue, I’d put a hastily-scribbled prayer in its mouth.
“Hymie Schwatrz.” I’d whisper, imagining the fifth grade bully dragged from the schoolyard, kicking and screaming.
But the statues never moved an inch.
So, I put a garden gnome in my backpack, and the next day at school, I bashed in Hymie’s skull.
“It was the golem!” I screamed, as the teachers dragged me away.