Carl Sagan once said that in order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
I suppose the same is true if you want to make ice cream from scratch, too.
It’s very important that you do this all in the same universe.
Because, if you try to create apple pie in one universe and ice cream in another universe, you now have to bridge the two universes in order to have pie ala mode.
Sadly, the matter from the two universes will cause a massive anti-matter explosion.
So, skip dessert, and just have coffee.
Kid Row
Someone painted over the S in Skid Row the other day, and now the place is filling up with
five-year-old winos and toddler bums.
“Hey, buddy, can you spare a pacifier?” asks a tiny tramp in an unchanged diaper.
The church runs a soup and bread line, although they give away fruit rollups and bottles of formula to the needy.
A clean diaper, someone to tie their shoes for them.
All these kids need is a helping hand, some say.
But I’ve seen them gamble it away.
Shooting dice on the pier.
Ride the ladder up, and the chute down.
Defenders of the flag
The Kholdani and The Resistance fought each other for years.
“We are the true defenders of the flag!” said The Resistance. “The Kholdani have dishonored it with their corruption and extermination campaigns!”
“Bullshit,” said the Kholdani, and they fought most fiercely.
When The Resistance finally won, they kept the flag.
The Kholdani were driven underground, and as The Resistance became corrupt and cruel, The Kholdani became The New Resistance.
When they won the civil war, the flag stayed the same, and The New New Resistance was born,
Pretty soon, everyone was dead, and the tattlered flag flew over smoking ruins.
Dead men tell no tales
Whenever someone says that dead men tell no tales, it’s obvious that they haven’t ever been to Necropolis, Kenya.
Not only does Necropolis have a population boom problem, but they have a severe shortage of paper.
The ruling elite came up with a brilliant solution to both problems: write everything down on the skin of people who have starved to death.
Okay, so the dead really aren’t telling any tales, and it’s dead men and women.
Plus, they’re all black, so it’s kind of hard to read the ink, even on the light-skinned ones.
Let’s just ship them some Kindles.
Deathbed Prayer
Freddy lay in his hospital bed, dying.
Susie held his hand and waited.
“Pray with me,” said Freddy.
“I’ve already prayed,” said Susie. “For you to fucking die. I just wish it wouldn’t take so fucking long.”
Freddy’s eyes got wider when Susie pulled the pillow out from under his head.
“Why?” was his last word, as Susie shoved the pillow over his face.
Freddy couldn’t put up much of a fight. He went pretty quick.
Susie caught her breath, looked to the sky, and said “Fuck you for making me wait so long.”
Then she yelled for a nurse.
Weekly Challenge #591 – DRIVE
Welcome to the 100 Word Stories podcast at oneadayuntilthedayidie.com.
This is the 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:
TOM
Bodhisattva
Phil liked to drive at night. Less people. He wasn’t much for freeways, liked the city streets and county roads. Wasn’t into speed, just cruising. Rarely drove with anyone. Never saw him with a girl. It wasn’t because he was the anti-social type, hardly, party hardy as any of us. Driving was a deep meditate, he’d say. When blank stares and wobbling eyes met his words, he just order a round of beer, up went the cheers and everyone thought he was messing with them. I was stand outside Dunkin’ Donuts the night he and his car reached total enlightenment
JON
591
The Peloponnesian War, Part Two
By
Jon DeCles
“Now, looky here, Jack, it mightn’t be bad, Athenian women adopting some of the fashions of the Spartan women.”
“Are you out of your bleedin’ mind? We’re already forbidden to even mention their names without consequences! They keep to themselves except when they decide they want us! We have to hire hetaera if we want a woman to talk with. Imagine if, in addition to all that, they start taken’ off their clothes in public! This whole bloody war will turn into nothing but one enormous erection!”
“It’s pretty much like that already, down at the gym,” said Tom stiffly.
CHARLIE
The massive drive whirled away for a week, copying everything from the implant. The chip was tasked to collect the previous year’s data. The data included sound and images. This was the equivalent of storing about three million television shows.
