Weekly Challenge #844: BLOCKER

Sleepy

RICHARD

Dunno!

“That’s cheating!”

“What do you mean, cheating? It’s a perfectly legitimate use of the word!”

“Yeah, hardly in the spirit of things is it? ‘Detective Jim Blocker was the precinct’s finest cop…’ If the prompt had been ‘hashtag’, would you call him Detective Jim Hashtag? Of course not. Just make the effort, will you?”

“I’ve tried, but I just can’t come up with anything.”

“Well, if you ask me, that’s just a copout! If you’ll excuse the pun.

The thing is, when you have writers’ block, you can’t give in. You’ve just gotta find a way to remove that blocker.”

LIZZIE

“The bike?”
“Yes! She took it. She says the oddest things. She listens to what I say and reorganizes everything in her head only to spit out sentences filled with hatred. And she says one thing one day to say the exact opposite the next, but swearing she never ever said what she said first. She is crazy. So, I blocked her. There.”
“I wasn’t talking about her. And I said blocker, not block her.”
“Oh… Well, I suppose I’m a pop-up blocker then. She won’t pop up in my life again, that’s for sure. Sadly, neither will my bike.”

SERENDIPIDY

Desperately, I flushed a third time, only for the water to rise perilously close to the top of the pan, whilst the offending, massive, pipe-blocker, obstinately refused to disappear.

I weighed up my options: I could just admit my crime, but that would be goodbye to any second date. Escape through the bathroom window? No, that was plain stupid.

And no way was I going to attempt to shift it by hand.

Only one thing for it.

I returned downstairs to my date.

“I’m sorry to say this, you won’t believe what your sister left in the toilet bowl!”

NORVAL JOE

Not wanting to be late for class, Billbert got to the scoreboard well before school. Sabrina’s eyes lit up when she saw him and broke off from other students standing in a cluster.
Billbert held up a hand. “You’ve never explained why physical contact is so important for your magic use.”
She shrugged. “Fair enough. It clears away the parascomps. Their like beta blockers and prevent the reuptake of magical energy expended the previous day.”
Billbert looked at the other student who only held hands. “Okay. But why kissing?”
Sabrina wrapped her arms around his chest. “Because I like it.”

PLANET Z

The Walther PPK was James Bond’s gun.
Bond started with a Baretta, but Q suggested that he switch to a PPK.
And you know boys and their toys.
Elvis gave the guy who played Felix Leiter a gold-plated PPK.
And Elvis himself owned a silver-plated one.
It’s the gun he shot his TV with when Robert Goulet totally botched the national anthem.
Many armies and police use it today.
You’d think it was some kind of hero’s gun.
Did you know it was Hitler’s sidearm, too?
He shot himself with one.
Good. Bad.
It depends on the hand it’s in.

Reduplicated

Wally hated reduplicated words.
Born in Walla Walla, Washington, he moved to New York, New York.
He refused to play with his yo-yo or go out for putt putt golf.
When he saw a cheerleader with a pom-pom, he’d tear the things up.
When he saw someone with a mahi-mahi, he’d jump on the fish.
When he saw Pizza Pizza at a Little Caesar’s restaurant, he burned the place down.
When he saw someone dancing the Cha Cha, he’d trip them and break their legs.
The cops arrested Wally, he was convicted, and sentenced to ten years in Sing Sing.

George and the wigs

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Still, he did his best, and sometimes, well, he’d manage to win a fight.
The only thing more shocking was his ransom demand: all the officers’ powdered wigs.
He’d bring the wigs to the hospital and hand them out to patients who needed them.
Well, not all of the wigs.
Some had powder burns. And bloodstains. Ew.
George had lots of leftover pirate bandanas, though
And the kids looked cool in them.
The adults, well, maybe cooler than that guitarist, Steven Van Zandt.
Because, seriously, that dude looks creepy.

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Pool parties

Ned threw the best pool parties.
All Winter long, it’s what we all looked forward to.
The deck, the furniture, the firepit, the landscaping.
The sound system and the lights.
It’s better than any Downtown club.
All Summer long, the party never ended.
Until it did. Ned and his family moved.
New people moved in.
They had kids our age, but homeschooled.
We tried to introduce ourselves, and they were polite, but shy. Almost reclusive.
We offered to throw the parties for them.
No thank you, they said.
Jenny has a pool. And throws parties.
But it’s not the same.

Favorite day of the week

If you ask people what their favorite day of the week is, most would reply with Friday.
Very few replied Monday.
You know, because it means going back to work. Or School.
Dan liked Sunday.
“It’s because of church,” Dan said.
But it wasn’t the confessionals. Or the choir.
Or the church softball league.
And the potluck brunches, those were truly awful.
They taught choking and CPR classes after those, they were so bad.
Dan put a dollar in the collection plate.
And took out a twenty.
“My favorite day of the week,” he said, putting it in his pocket.

Bad craftsman

They say a poor craftsman blames his tools, but Bob was a really good craftsman.
His neighbors were always borrowing his tools and not returning them, and they were always borrowing the good tools, so Bob was stuck with his worn-out bad tools.
One day, he got fed up with everyone not returning his tools, so he made a list and went door to door, smashing in skulls with a hammer and taking back his tools.
By the time the cops came, Bob had all his tools back.
In prison, he worked in the wood shop.
Building really crappy furniture.

