Author: R.

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:

• Richard
• Charlie Lacrosse
• Lizzie
• Serendipity
• Tom
• Jon
• Norval Joe
• Danny
• Paul Camp
• Planet Z



RICHARD

Mavis

Mavis plays the pipe organ in church every Sunday.

She’s not particularly good, but the vicar won’t let anyone else try their hand, despite having a few candidates who could play equally well, if not better.

There’s Albert, who was a music teacher; Henry, who plays keyboard on a Friday night at The Smokehouse Blues Bar; and Jake, who’s young, but can play better than most twice his age.

We reckoned the vicar just didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

Until we discovered the vicar’s own ‘pipe organ’ was also getting the Mavis treatment in the vestry before every service!

CHARLIE

When I went to South Africa to shop for my organ, I brought Bessie with me. I trusted her enough to help me pick out the organ I would have the rest of my life.

She was not a stuffy, snooty type. She would pick one out that was simple, not ornate in any way, and she would tend to pick something that was practical and easy to maintain.

We arrived at the showroom and the director took us into the private display salon.

There were about a dozen on display. A couple of them had mirrors reflecting several views.

#2

If you have an aging organ, you have several options: 1) rebuild the existing organ; 2) replace the organ with a suitable electronic substitute; 3) purchase an entirely new organ; or 4) make do with a compromised tool.

Trading in an existing organ for an electronic substitute can be much like tossing out an heirloom gold watch bequeathed by your grandfather and replacing it with a Walmart 6 dollar watch. Most organs, even those neglected and in greatest need of repair, have parts of considerable value to someone.

The pipes, casework, console shell, and many other components never wear out.

LIZZIE

When we arrived for dinner at the neighbors, a man was playing a song on an old pipe organ. One of the notes was off-key, but he played on. When the host invited us to go outside, I was happy to escape that torture. The problems started when she explained that they needed meat and that they took some of his organs . I was shocked, and was about to ask how he could even play when I felt a sharp blow to the back of my neck. Officer, do you think this scar is what I suspect it is?

SERENDIPITY

I’m all in favour of organ donation, but I do think that it’s a shame so many die because the demand for organs so frequently outstrips the supply.

So I thought I should do my bit to solve the problem. I’ve been working on growing human tissues in the lab, with some very encouraging successes to date, I’ve even managed to create a functioning human kidney!

You see, I’m not all bad.

I bet you thought this was going to be a story about harvesting organs from unwilling victims, didn’t you?

That’s just a hobby I pursue on the side!

TOM

Even Educated Fleas Do-s It

Birds got this organ that lets them know exactly where there are in space. You’ve seen Humming Birds target a space that was once a red feeder and hoover there in surprise. Well modern science has discovered a logic organ in male humans. It seems a matrix of Y-chromosomes somewhere north of Mr. Happy and bit south of the hippocampus is responsible for mid-level discord processes. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have dubbed this new structure the Y-organ. The triggering mechanism is the sound of the female voice. The response is a long string of the word: WHY WHY WHY.

JON

Bach’s Royal Instrument

By

Jon DeCles

The organ is the biggest, most powerful instrument ever built. Pipes from teeny tiny to pipes 28 feet long. In San Francisco there is an art gallery that is one gigantic organ, the pipes inside the walls. Churches tremble as if in earthquake when the mighty organ sounds its orgasmic chords under fingers and pedals. People who have only heard the organ recorded are like those who have read pornography but never had sex. Properly played, the organ can make you tremble right down to your core.

That’s the very kind of big-piped, powerful, orgasm-inducing, mind-shattering organ that I want.

NORVAL JOE

A dozen students, including Billbert, gathered around Roderick as he put his feet through the holes in the grocery bag and pulled it up.

“Watch this.” He put his arms out like superman, jumped forward, and belly flopped in the dirt.

The kids wouldn’t have laughed harder if an organ grinder with a dancing monkey had suddenly appeared.

Fuming, Roderick got to his feet, tore off the grocery bag, and threw the shreds of plastic on the ground. He walked to Billbert and slugged him in the stomach.

“I think he ruptured my spleen,” Billbert said, watching Roderick stomp away.