The drive had to be cooled with extraordinary apparatus, including liquid nitrogen and elaborate heat sinks.
After the drive was filled and subsequently indexed, it was shared among the existing female members of the tribe and stored safely away for future use.
Stain McMillen was the oldest McMillen son, and was chosen to care for and maintain the storage cluster.
#2
Stain stored the cluster in the trunk of his Buick Electra. The top weather seal of the trunk had deteriorated and rain and the car wash allowed water to seep into Stain’s car trunk. In a short time, the family data was jeopardized and the danger was not discovered until Stain opened his trunk to check his spare.
Stain panicked, and took the bulky unit to his local computer store for inspection. The cluster was dried and packed in desiccant.
After powering up the drive, the techs ran integrity tests on the data and found everything intact. Thank you, God!
JEFFREY
The Right Prescription
by Jeffrey Fischer
I kept seeing ads for people with “Low T.” They caught my eye. I’m not saying I can’t… you know, but my sex drive hasn’t improved with age. Maybe I did have low T.
Several doses later, I was a new man. My wife didn’t know what overcame me, but she didn’t seem pleased. My mistress wasn’t happy, either, and both my girlfriends, while feigning delight at my regained prowess, were clearly more interested in nights out than nights in.
I complained to my doctor that the drug wasn’t helping. He squinted at the label and switched prescriptions. He said the original was in error. I now get endless refills of Lipton for my low tea. Decaf, of course.
RICHARD
#1 – Safari
You always get one on every game drive… The irritating, know it all idiot who ruins everything for the other guests, makes constant unreasonable demands, and thinks the whole experience revolves around them.
Today’s was the worst… Everyone in the vehicle hated him with a passion.
There we are, surrounded by a pride of lions, and he comes out with the inevitable question: “Are we safe?”
“As long as we stay in the vehicle”
I turned the key, with a secret smile, and nothing happened.
“So what do we do now?” he sneered.
“You”, I smiled, “Get out and push!”
#2 – Interview
“We’re looking for someone with drive and enthusiasm to be an inspirational leader in this company” said the guy behind the desk.
“Are you that someone?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but he cut me off…
“Don’t even answer that”, he barked, “I can tell already you have what it takes. Y’know, I’m going to take a risk – and I’m going to offer you the job right here on the spot”
“So what do you say?”
I placed the parcel on his desk…
“Package for you”, I said, “Sign here, and I can get back to my deliveries!”
#3 – Taxi
“Follow that car!”, I shouted, throwing myself into the back of the cab.
The driver, took off, tyres screeching – “I’ve waited years for someone to say that! So, are you a cop, or a gangster, or what?”
“No questions… Just drive!”
We tore through the city streets gradually gaining on the vehicle in front of us.
Finally, at a red light, I wrenched open my door, flung a handful of cash at the cabbie and calmly walked away.
No idea who was in that car, I’d just always wanted to jump into a cab and shout “follow that car!”
DUANE
Drive
This time I am going to get it done. I’ll finish it and submit it.
But I need a clean desk so I can concentrate. So, I’ll clean my desk and, then, I’ll get it done.
How did this desk get so messy? There sure a lot of icons on my desktop too. Messy. I guess desks and desktops have that in common. I’ll have to clean that up too. Clean my desk and my desktop and then I will get it done.
Okay, right after lunch I’ll clean my desk and desktop. Then I can finally get it done.
LIZZIE
She couldn’t walk but she had a very nice bike. It was parked outside the house and it was covered by flowers, violet, red, blue, and white. And she smiled. The bright colors made her smile. And the bicycle rusted away parked outside the house. Every now and then, she’d look at that bike. She’d close her eyes, and ride it, her legs completely paralyzed, but moving freely in her imagination. Whenever she got home and parked the bicycle outside the house, the flowers would sway back and take hold of her bike, becoming the sole guardians of her dreams.
SERENDIPITY
It was a long drive through the night, during the course of which the muffled thumps from the boot grew gradually more faint, until they ceased altogether.
