The topic of the next weekly challenge is Moisture
RICHARD
First Responders
We watched him.
Watched him as he toppled from the ledge, falling four storeys, until the concrete path below arrested his descent.
We ran towards him, time being of the essence, thinking that just maybe he’d survived the impact.
We reached his prone figure and I knelt down beside him, as Jack urged me to get the guy into the recovery position.
Then, with practiced efficiency, we did what we do best.
It was a good haul: We recovered his wallet, watch, mobile phone, cash and a gold tooth.
And we were out of there long before the ambulance arrived.
LIZZIE
“I’ve never felt so grounded,” he said.
She could see through him.
“Some girl I met online,” he said.
A whole lot of bravado, a cigarette hanging from his lips.
That snapshot she took of him… The ridiculous hat, the feather, the flower. Was it a rose?
Hopeless. Empty.
She still remembered the album crammed with photos of himself, only himself. Page after page, after page.
When she asked why, he grinned and mumbled some vague explanation filled with an under-layer of self-doubt he desperately tried to hide.
Grounded in his desperation, wanting to be seen for what he wasn’t.
TOM
Recovery
Hi I’m the Angle previously known as 103742 , but you can call be Bill, saves time. When I am asked, which isn’t often, why did you take place in the Great Falling? Well, I can tell you this, it had noting to do with pride. Heavens no, that’s a little gallows humor there. It was Jenny, actually Angle 8675309. She said want to go on a fall with me? What’s a fall I ask, angles don’t know shit about verbs, its that lacking free-will thing. So down we all go screaming cowabunga. Been in recovery ever since, making progress.
NORVAL JOE
When Linoliamanda finally took Billbert’s hand they quickly rose, the well and old man falling away below them. Having overshot Sabrina, Billbert made a quick recovery and returned to the girl standing by the well.
Sabrina held out her hand. “Let’s go.”
Billbert was hesitant. “I’ve never levitated two people. I don’t know if I can.”
“There they are,” one of the teens shouted as they appeared on the trail from the forest.
Sabrina shook her extended hand at Billbert. “Let’s find out, quick.”
As the group of teens ran toward them, Billbert tried to levitate the three of them.
PLANET Z
“Insert the Recovery Disk and hit ENTER.” blinked on the screen.
Erica opened her desk drawer and looked through the disks until she found one marked RECOVERY DISK.
Sliding it into the drive, the ejection tab popped out with a click.
“Here goes nothing,” said Erica, and she pressed the ENTER key.
A progress bar appeared, and a green line slowly crawled from left to right.
When it filled the bar, RECOVERED appeared on the screen.
Then it went dark, the system rebooted, and Erica waited for the familiar login screen to appear.
“I need a faster system,” she muttered.
Angle Angel.
Why???
Shame on the editor for allowing Tom to misspell the word so many times and still publish it.
I don’t get it.
From Douglas Adams:
Lallafa had lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa. He lived there, and he wrote his poems there. He wrote them on pages made of dried habra leaves, without the benefit of education or correcting fluid. He wrote about the light in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the darkness in the forest and what he thought about that. He wrote about the girl who had left him and precisely what he thought about that.
…
Then, shortly after the invention of time travel, some major correcting fluid manufacturers wondered whether his poems might have been better still if he had access to some high-quality correcting fluid, and whether he might be persuaded to say a few words to that effect.
They traveled the time waves; they found him, and did indeed persuade him. In fact they persuaded him to such effect that he became extremely rich at their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write with such precision never got around to leaving him, and in fact they moved out of the forest to a rather nice pad in town and he frequently commuted to the future to do talk shows, on which he sparkled wittily.
He never got around to writing the poems, of course, which was a problem but an easily solved one. The manufacturers of correcting fluid simply packed him off for a week somewhere with a copy of a later edition of his book and stacks of dried habra leaves to copy them out onto, making the odd deliberate mistake and correction on the way.
Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what’s changed? The first people say that that isn’t the point. They aren’t quite certain what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn’t it. They set up the Campaign for Real Time to try to stop this sort of thing going on. Their case was considerably strengthened by the fact that a week after they had set themselves up, news broke that not only had the great Cathedral of Chalesm been pulled down in order to build a new ion refinery, but that construction of the refinery had taken so long, and had had to extend so far back into the past in order to allow ion production to start on time, that the Cathedral of Chalesm had now never been built in the first place. Picture postcards of the cathedral suddenly became immensely valuable.