Under

639155

This morning, I found a tarp on my lawn.
I want to peek under it, but who knows what’s under it.
Tarps cover things you don’t want to look at.
I can’t tell what’s under there by the bulge in the tarp.
And every time I look, I swear it’s changed shape.
Maybe someone will take it if I just go back to my routine.
So, I drag out the trash cans and check the mailbox.
Everybody’s mailbox is empty.
“Maybe the mailman is under that tarp?” my neighbor asks.
We sit around and wait.
Nobody looks. We just wait.

The Thief

639159

The thief breaks into your house and steals your dreams while you sleep.
He puts them in a burlap sack and tiptoes through the night.
The fence looks through the sack of dreams.
“Second-rate pipedreams here,” he says.
He always says they’re second-rate to get the price down.
“This one’s shattered,” he says, pointing out the pieces in the bottom of the sack.
They agree on fifty bucks.
The thief doesn’t know what the fence does with the dreams. He’s heard of some guy named Sandman.
The thief doesn’t care. He just steals and sells them.
And dreams of retiring.

Falling

639157

I miss falling leaves.
I used to make a cup of tea and watch the leaves fall from the trees at sunset.
From her days as a kitten to old age, the cat would pounce them the moment they hit the ground.
Here in the space station, everything’s falling together.
No leaves.
No trees.
No cats.
No cups or spoons for tea. Just a plastic bag and straw.
I close my eyes and try to remember the leaves. Sunsets. Tea.
I can’t.
The videos you send aren’t the same, either.
Eight months to go on this mission.
And then… falling.

Green Beans

639161

Momma always said you ain’t lonely when you got green beans.
So, I got these here green beans. I hugged on them, and they snapped all so happy.
They now my friends.
Course, I also hungry, so maybe I put some here butter and salt on em.
They sure do mighty delicious. I could just eat one and…
Oh, one more… okay?
Wait… I’ll be right back…
Oh no. I done ate them all. My friends.
I got me an idea… I’ll just go to the bathroom and wait.
When I see them again, I’m gonna hug them so tight!

Billybob Steak

639164

It was the biggest steak Paul had seen in his life.
“Eat all of the Billybob Big Steak, and you get it for free,” said the waiter.
“Really?”
“Really.”
So, Paul picked up his fork and knife and went to work.
He didn’t think he could do it, but after an hour there was one bite of steak left.
He put it on his fork, stuck it in his mouth, and swallowed.
“I win!” he said, and the piece of steak caught in his throat.
As hard as the waiter tried, Paul still choked to death.
Billybob catered the funeral.

Weekly Challenge #179 – Magic Toaster and Who knows?

7757134

Welcome to the Weekly Challenge Number One Hundred And Seventy-Nine, 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… was…. um…
It’s Who Knows? and Magic Toaster.!
The excellent theme music is by Guy David.
VOTING

Which were the best stories this week?
Steven
TJ
Norval Joe
JRadimus
Lynda
Jeffrey
Guy
Anima
Justin
Terry
Z
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Go ahead and listen to them and then vote for your favorites (multiple selections are allowed):


Steven

Bob gapes at the holoscreen. “Sally, have you seen the artificial life sim?”
Sally peers over his shoulder. “What?”
“Up in the sky,” he says.
Above the simulated people walking virtual streets, a blue and red
figure swoops down. It lifts a car over its head, stopping it from
hitting a jaywalking alife boy.
“That one,” Bob continued, “is using a software exploit! It does
things the others can’t!”
“Huh,” Sally said.
Bob’s face was red. “Who could have known about that flaw? Who could
have installed the exploit?”
“I dunno,” Sally said, hiding the install CD behind her back.

TJ

The third rummage sale I visited seemed a little picked over already, but a flash of weathered metal drew me further into the garage. A toaster sat on a workbench looking broken, but I dusted it off with my sleeve. A genie appeared. “For freeing me from toaster. I grant you three wish.” I wished for power, money, fame! Just then, I was zapped by a short in the power cord, fell backward into the cash table, just as someone snapped a vidcap and uploaded it to YouTube. “Who’s that guy?” someone asked as the genie vanished. Shrug. “Who knows?”

Norval Joe

“Yeah, I guess you can call me Jasmine. I’ll call you Aladdin.” She shouted over her shoulder. The rush of wind made it hard to hear and her long black hair whipped his face.
He held her tightly on his lap.
He shouted back, “One thing they don’t point out in the movie is how cold it is flying around on a magic carpet.”
“Who knows,” she said, “press that lever down and it might warm us up.”
“Right. Try it when it’s your turn to fly this thing. Magic toaster or not, it would probably just burn my butt.”

J Radimus

“Whose turn is to load the toaster?”
“It’s mine,” chirped Emma.
Mom handed Emma the slices of bread, which she carefully loaded into the slots. “I hope it’s Eggs ‘Bunny-Duck’ today,” wished Emma, not quite wrapping her tongue around ‘Benedict’.
“No,” interjected Alex, “it’s gonna be chocolate cake!” He always hoped the toaster would return chocolate cake.
“We’ll see in 2 minutes,” Mom sang cheerfully.
The bell dinged, and the children squealed. Mom opened the toaster door, and pulled out … 4 slices of unevenly toasted bread.
“I think the toaster’s … magic, or something. It somehow cooked our bread.”
Beyond all expectation, I just couldn’t get my head around any ideas for the pirate theme. I had something specific in mind from the original, and the change completely through my creative gears out of kilter. The only thing I could think of was to retell the old joke about the captain and his Brown Pants.