The ship went down…

The ship went down, and Max was the sole survivor, washing ashore on an island, surrounded by the bodies of his shipmates.
He gathered up all the driftwood and vines he could.
And he made a raft.
A sail tied together from clothes of his dead shipmates.
Getting a sense of the currents and waves and winds.
Raising the sail and setting out, he vanished into the horizon.
That night, a ship found the island he’d been on and collected the bodies.
“I guess there were no survivors,” said a deckhand.
Maybe the heat stroke made Max dream that up?

Weekly Challenge #843: ANYWHERE

Also, Ed is inviting everyone to contribute to his site Edwardian Times, which is a great opportunity for more ways to express and create. Head on over there and check things out, and let’s all have some fun and challenge in crafting more imaginations.

Floopsy

TURA

Anywhere
———
“Where shall we go for dinner?” I asked.

“Oh, anywhere,” she said airily. But strolling through the restaurant district, she turned up her nose at every place we passed. “Anywhere” seemed to be a rather narrow category.

“It had red upholstery!” she shrilled. “It looked like a McDonalds!”

“And really, Turkish-Siberian-Japanese? The eclecticism is killing me!”

“‘Austrasian’? That means mediaeval Central Europe” (I didn’t know that) “so it’ll all be huge plates of Eisbein mit Sauerkraut and anachronistic potatoes.”

Eventually I just chose a place. But when the waiter came to take our order, she said, “Oh, anything.”

LIZZIE

Anywhere was a town in the middle of nowhere. Life was tough.
One day, a stranger came into town. They didn’t like strangers.
“Anywhere a man can sleep around here?” He asked.
No one answered.
The next day, he was gone and he never came back.
However, he left a thank you note and a stone.”Bury it.”
And they did.
A year later, they heard some noises, dug up the stone, but it had disappeared. Instead, they found a tunnel with thousands of precious stones.
The… stone… had hatched and people began to think that perhaps strangers weren’t always bad.

RICHARD

Anywhere

“Where to, guvnor?”

“Oh, I’m not really bothered, it’s my first time in London. Take me somewhere you’d like to go. Anywhere will do.”

The cabbie craned his head round to look at me, a quizzical look on his face.

“Well, if you’re sure?”

I nodded, “Yes, this is all a new experience for me”, I laughed, “I’m placing my fate in your hands!”

Half an hour later, we pulled into the driveway of a suburban house.

“That’ll be twenty quid, guv.”

“But, where exactly are we?”

“Somewhere I wanted to go mate – home!

You can get the bus back!”

ED

Anyone from Anywhere

Charlie’s mind was blank. Well, not completely. He knew how to walk and talk. But he couldn’t remember anything that mattered to him, or to the people around him. They all had answers they wanted, but those answers were not coming now.

Maybe they would; maybe they wouldn’t.

The doctors, nurses, and people who said they were family told him he had been in a motorcycle accident days ago while heading home from work. “Your body is suppressing the trauma,” he was told. “You have amnesia.”

As far as Charlie knew, he could be anyone from anywhere. It was unsettling.

SERENDIPIDY

The young man wound his window down and beckoned me over.

“Excuse me, we’re a little lost, can you tell me where we are, please?”

He passed me a folded map, and I leaned down to peer into the car.

I could tell they’d been arguing, the woman in the passenger seat wore a tight-lipped expression, and you could almost feel the tension between them.

I handed back the map.

“It doesn’t matter where you are” I said, “but, you really want to be anywhere, but here.”

Then, I pulled out my pistol, and shot him in the face.

NORVAL JOE

I guess I need to address the elephant in the room.
Has anyone seen Tom anywhere? I mean, what could possibly go wrong when you live in the dry hills around Clear Lake, California.
Did he take a trip to Planet Z?
Did Tom get sucked into a black hole, or maybe through a worm hole to a thicket in Yorkshire?
Maybe we can ask Cervantes or Ford. Maybe he’s sought refuge amongst the Canadians.
Regardless of the reason, Tom, I want you to know your absense has been noticed.
So, good night America, and all the ships at sea.

PLANET Z

With a laptop and a phone, they say I can work from anywhere, but there’s some limitations.
I’ll need to be able to recharge the laptop and phone, obviously.
Can’t work if the batteries are dead.
I also need to be able to access the Internet at a reasonable speed.
I can’t work from underwater. The laptop and phone would have severe issues.
Nor can I work while skydiving. It would keep meetings brief, but even with noise-canceling headphones, the roar of the wind would be too loud.
And there’s no way in Hell I’ll ever move to New Jersey.

Good fences

They say that good fences make good neighbors.
So, would the best fence make the best neighbor?
I bought the best fence on the market and had it professionally installed.
I was shocked that the neighbors complained.
Unlike their cheap wooden fences, I had spared no expense with my fence.
Twelve feet high, with sustainably-sourced electricity flowing through it.
And powering the motion-sensing spotlights.
Topped with the finest stainless steel razor wire.
There’s no pleasing some people.
I raised the drawbridge and ordered the household help to boil pitch and tar on the stove.
In case the ungrateful riff-raff returned.

A chore not to think

When I get stressed, I do chores.
It’s my mind’s way of trying to find order in the chaos.
To stave off the entropy, just to keep my hands busy.
Vacuuming the carpet, washing the dishes and putting them away.
Running a few loads of laundry, putting things in the drawers or hanging them up in the right order.
Tee shirts, overshirts… sorted by color, of course.
Pairing socks. Even though they are all the same.
But especially the bed, getting that top sheet and the pillow cases and the fitted sheets in place.
And the litterboxes, fresh and neat.