Finally, in the grey pre-dawn light, I pulled off the desert road and found the spot I’d previously chosen. It was cold, but digging would soon warm me up.
Three hours later, the sun was climbing over the horizon and i was packing away the shovel and brushing the dust from my hands.
That was the potatoes planted… I’d be taking the body home with me to brew into fertiliser for future use.
NORVAL JOE
When I was a kid, my parents saved money on movies by piling us all in the station wagon and taking us to the drive in theater. You paid by the carload and not by the individual person.
On warm summer nights we would sit on the hood of the car and watch the latest Disney flick–like, The Love Bug, The Teenage Professor, or Song of the South.
I saw the beginning of a lot of movies. Since they couldn’t start until it was dark and the sun set around 9 pm, I was usually asleep before the show ended.
TURA
Drive
———
It began with the gene drive. It’s a mechanism to make a gene pass itself to all your descendants, even if you only inherited one copy. It was used against mosquitos, to stop malaria.
Trouble is, those genes can get mutations, like any other. The mosquitos evolved to handle it. Then it got into humans via mosquito bites. It incorporated retroviruses to copy itself between your cells, and learned infectiousness from the common cold virus.
The endgame is something that can turn a crowd into a giant blob of cancer in the time it takes to watch a football game.
———
PLANET Z
In Hebrew School, the rabbi taught us about The Golem of Prague.
“When you put a prayer in its mouth and whisper a name, the golem will hunt down that person.”
Every time I saw a statue, I’d put a hastily-scribbled prayer in its mouth.
“Hymie Schwatrz.” I’d whisper, imagining the fifth grade bully dragged from the schoolyard, kicking and screaming.
But the statues never moved an inch.
So, I put a garden gnome in my backpack, and the next day at school, I bashed in Hymie’s skull.
“It was the golem!” I screamed, as the teachers dragged me away.
Random drug testing
It’s a random surprise drug testing day at work.
Employees file into the main conference room, and a team of nurses pull out the testing kits.
Each employee picks up a test kit, breaks the seal, and looks inside.
I look inside my kit.
Heroin. Needle. Spoon. Lighter. Rubber tube.
Shit, I hate needles.
The credit manager opens their kit, and pulls out a joint and a lighter.
“Hey, can I trade with you?”
A nurse interrupts me. “It’s supposed to be random.”
I read the instructions, cook the nugget, and draw up a little blood before shooting it in.
Ringleader
Kids can be so cruel.
One girl in my daughter’s class is named Betsy. The kids call her Betsy Wetsy.
They stand around her and shout it until she soils herself.
A boy named Harold has long hair. He’s Hairy Harry.
He tried to chop off his hair and made a mess of himself, even with those rounded safety scissors.
The teacher tried to stop the torment, but the kids turned on her.
She’s in counseling now.
Nobody’s made fun of my daughter yet.
Not because she’s perfect.
No, she the ringleader of the child mob.
I’m so proud of her.
Shoe room
Sally liked to shop for shoes.
She filled her closet with them.
Eventually, the “baby’s room” became the shoe room.
Her husband wanted a baby, but Sally knew that if she had a baby, she’d have to clear out her shoe room.
So, she took birth control.
When the birth control failed, she secretly got an abortion.
The next time the birth control failed, she got her tubes tied.
Her husband eventually tricked her into a fertility clinic where the whole ruse was exposed.
They adopted a pair of twins.
And got a bigger house, with its own shoe room.
Working for Peanuts
Listening to the jazz streaming channel in iTunes while writing is like living in a Charlie Brown special where you’re Charlie, and everything you write just isn’t good enough for the Peanuts Gang.
“You blockhead,” growls Lucy. “Don’t you know that you used passive voice?”
“Good grief,” you say, furiously backspacing. Except that you backspace over the one good paragraph you wrote.
“Try Control-Z to undo that,” says Linus. Your smitten sister beams at his brilliance.
Your beagle, neglected and lonely, pulls out the power cord from the wall.
The screen goes blank. The music stops.
Thank God for auto-save.