Welcome to the 100 Word Stories podcast at podcasting.isfullofcrap.com. I’m your host, Laurence Simon.
This is Weekly Challenge Number Three Hundred and Twenty, 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 avoid bursting into flames, pet rock, circus, who let the dogs out, and butter.
And we’ve got stories by a lot of people:
William R. Davis-Kenmore Swipe
Thomas
Colonel Terrance
Pamala
Tura
Chris Munroe
Tom
Logan Berry
Serendipity Haven
Lizzie Gudkov
Bonchance and Sevi
Zackmann
Dionysus
Guy David
Danny Dwyer
Cliff
Norval Joe
RedGoddess
Planet Z
And if you want to spam your social networks with this episode, use the Share buttons at the end of the post…
Obligatory cat photo:
The more people see this on Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter – the more explaining you’ll have to do with your loved ones, coworkers, and parole officers.
ELECTRIC BICYCLES
His usual mixture was 27% bright Virginia, 15% Cavendish, 10% Latakia, and the rest, pencil shavings, gun powder and selenium.
He smoked an antique Meerschaum once smoked by Gertrude Stein. Resplendent in his tailored, velour-cuffed, smoking jacket,
young Mr. Thomas was the epitome of culture, class, and achievement until he was caught by the pistol-wielding security officer
last week, stealing ladies’ underthings off the clotheslines and sniffing the seats of bicycles parked in the garage. Embarrassed
and bringing shame to the Thomas family, young Mr. Thomas took his own life by sucking on the exhaust pipe of his father’s Bentley.
THOMAS
His usual mixture was 27% Xylene, 10% isopropyl alcohol, 20% acetone, and the rest, liquefied petroleum gas. He spent his working day cleaning graffiti from public property. The taggers were brain damaged skateboarders and grammar school gang members. The Central Foxpups was the oldest gang, but the Middleschool Jezabels was coming up strong. They used 4 inch paintbrushes and epoxy paint for tagging, and they traveled in packs of nine. There were five painters and a lookout for each compass direction. They could paint a park bench or a city truck in five minutes, wielding a brush in each hand.
##
The new president, a total whack job, proposed a flat, 27% income tax for taxpayers making less than 15 thousand a year. The people were up in arms, so he raised it to 16 thousand a year. Those making over the amount were to pay in flesh. A pound of flesh would pay half your taxes. Three pounds paid the income tax and earned a year of satellite TV. The underground formed, and meat lockers at military installations were filled with tax payments. The mystery of the disappearing “underclass” was never solved and along with it, their flat, 27% tax.
COLONEL TERRANCE
Kenmore was an endorphin junkie, and the son of a very rich family in Piedmont Hills. He spent the winter sledding the alps,
popping frozen grapes and sipping martinis as he traversed the hills in a monogrammed bobsled. His sled runners were waxed
with a mixture of 27% beeswax, 15% unborn mink oil, and the balance, baby fat harvested by Falun Gong practitioners.
Kenmore Singewick Puttiterd had no use for ordinary people – especially the poor and disabled. He employed full time
servants to gather, plastic wrap, and dispose of his bodily waste, just as his friend O. did, in Montecito.
PAMALA
Stretching and groaning from the pain of decrepit bodily muscles, which occurs on this side of the age- hill of life the marathon from bed to kitchen looms constantly on the daily horizon.
Getting a cup of coffee and trying to awake, falling into the kitchen chair to again face the nemesis of that horrific ceiling spot. It was a past spaghetti dinner explosion that shot straight up. Four months that spot has continued to laugh at my inabilities.
Today was an epiphany and a solution with a light weight mop. Small successes equals age Olympics.
TURA
After global warming, the oxygen crisis. We learned in school that the atmosphere’s 21% oxygen, right? Twenty years ago it was. It’s 22 now. So old folks get to breathe a little easier, nothing wrong with that? At 24% you can’t fight city fires. At 26, you see long-term health damage: blindness, strokes.
No-one knows why it’s happening. Humanity’s grown so big, everything we do bumps up against something, like Alice in the White Rabbit’s house, but we still know almost nothing about how the world works.
At 27%, it’s the end. All the vegetation will burn until it’s gone.
MUNSI
Team meeting, everybody.
Here’s what’s happening. Sales are down, industries change, and we’ve got to change or we’ll be left behind.
So, I’m trimming the department budget by 27%.
To prevent layoffs, wages and benefits will be cut by 27%, and your retirement packages will change to reflect this.
Thanks in advance for your co-operation.
Huh?
No, my bonuses won’t be cut. They’ll grow, due to my skillful crisis management.
But that’s not important. What matters is, nobody’s fired, and we’re sharing the sacrifice.
This is good news, we’ve really accomplished something today!
We’re the few, the proud.
The 27%
TOM
Case of the Amber Rose of the Amazon
“Watson mind the body draped over the ottoman.”
“But Homes where am I to sit?”
“There is a sinister force afoot.
What does a tuck on an ottoman tell you?”
“I have no place to rest my feet”
“No, we must parse the subtle relationships of
the terms and arrive at their precise meaning.”
“Well, a tuck is a tuck is a tuck.”
“Just as a rose is a rose is a rose.”
“Clearly Miss Stein is at the center of this affair
but my mind fails me, a 27% solution is in order.”