DANNY

Jezebel was a musician, who liked to make instruments out of human organs and body parts. There were the Bagpipes made of lungs, piano keys made from bones, piano wire made from hair and muscle, and his favorite, a harmonica made from a larynx. Jezebel would bring his grizzly musical instruments to the town square every Saturday, where the crowd favorite was his portable Organ made solely out of organs. It would make disturbing squishy sounds with every key he hit. “What on earth does that sound like?” most would ask. I don’t know, but it sure does sound expensive.

PAUL CAMP

Time For the Game

“Daddy, why do they call it the Organ Trail?” The game is about to start. I mute the car radio.
“The Organ Trail?”
“You know, with the covered wagons.”
“Oh, sweetheart, you mean the Oregon Trail. Oregon is a place.”
“No, Daddy! Mrs. Lindholm says it’s the ‘Organ Trail.’
Who am I to contradict her first grade teacher?
“It’s because the Indians would cut out everyone’s hearts and livers. You know, their organs.”
A look in the mirror of horrified silence. We can straighten this out later. I turn up the radio. This is going to be a great game.

PLANET Z

People settled Red Creek about two hundred years ago.
They built houses, a school, and a church.
More people arrived. And they built more.
They raised money for a pipe organ for the church.
Wells Fargo wagons brought the pipes and machinery out to Red Creek.
But the assembly instructions somehow got lost.
Instead of waiting for a new copy to arrive, the town blacksmith did his best to put the thing together.
At the celebration party, the pipe organ exploded, killing everyone in town.
Wells Fargo paid the newspapers to cover it up and call it a meteor strike

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:

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



JEFFREY

Relax
by Jeffrey Fischer

The past few weeks had been very stressful for me. An internal audit and the loss of a big client had left me edgy and irritable. My friend Mack, sensing my tension, proposed a weekend trip to go fly fishing. “Trust me, you’ll never have been so relaxed in your life.”

That’s how I found myself in a freezing stream at 6 a.m., casting a rod adorned with colorful plastic into the water. Three hours later I was in the same spot with nothing to show for it beyond my increasing frustration and perhaps some frostbite. I snapped my rod in two, did the same with Mack’s, and threw our gear into the stream. “You’re right,” said, “this *is* relaxing. I should have done this hours ago.”

RICHARD

#1 – Leave it to the birds

If we were meant to fly, we’d have been given wings and feathers. Unfortunately we weren’t, so those crazy Wright brothers came up with the mad idea of creating the aeroplane.

C’mon… I don’t care what the laws of physics state, there’s something incredibly wrong about five hundred tons of steel and aviation fuel defying gravity and taking to the skies.

I’m dead against it – people were not meant to fly, and nothing you can argue to the contrary will change my opinion.

So, you might ask why it is I love flying so much.

Two words: Free booze.

#2 – Fly!

As a child, I always wondered what it would be like to fly. Stories of Peter Pan inspired dreams of flitting above the rooftops, soaring through the clouds and sailing through the misty air.

And then, one day, I met the gypsy woman, and fumbling with the few coins I had saved from my pocket money, I whispered her my most fervent wish.

That night, as the moon rose above the horizon, so did I, and it was everything I’d dreamed of, and more.

Sadly, that was the only time.

And I shall never fly again.

Landings are a bastard!

#3 – Ecology

I watched the fly struggling in the web outside my window, and felt the stirrings of compassion.

Perhaps I should intervene and set the poor thing free?

But then the spider would go hungry; and maybe the bird that would have feasted on the spider would go hungry, and so on, right up the food chain, until we reach the ultimate apex predator… human beings.

And we can’t have hungry humans, can we?

Ecology is terribly complex.

However, that’s not the reason I left the fly struggling in that web.

I left it there, because I really can’t stand flies!

CHARLIE

A fly has been buzzing around the inside of my window, opposite my desk. It managed to avoid a scrap of flypaper pinned to the sill. It’s big, and I think it’s a male. The male is smaller than the female and the genitalia looks darker, blunter, untidier, and more convoluted.

If and when the fly gets stuck to the flypaper, I will take it outside and do my best to free the fly, using disposable gloves and plastic tweezers.

