Author: R.

The World Is My Gym

The world is my gym.
The sidewalk is my treadmill.
And the membership is free.
Sometimes, it’s raining.
Sometimes, it’s hot.
Sometimes, it’s cold.
Sometimes, it’s windy.
But, usually, it’s nice out.
The birds are singing.
I can’t hear them.
I have my headphones on.
A bird swoops past my head, flapping.
Defending its nest.
This happens every day.
I think about bringing a club.
Or a weighted sock.
To stun the aggressive avian.
What if I kill it?
Who would feed the baby birds?
I imagine myself, perched over featherless chicks.
Then vomiting into the nest
Where’s my ladder?

The Statue

We dug up the statue and cleaned it off.
It was a golden angel, and it was perfect in every way.
When was it made?
Who made it?
Why?
It didn’t weigh like it was solid gold. We thumped it and it sounded hollow, but filled with something.
Did we dare open it?
We had it shipped back to the university, and after careful examination, we found an unobtrusive spot to drill.
The hole grew deeper, deeper…
That’s when the poison gas leaked out, and as we choked, we realized it was the artist’s final statement:
Don’t fuck with perfection.

Sense Of Home

The difference between house and home.
Home is where you feel safe. Home is where you belong.
The moment you no longer feel safe or feel you belong, it no longer feels like home.
Afraid. Hurt. Breathing quickly.
Violated.
Add locks, add alarms.
There’s nothing you can add to bring back that sense of home.
So, you go somewhere else. You search for some place safe.
Where you feel like you belong.
It takes time.
Cuts scar over. Bruises vanish.
You stop jumping at every noise.
Eventually, you forget to be afraid, and the worry slowly goes away.
Welcome home.

Get your own ghost!

What are you doing, wrapping your rage in a ghost?
If you’re going to be an asshole, do it on your own terms!
Don’t go dragging their good name through the mud as you bloody your fists on someone face.
It’s disgusting when you wrap yourself in the flag and act all patriotic for profit, but it’s utterly revolting how you exploit the memory of someone who trusted you.
How could you?
What’s even worse is that you didn’t even wait for them to die.
I wish you were dead, because I can’t wait to do the same to you.

Weekly Challenge #272 – “Even in the quietest moments…”

Welcome to the 100 Word Stories podcast at podcasting.isfullofcrap.com. I’m your host, Laurence Simon.

This is Weekly Challenge Number Two Hundred and Seventy-Two, 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 “Even in the quietest moments…”

How about voting for your favorites?

Well, it looks like WordPress 3.2 and the poll system are not happy with each other:

Error: An error has occurred; Poll not created.

Oh well.

And if you want to spam your social networks with this episode, use the Share buttons at the end of the post.

TJ

High school junior Skylar wished to know all that could be known. In his
quietest moments, he wished to command the sum total of human
experience. But he had to start somewhere. He’d programmed a string or
two of code to resemble benign background garble that attached, he hoped
discreetly, to social networking log-ins. He found the wifi hotspot at
the mall to be fertile hunting ground. He tripped a few error messages
along the way, but he was already able to view dozens of pages of people
he didn’t know and who’d never friended him. Next stop, cell phones.

EccentriceRant

***Still***

Sometimes, it isn’t in the bright light of day that everything becomes clear. The truth lurks in the shadows and it comes out at night.

He has been fast asleep beside me, peaceful and serene, for the last hour. I almost didn’t hear it, had it not been for the stillness surrounding us.

“Stella.”

Almost a whisper, barely audible even in the quietest moments like this.

“Stella. Stella.”

“Stella?” A question and a name, but to which I don’t, and can’t, answer.

He turns in his sleep.

Throughout the night, my lips remain sealed. And my eyes, wide open.

Guard 13007

Tick-tock, tick-tock, all day long. The clock went on and on. Slowly, driving me insane, though it seemed quite inane. They asked what were wrong, it could not be too long. Alone with that clock, it was quite a shock.

Words meaningless, I tried to write. Try as I might, the words stayed dull. This I must mull. Even in the quietest moments, the clock still ticked, still talked. It whispers of things to do.

The clock, the clock. Talk, talk. It tells me many things, tells me who to kill. Don’t worry, it hasn’t said your name yet today.

Zackmann

None of us knew what would happen with the computer implants. I wish I had stayed reluctant
to become a first adapter. Everyone thought the company was aboveboard, until the tower sent
a signal that made everyone with an implant walk to the nearest manufacturing plant of Future
Now Robotics Company making them become zombielike workmen, unknowingly making
weapons for the Robot Wars. Thank God the air force blew up the transmission tower.
Now, even in the quietest moments, I can still hear the call, the call of evil, calling me into the
dark, the call of The Computer King.

