Welcome to the 100 Word Stories podcast at oneadayuntilthedayidie.com.
This is 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:
TURA
Scoop
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I hit “send” on my report, and relaxed in the glow of a job well done. It had been no easy matter to gain access to the rebel leaders and interview them, while all the other journalists stayed in their cosy hotels and relayed thinly rewritten government communiqués.
Within minutes the reply came back. “Your story an exclusive. Congratulations!”
The rebels’ final assault on the capital was planned for that day, but as the hours went by, there was no sign of any disturbance.
The next morning I received another message from my editor.
“Your story still an exclusive. Why?”
JEFFREY
The Scoop
by Jeffrey Fischer
“Extra!” the paperboy cried, “Mob boss caught in sting!” He waved freshly-inked newspapers above his head. Businessmen on their way home from work slipped him a coin and walked away with a copy. “Read all about it, exclusive to the Register!”
Two beefy men in matching pinstripe suits and fedoras walked up to the boy. One boxed out anyone else from approaching while the other said, “Got a real scoop, do ya, kid?”
“You bet, mister! Only in the Register – find out how the Rotini Family got caught. Those guys are going to jail for years, maybe even… hey, what are you doing?”
“I got a scoop, too. Try this headline: Paperboy Found in Pieces. Sadly, you ain’t going to hawk that particular edition. One of your competitors is gonna get the message out.”
The Most Important Meal
by Jeffrey Fischer
I pulled the box of Raisin Bran from the pantry. I couldn’t remember the last time I had it for breakfast. Giving the box a good shake to distribute the raisins more evenly, I filled a bowl, poured milk, and dug in.
“Mmm, good stuff,” I told my wife as she entered the kitchen. “And unlike most grocery items, Post keeps making it better. Remember how they used to advertise ‘two scoops of raisins’ in the box?” My wife mumbled her assent. “Well, this box seems to have a lot more than that.”
“Seems odd,” she replied, pouring some coffee. “By the way, one of your raisins seems to be escaping.”
I watched a black blob walk across the table and felt sick. “Maybe they now have two scoops of bugs.” My wife, the comedienne.
MUNSI
Lois Lane
By Christopher Munroe
Lois Lane is NOT a good reporter.
There, I said it. Somebody has to. I don’t care how many Pulitzers she’s won off-panel, how many hypothetical stories she broke while nobody reading the comic was paying attention, the scoop of a lifetime sits two desks over, and glasses are NOT a disguise.
I don’t care what steps Clark adds to make discovering he’s Superman harder, noticing things is literally Lois Lane’s entire job, she should be better at it.
That said: Clark Kent, in spite of his powers, is a consistently worse reporter than her, so what does that say?
RICHARD
Gelato
I vividly remember travelling to Rome many years ago on a school trip and the day we stopped at my first genuine gelateria.
They had every variety of ice cream you could possibly imagine, and a few I’d never even considered before. Everything from toffee apple to chocolate and tutti frutti!
Of course, I wanted a scoop of almost every flavour, but in the end I had to settle for six large scoops of my favourite types.
The result was as big as my head, and made me sick as a dog… But to me, it was ice cream heaven!
LIZZIE
Annie hated the smell of the farm and she especially hated John, the handsy foreman. But she liked hay and the color red. What a shame hay wasn’t red.
The farm had a machine that scooped bales of hay and took them for storage. Just for fun, she would go in the barn at night and destroy the bales by forking them and throwing the hay in the air.
When John’s bloodied hand waved faintly from underneath the hay, Annie was stunned. “Ops…” She looked left and right and… forked the pile of hay again. “Well, it’s definitely red now.”
SERENDIPITY
We zombies have received a terribly bad press, you know. So, just for the record, we don’t all shuffle round the streets in torn clothing, slack-jawed and vacant-eyed, groaning and moaning for brains.
Most of us are pretty refined: well-groomed and far prefer to sit at a table, with good quality tableware and pressed linen tablecloths and napkins, when we have our meals, accompanied by good conversation and a decent bottle of Merlot.
Of course, we still eat brains, (remember, we are zombies, after all), but we scoop them out first before serving them up on best quality china plates!
ZACKMANN
I have really been enjoying Murdoch Mysteries and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries on Netflix. I let My wife watch her shows first and she likes Criminal Minds but if frustrates me that after so many years they still seem to be looking for some supervillain called The UnSub. That UnSub guy must be smarter than Professor Moriarty. Dharma’s husband is talking about The UnSub for the third consecutive episode tonight.
I think I will just give up on television for the night and just listen to an audio drama maybe an episode of The Scoop Sisters from Icebox Radio Theater.
TOM
The Name in the Game
His name was not scoop, but that’s what everyone at the paper call him. He
had been a major player in his day. Worked on the Sun, the Trib, the Cron,
and the Times. Lost his edge after Iraq. Now he was doing green sheets for
the Lower Lake Record. Sometimes the fates just dump you into heart of
the beast. So it was for scoop when the Valley Fire rip through Lake Co.
His coverage of the fire went national, then global. Won the Pultzer and
wrote the New York Times bestseller: River of Fire. Teaches down at UCLA
these days.
NORVAL JOE
Henry worked for the Crappy Cat Litter company for thirty years. He started as just a boy and worked his way up from floor sweeper to duty assignment manager.
When the economy took a dump they said he wasn’t carrying his load and had to go. He didn’t see it coming until the stuff hit the fan.
Furious, he stormed across the production floor. He was so pissed off that he wasn’t watching where he was going and fell into a bin of clumpable cat litter. They had to get a tractor with a front loader to scoop him out.
PLANET Z
The spaceship’s design was brilliant.
Scoop charged ions from interstellar space into the front, process them into fuel, and fire boosters out the back.
They made a few scale models, and they ran brilliantly, racing from planet to planet within expected parameters.
So, we built a full-sized working prototype out in orbit.
And it just sat there.
Because we’d managed to scoop up all the free charged ions from around orbit.
Every attempt to add booster rockets ended up bending the chassis.
We turned the prototype into a space hotel.
From where you can watch them build the next spaceship.
Tom, that sounds like an awful, frightening experience. Thank God you and your family are all right. (And you’re a crazy man for sending in a story on top of everything!)