I will release it above a steaming pile of dog crap, so it can find nourishment after its stressful ordeal.

#2

When I was a lad, I dressed fly. I was the picture of sartorial splendor and a model for the hippest and most sought after style in the city.

I sewed many of my own garments, learning how to make patterns by tediously disassembling my favorite shirts, jackets and trousers. I made patterns, bought fabrics and piping at a large fabric store, and stitched things together with an antique, treadle-powered Singer.

People would ask me where I bought my clothes. I told them they were original, and I made them. I was offered cash, trades, and drugs for my wardrobe.

TOM

Pretty Fly For a White Guy

Technically Elvis Presley was fly before fly was fly. Clothes from Lansky’s moves from Chuck Berry. Pat Boon would take decades to catch up even with a Big Mama” Thornton kick start. But you got to give credit where credit is due. Back stage at the T.A.M.I. Show in 1964 Mick Jagger is watching the Hardest Work Man in Show Business kill it on stage. He the Stones go on next and Jagger pretty much steals every move James Brown made. Keith Richards said of the moment, “the biggest mistake of their careers.” You just can’t out fly James Brown.

LIZZIE

“The photo’s really bad. Where’s this?!”
“I don’t know. But this is where the hot air balloon is.”
“I can see that… Do you have any other irrelevant information to volunteer?!”
“There’s a lighthouse on the photo.”
“I can see that too… What else?”
“Nothing… Except those red leaves.”
“Special leaves?”
“No. They’re quite common.”
“Then, we have nothing.”
“Nope.”
“Why did you bring me this photo then?”
“Because at the back someone wrote the coordinates.”
“And you waited this long to tell me that?”
“I just hate negative people.”

SERENDIPITY

Isn’t this just amazing?

I know you’re nervous. Who wouldn’t be nervous before their first jump? Some would say you have to be more than a little crazy to throw yourself out of a perfectly good plane at thirteen thousand feet, with nothing but a thin sheet of silk to stop you from hitting the ground below at terminal velocity.

But I know you, and that you’re not at all crazy, not even a little bit.

There’s no way you’d jump out of a plane with only a parachute to save you.

Not that I packed one for you anyway!

TURA

We burst out of our cocoons in our new bodies, rise into the air, and scatter. Our throng is more numerous than I can grasp. But each must strive to outdo the others, and find a mate to receive our payload alone.

I sense how much energy yet remains. I have no mouth and cannot feed, but I must not fail. At last I detect an unmated target. With my utmost effort I expend my last reserves, and at the end I achieve consummation.

The drone swooped down from the sky and exploded in the centre of the enemy outpost.

JON

I believe I can fly, and in dreams I know I can. The problem is the aerodynamic imagination.

Some people, when they fly in their dreams, fly with their arms outstretched at their sides, kind of like wings. Some with their arms stretched out in front of them, like Superman. If you are in the dream time, you never see anybody flying the other way, the way that is not your way.

If you do, you lose faith and you crash.

I heard when you hanglide you cease to dream of flying.

Now I fly for real and don’t crash.

NORVAL JOE

Sitting in the back of the bus, Billbert thought he was home free, until Roderick climbed on. Though the bus was crowded the bully made straight for him and sat.
“Give me that bag, or you’re going to fly out the window of this bus,” Roderick snarled.
When Billbert hesitated, Roderick pulled his backpack from his hands and rifled through the pockets until he found it.
Dragging Billbert from the bus at the next stop, Roderick held the bag in the air and declared for the rest of the students to hear, “This bag is going to make me fly.”

PLANET Z

We walked through metal detectors, got patted down, and were escorted into the conference hall by bodyguards.
More bodyguards sat in a row in front of the podium as celebrities shouted about how much they hated the NRA and demanded gun control.
So, I shouted “GUN!”
All of the bodyguards quickly pulled out their weapons and scanned the crowd, and then… there was a shot, and another, and then…
The bodyguards were shooting each other.
Instant panic. Celebrities rushed the exits, but they were locked.
“SEE HOW WE NEED GUN CONTROL!” shouted someone.
A shot rang out, and they screamed.