Tom

I suffer from ringing in the ears. Even in the quietest moments it rumbles on like a distance school bell. Never stopping. Never dropping below a whisper. When people call for a moment of silence they experience a pool of empty calm. A meditative state that somehow triggers an incoming flow of ethereal bliss. What I get is effectively the volume turned up to nine. All I can do is tuff if out fill 60+ seconds with a blinding rotation of random thoughts, happy for the returning flood of world noise that masks the ringing. My world has no silence.

TerrazaByte

I have found that even in the quietest moments, when all that surrounds us has been silenced, there are so many other things still clamoring for our attention.

It’s those noisy little things that we tend to push to the back of our thoughts, thinking that we can deal with them at another time.

They never go away; they just sit there making their presence known… even in our quietest of moments.

So put down that cell phone, close that lid on the laptop and go take care of the little things and your next quiet time will be truly quiet.

Norval Joe

Fly Paper Boy lay on his bunk, fully dressed, still unwilling to believe he was in prison. Vinyl man, just a few feet below on the bottom bunk, wheezed and rasped in the depths of sleep.
“He’s asleep,” he muttered. Even in the quitest moments, when the other criminals snoozed soundlessly, the boy couldn’t stop his racing thoughts.
“This can’t be happening,” he thought for the thousandth time. “I’m one of the good guys.”
“It’s under the porch,” Vinyl man said between snores. “I buried the money under the old woman’s house.”
Suddenly the situation seemed brighter to the boy.

Planet Z

Even in the quietest moments, you have to keep your guard up.

The mad mathematicianess Lisa Common-Denominator is always scheming… plotting…

We allow no paper in her cell.
No writing implements.
Not even chalk. We cannot risk it.

However, she still manages to swipe materials. And use her blood.

A check, on which she’s added zero. “And zero cents.” No change there.

A timer, on which she’s added zero. From thirty seconds to three minutes. Six times longer, not ten.

A calendar, on which she’s added zero.

July… fortieth?

The prison walls rumble, and then I hear the sirens.

Escape!

We Talk

I know it’s impolite to do so, but we talk about you behind your back.
Literally. We stand right behind you and talk about you behind your back.
Oh, you can hear us back here?
What if we whisper. Like this?
Still hear us?
Well, I guess that defeats the purpose of talking about you behind your back if you can hear it.
Maybe if you would lean against a wall and we can talk about you on the other side of the wall?
That’s not the same?
Well, at least our conversation puts your back up against the wall.

Jif Skippy

Girls are not made of sugar and spice and everything nice.
They are made of peanut butter.
You know, If I made a daughter out of peanut butter, I’d name her Jif Skippy.
Because if I made a son out of peanut butter, I’d name him Tom.
No, I wouldn’t name him Peter Pan. Because everyone else making boys out of peanut butter name their boys Peter Pan.
Some use chunky, others use smooth.
I don’t have a preference, as long as it isn’t low-cost generic.
If you’re going to make a daughter out of peanut butter, use quality ingredients.

Resource

The company handbook says that their most important resource is their employees.
Bullshit. When you work for SolarNet Energy, the most precious resource is the orbiting array of reflectors and collectors.
If there’s a choice between you and the array…
Let me rephrase that. There is no choice. We protect the array at any cost.
Any cost.
The previous CEO of the company wanted a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
I said “Dumb idea.”
She insisted. And she accidentally started an electron cascade reaction.
After they pulled out her charred corpse and fixed the grid, I said “Well done, guys. Flip the switch.”

Hostages

Gunshots.
Screams.
Alarms.
Shouting.
Then, after a while, sirens.
The bank job went sour, so the robbers took hostages.
“We brought plenty of water and food for ourselves,” they said. “Either meet our demands or these hostages can starve.”
Pizzas and cokes arrived quickly, but the FBI refused their demands.
“Don’t you want a helicopter?” they asked. “Or a bus to the airport?”
“Nope,” the robbers said. “We want horsey-back rides out of here. We hadn’t had those in years and loved getting them as kids.”
When the situation was over, the FBI had to admit, they had fun, too.

Feathers

She carries the sack full of feathers.
I carry the fan, dragging a long extension cord behind me.
When we get to the Henderson’s, I set down the fan
She opens up the sack.
I turn on the fan.
It’s loud. Really loud.
The strongest one I could find that I could still carry.
She knocks on the door.
But I can’t hear it. The fan is that loud.
I can’t hear the deadbolt turning and the door opening, either.
But I hear the yelling when she dumps the feathers on the fan.
That’s when the feathers start to fly.