Lynda

Life was never the same for Alex after his brother was poisoned by their father. He kept to himself a lot before then, but after his brother began communicating through the toaster, things turned around.
At first he tried to convince himself there was nothing magic about the toaster, he’d been drinking the first time it spoke, maybe he was developing schizophrenia, who knows? Sure, he’d like to do what the toaster told him and throw it in the tub with dad, but it made great toast. Browned evenly, not too burnt. It didn’t even need to be plugged in.

Jeffrey

We have a magic Toaster. Its not like the one in the kidie movies, no our magic toaster does weird things. Last week, it burned images of famous art works in all of our toast. It was cool at first, but it is a little hard to eat when the Mona Lisa is staring back at you.
This week it has been experimenting with geometric patterns. We have been trying to eat our way around the patterned to cut out the shapes, but our mom tells us to quit playing with our food. Who knew it could be this cool.

Guy

The Who sang about a magic bus. The Who Knows sang about a magic toaster. They had a small audience. They struggled, trying to make it, but they never did. For every band that makes it, there are thousands who don’t. There is someone that hears those bends before anyone else, and that’s you – the audience. You can put a musician on the throne, but you can also be the judge, the jury, and sometimes – the executioners. Like many others, The Who Knows never recorded anything and disappeared into oblivion before they could contribute their musical vision to the world.

Anima

“Go ahead, ask a question.”
“This is silly. I’m not going to ask a question.”
“Who knows, maybe you’ll get the answer you want from the toaster… You don’t like my opinion, or Brenda’s or Shellie’s. All you have to do is shake it a bit while you ask your question aloud.”
“Ok already! You’re not going to leave me alone until I ask, are you? Sheesh. Magic Toaster, is this the right hairstyle for me?”
“Now you push the lever down…”
(tick tick tick… clunk)
“What’s it say?”
“Dislodge the burnt toast with a knife for the best results….”

Justin

Has this ever happened to you?
“My toast isn’t toasted the way I like!”
Don’t wake up every morning to toast you don’t love, get the toast you deserve with the Magic Toaster!
Designed in Germany with the best in metaphysical science, this toaster will toast your bread just like you want, every time!
Check this out, the bread goes in these slots and you press this switch, and in just seconds your toast pops out, perfect!
Check this, are you following my camera guy? This toast is golden on both sides. How does it work? Who knows, it magic!

Terry

Dan began the construction by fastening sheets of plywood
together forming a rectangular box,
Tommy, Dan’s little brother asked question after
question as he watched the construction and finally
asked, “What’s it going to be?”
Dan, casually answered as he attached
the final hinge on the door, “Who knows,
maybe a magic toaster”.
“Let me try it!” Tommy yelled.
Dan motioned Tommy inside, closed the door
and knocked three times on it before reopening
it.
Tommy was no longer inside the box!
Quietly, Dan snickered, “well looks like
no more questions tonight, at least I got the magic part right”.

Z

The flea market in Zagreb.
Stjoytch spreads bedsheet on ground, lays the appliances down on it.
This blender. It blends.
This eggbeater. It beats eggs.
This rice cooker. It cooks rice.
He put down silver box. No cord, no buttons.
This magic toaster.
How you get bread in magic toaster with no slots?
How it toast without power?
Stjoytch say who knows? 200 kuna, take it or go.
I buy it.
It sit in kitchen for a year, do nothing.
Maybe I go to flea market, spread bedsheet next to Stjoytch.
But Stjoytch gave bargain. I sell for 250 kuna.

The Mustard Guru

639166

I am waiting for a process on this server to finish.
The progress bar is stuck at 27 percent.
“A watched progress bar never completes,” says the guru in the cubicle next to mine.
So, I turn off the monitor.
The guru turns it back on. “Can’t do that,” he says.
I close my eyes. He smacks me on the back of my head.
“Ouch.”
He hands me a packet of spicy mustard from his lunch.
“Smear that on the monitor,” he commands.
So, I do.
He smacks me on the back of the head again.
“Now, lick it off.”

The Noodle Mystery

639168

When I get a lunch hour, I make the best of that hour.
Mama Chang’s Noodle House.
There was something odd about the bowl of noodles I was having for lunch.
I’ve heard rumors that the chicken is really stray cat.
It still tastes good. Cheap, too.
This time, I had ordered pork and vegetables, but instead I had received Walt Whitman.
I tried to fish out the noodles around him, but Walt found this insulting.
“I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones,” said Walt.
So, I reached for him with my chopsticks and ate him.

Forgive me, father, for I have provided adequate signage…

639209

A drowned monk was found on the riverbank, a mile downstream from the bridge under repair.
A few orange cones were found in the water, too. Blown away by high winds.
The foreman pointed to the sign in the middle of the road that said BRIDGE OUT and sighed. “Reflective lettering. Visible from two hundred feet.”
The monastery sent a representative to claim the body.
When told about how his fellow priest died, the man wrote: “Father Rowan was blind.”
The foreman took off his hardhat, growled, and went up to the sign. “It’s also in Braille at the bottom.”

Sweating Bullets

639166

I know a magical creature on The Island Of Strange Beasts called the Winchester Panda.
It literally sweats bullets.
The more frightened or warm the creature gets, the more bullets it sweats.
The caliber, too. From small derringer shells to full metal jacket 50-cal machine gun rounds.
Their nesting areas look like ammo dumps, bullets strewn everywhere.
The Army tried to raise these things in captivity to cut down on munitions costs, but they only thrive in the wild.
No, we don’t hunt them. They don’t taste good, and their pelts are rather shabby.
But they hunt us. Keep quiet!