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I'm a humble, soft-spoken cowpoke with a strong sense of justice, and I'm in.
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# ¿ May 22, 2014 14:44 |
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# ¿ Mar 19, 2024 02:00 |
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I may have picked the worst week to join this glorious battle, but eh. Somehow writing this story also managed to ease this spot of quarter-life depression that I've been having, so at the very least I'll die happy and decapitated instead of just decapitated. Birthday Boy (918 words) "I don't like getting older," said the Birthday Boy as he lay on his birthday couch. "There's really nothing good about growing more frail and incontinent." I set my present down on the coffee table, atop a stack of empty pizza boxes and single-serving dinners. "You're the only one that ever celebrates this quote-unquote holiday, you know." Birthday Boy smiled. "Me and you." "You and I. And I'm just humoring you, for the record." "Tell yourself that, friend, and give me a second to change." He breathed in deep as his beard and beer belly seemed to regress into his body, muscles gained definition lost to his 'age', hair turned from graying brown to actual brown. "Okay, done changing." "Good. Those liver spots really didn't suit you. How long were you working on that, anyway?" "That what?" I gestured towards the couch. "That. The whole lazy middle-aged near-birthday sad-sack thing you had going on." "Oh, that." He shrugged. "I'm not sure, I think I rolled forward my age a little bit a few months ago and then just got lost in the tedium of it." "That's an understatement," I muttered. "I'm rarely out this way any more and I still know that these people don't live like this." I patted an empty burrito box that sat atop some clutter stack as emphasis. The entire stack fell over, so I assume that I had plenty of emphasis to my words, now. Birthday Boy just laughed at my supposed clumsiness. "You'd be surprised," he said as he pulled off the dingy white tee he wore and looked through a stack of miscellaneous laundry for something more appropriate. "There are whole television channels devoted to the lives of even the most minor people. I mean, there's stuff about celebrities and sports stars and the rich, of course, but just the other day I saw this one about this guy-" He stopped himself right there, looking down at his surroundings and then back to me. "Middle-aged, depressed, hoarder, no friends, no family, nothing but a job checking groceries and some alley cats and-" "You wanted to try it for yourself," I finished. "So you went off and did it without telling anyone." "Who would I tell? Nobody really gets my weird tastes in 'entertainment', especially not you." I felt a ping of something - either anger or rage, maybe both? - and decided to hold on to it for just a minute. Emotions could be fun in moderation. I sighed and said "You really are the worst spouse, you know that?" Birthday Boy was taken aback, either by my show of emotion or usage of local vernacular, and put his hands gently on my shoulders. "Is that what you think? Perhaps I should show you how terrible a spouse I can really be?" Then, he leaned forward and kissed me. Unsurprising, but not entirely unwelcome. -- An hour later, we both sat on the sofa in a pile of blankets, as the Birthday Boy showed me some of the local 'cuisine' on the TV. It was entirely as I expected, and though it put me into a deep depression I could not figure out the appeal it held. "These two are friends," explained Birthday Boy, "But they tend to bad-mouth one another to the camera. It's a very multifaceted relationship." I gently batted his arm away from my hair, which he had been twirling for the last few minutes. "If it's really that bad, why don't they find better friends?" "I don't know. Maybe this just makes for a better story?" "But it's supposed to be a reflection of reality, why does it matter?" Birthday Boy grinned. "Those last four words sum it up pretty well. These people spend their lives bickering, forming strange friendships, doing a lot of this," he gestured down at our naked bodies. "And in the end they are more or less assholes to one another. Why does any of it really matter?" "I meant the show," I said, blushing suddenly with the self-awareness of my nudity. "Oh. Well, if it's not a good story, nobody's going to watch, right? And then the television company won't make any money airing the show, and it'll be cancelled. If the show is cancelled, there's nothing left to do but euthanize the cast." My eyes went wide. "They do that around here?" "Not at all." After a second, he added "That's a bit of humor, you know." "Of course I know, I just didn't quite expect that from you of all people." "It hasn't been too long since we were joined," he said, moving his body closer to mine. "There's still a lot I don't understand about you, either." "Then come back with me, to our original time and space. The war is still going on, you know, and it's still fantastically evenly matched. We've even gotten the casualties down to exactly zero, so there should be no more incidents like the one that caused you to-" He put his finger to my lips, making it difficult to continue talking. "Shh. Maybe on your birthday I'll come and spend a couple hundred years working the war with you, but for now I want to celebrate my birthday in a way customary to this time and this place. With you." "A way customary to... what do you mean?" He hadn't even opened his present. Isn't that the most customary way to do birthdays around here? I felt a gentle nudge and looked down. "Oh. That."
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# ¿ May 26, 2014 02:50 |
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Slow Day At Homicide (100 words) The murder came quick in the midday: one flash of the knife and tomato stains all across the aisle. The widow flopped to the ground in grief, hitting on a soft spot with an unappetizing squish. "Who could have done such a thing?" asked the bananas, the avocados, the pineapple. "This is truly..." "God drat it, detective, what did I say about staging cold cases in the produce aisle?" The detective turned away from his diorama to see a grocery clerk, arms crossed, leering down at him. "Er, sorry." He left quietly, embarassed, groceries unbought, killer still on the loose. ACTUAL REAL HUMAN EDIT: I finished writing this and then I saw this: Some Guy TT posted:Ace Detective Dick Dongle Goes To The Store Is 'detective in the supermarket' a genre? I think we should make it a genre. Mazo Panku fucked around with this message at 17:53 on May 26, 2014 |
# ¿ May 26, 2014 17:51 |
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This guy's name is Pimpton, and I'm going to ride his carcass to either glory or demise. I'm in.
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# ¿ May 27, 2014 00:29 |
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drat it... so much for that race to the finish. Only thing left for me to do is finish this story and accept my and subsequent beheading by ravenous hawks like a
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# ¿ Jun 2, 2014 08:19 |