LOGAN BERRY
When I was eight, me and my best friend Stephen broke into a neighbor’s house. We were looking for cash. Not a lot of cash, but enough to buy a bowl of French fries at Bud’s Grill. We looked in all the obvious places (on top of the dresser where my mother kept coins, and in the cupboard by the fridge where Stephen’s mother kept change), but our take was precisely nothing.
We liked the neighbor-victim, Mrs Davies, and were horribly remorseful when she found out about our crime, and told us with sad eyes that we couldn’t play with her daughter Anna anymore. My parents were furious, and I endured a month-long grounding and united demonstration of disappointment in me, their eldest daughter.
Stephen’s mother cried. And his father, before giving him a beating, said “childhood criminals are 27% more likely to serve prison time as adults.” He was always a total dick.
SERENDIPIDY
You may laugh, but consider what it’s like being me!
There I was: just a few hours old and, as my mother slept in her hospital bed, dad twiddled his fingers, growing increasingly bored.
Turning on the TV, he flicked to the news channel, smiling broadly at the news of Facebook’s stock flotation… hurriedly scribbling some figures on a spare scrap of paper, his smile grew broader still!
He nipped out for a coffee.
The Registrar arrived to collect my birth registration. Reading it, she frowned, shrugged and filed it away.
And that’s how I ended up named, ‘= 27% Profit!!!’
LIZZIE
“How much is 27%?” the kid asked.
“As much as it sounds,” his friend replied.
“How much is that?”
“It depends on the total.”
“The total what?”
“The total thing you want the 27% of.”
In the waiting room, the dialog went on and on, people getting impatient. Suddenly, a man stood up and showed his four-fingered hand, lifting one finger.
“See this? This is more or less 27%.”
“Oh,” the kid said, “27% is a finger! You should’ve said so in the first place!”
The friend rolled his eyes.
And… Just for the record, it was not THAT finger!
BONCHANCE AND SEVI
27 % by Severina Halotstar and Bonchance Longfall
Pablo received a letter from Espi asking if he would donate his sperm for her to have a puppy.
Espi gave details about the fertility clinic that Pablo was to visit and make a “test donation”. It would ascertain his virility. Pablo would do anything for his Espi. Perhaps if he fathered her puppy she would want a more permanent relationship. He put circus life on hold.
He was told the results of his sperm donation would be mailed to him in the express post.
Five days later the results arrived. Typed in bold: Sperm Count: 27%! (normal > 85%).
27 % by Severina Halotstar and Bonchance Longfall
Tom always gave 100%.
Meetings wasted about 40% of his time.
60% could still be quite effective except for the fact that company emails ate up about 20% percent of his time deleting corporate updates that
no one reads, along with letters from the HR and benefits departments.
Cost savings strategies of all employees disposing their own trash in the dumpster and a roster to clean the employee bathrooms consumed another 10%.
Further distracted by suspicions that his mangy old cat was pregnant and his wife of 25 years was going to leave him, rounded down his effectiveness to 27%.
ZACKMANN
“So have you checked out the new Podcast Database?”
“Yes, I have Zack and even signed up. Now stop messaging me about it”
“Sorry, I was afraid there was someone who I messaged more than once. The website is Scott Roche’s baby but I do find a database for podcasts creators and podcast fans a really cool idea.”
“So Zack, Have you entered any of your favorite podcasts or content creators yet?”
“A couple but I might have only caused Scott to do 27% more work because I am very, you know very helpful but maybe not so technically inclined.”
DIONYSUS CLOWES
Lifespan/Bo Diddley’s Money
According to Wikipedia the average human life expectancy worldwide is 67.2 years. And according to Aristotle, human happiness, the good life for humans, is a measure that only applies to a whole life. So what does it mean that her smile, the way she lowered her eyes, only her lashes visible, over the delighted smile, the light like early fall off her hair when I told her what I’d written stopped at 18? Isn’t that only 27% of a good life, of happiness? Who gets the left-over happiness that was ours? Where’s that fucking happiness now, 27 years later?
Ottawa
I thought of immortality figuratively when I first heard of Ottawa. Then I contacted him, because I thought it was desirable. He entered negotiations in a way that, over time, impressed upon me the literal and serious nature of the process: by photographing me with the camera he had developed I would become literally immortal. I would elude inevitable death.
Negotiations. He claimed it was better to think in terms of how much life I wanted to keep and insisted on expressing this quantity as a percentage.
Now (always now), 27% through life, I ask, why not 100%?
GUY DAVID
It jumped out of the water and started walking on the sand. I stealthily followed between the shadows, curious. It walked into the badly misspelled gift shop, named “Everyone’s Persent”. Others of it’s kind where already there. Others followed. All in all, there where 27 of them. They didn’t talk in any common language. Instead, they used a sound that was half way between a gurgle and the rumbling of a mad man. Seeing them up close, I recognized them immediately and I knew I had to warn the mayor. There was no doubt about it. The Murlocs have arrived.
PLANET Z
The city of Bellaire put radar speed traps on Newcastle Road.
The sign only said 15. It’s not my fault it only has two digits.
We fly down the road, ignoring stop signs and lights, zooming past the houses and the school and community center.
Sally and I scream with laughter.
As we came up on Bellaire Road, I opened up the throttle and pulled back on the stick.
The plane pulled up and we soared over the intersection.
Heading back to the airport, her phone went off.
It was her dad. The sheriff.
Of West University.
(He hates Bellaire.)