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I think every single thing I've ever written could be titled "The Price is Right". Haha, you guys won't even realize I'm pulling this one straight from the slush pile, just changing names and poo poo. In
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Aug 25, 2015 16:40
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 02:21 |
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Also I thought this was gonna be about forms, not genres. Like "Haiku epistolary novel".
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Aug 25, 2015 16:41
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sebmojo posted:There was a popping sound as her shirt opened. The heavy burden of her hair unfurled in slow motion. You should probably rewrite it with that in mind, actually. Here's my Bangsian Disaster Fiction. 1400 words, exactly. It was really hard not having Hitler show up, but I somehow managed. --- The priz*e being right The first came at midnight. His name was Tertius Decius Livier. He had brown eyes, had been a Bucinator in the Legio XII, granted Roman citizenship after raising through the ranks, he had had no wife, but a lover - a greek scriptor, tall and lean - but nobody knew this when he arrived. The second came while Bryan Grainger was skyping with his wife. The two had spoken for hours now; the horizon Bryan could see from his Syrian apartment already developed an early gloomy orange, although back in Sweden, Franka's room was still shrouded in the darkest night. The subject was cheating. Bryan's bright anger had slowly faded into a brooding annoyance. When the second hit came, a short period of silence had just set in; Franka was biting her lips, and the two stared past each other over their webcams. Then, Franka heard a distant muted 'thud', startling her husband. "What?" - Bryan raised his left as if to silence her. She saw him rise, turn, listening to something. He turned back to her, and with a voice suddenly all professional, said "Franka, I got to check ..." And in this moment, the third arrived and Franka's webcam image froze. Not two hours later, Franka was stashing her sparse luggage into her overhead compartment. Impulse actions, she thought, had brought her into this decision, maybe they would also get her out of it. At the very least she wouldn't let a bad internet connection become the end of her marriage. She leaned back, put on her sleeping mask, and tried to replace a night's sleep lost to fighting with half a morning's sleep on a flight to Syria. And while she slept, the world learned what was happening in Syria. She managed to doze through most of the captain's confused announcement, but the panicked responses of the other passengers forced her back into the land of the living - or, what had been the land of the living just a few hours before. People were screaming all around her, Arabic, Swedish, English, French. Suddenly, the woman next to her grabbed her arm and wailed: "What do we do? What do we do?" The crackling speaker turned on again, as if to answer her. "Currently, we do not have clearance to land. I repeat, no clearance to land. We are told to leave the area immediately. The area is unsafe. I will attempt to turn back towards Europe." And as the airplane turned in a wide arc, his left side facing the desert, Franka looked down on Syria, and she saw, tiny black spots hundreds of meters below, dead bodies, burning homes, crashed cars, and, again and again, dead bodies - on the streets, on the roofs of the tiny houses, in the sand. Then, one hit them. His name was Ali; he had been a leader of men in the very army with which Muhammad had conquered half the Arab world, and which later, when he had died, conquered the rest of it. Ali had not seen the end of it; he had died here, in Syria, much like Tertius, dying of dysentery after a battle his army had won. And now he crashed, with terminal velocity, into the co-pilot's window. As the dead came back upon the earth in a hailstorm of corpses, the co-pilot fell into shock, and when the pilot turned, he saw a broken face looking at him from outside the cracked window. He froze. As the airplane kept turning, the winds ripped away the corpse, leaving a blood-stained window pane behind which the Syrian sands rapidly approached. The pilot, regaining his senses, turned the aircraft's nose up again, but half a second into his upwards climb, another body dropped, right in front of him, and he could see the panicked grimace and futile flailing of limbs. The pilot screamed, pushed the joystick through, and two minutes later, the airplane crashed into the Syrian sands. Franka, barely bruised, was one of the first to leave the beached wreck. The Syrian sun reflected from its metal skin, and when she turned away from it, from the people crawling out of the hatches, she realized nobody would come to rescue them. The city in front of her was burning. Walking towards it, she came across two other recent arrival. A baby of 8 months, a girl, black, skinny, had landed here many hours earlier. Her mother come from the south with a slave catcher's caravan in 1572, but before the caravan arrived at the markets to be sold, her newborn had died. The second was dressed in the uniform of a German soldier, although his face was tanned - perhaps a foreign volunteer. The Death's Head symbol on his uniform paled in contrast to his actually shattered skull. Something made Franka pick up his rifle. Holding onto the weapon reminded her of hunting with her father in the tranquility of the Swedish woods, calming her down a bit. A few hundred meters in front of her, she saw another fall, a Syrian farmer, death in 7535 BC. She ran past him, towards the city. The city was a madhouse. Veiled women were running from their homes, their children in arms. She saw another car crash right in front of her, at the outskirts of the city: one driver who had thought he could flee to the north, the other to the south, meeting in the middle and now blockading a crossing. Franka's cellphone was broken, but she saw a dropped one on the street, and when she picked it up, she couldn't make much of the words in Arabic and there was no connection, but the open browser showed grainy pictures from all over Syria of a rain of bodies. When she looked up from the cracked LCD, she saw four men standing a few meters in front of her, silently, exchanging glances. She put the cellphone down. Then, she saw one of them fixating something behind her - nodding at something behind her. Seeking cover, Bryan had rolled under a truck on the way to the main building. The camp of tents around it was destroyed. He heard screaming - terror, and pain - all around him. Just as he was about to get up and sprint towards his next designated cover, another body crashed into the net covering the loading area of the truck - and the net held. The body rolled down the torn net and landed in the sand right next to Bryan. He was still alive. And Bryan knew him. Somehow, the net had braced the impact sufficiently to keep terminal velocity from being truly terminal. Still, the body of the used car salesman Bryan had just visited two weeks ago, in Al-Qamishli, a few hours to the north, was broken and shattered. It was not the first falling body he had seen of somebody who had just died here recently. "Saa'adinii", the man gargled. Help me. Bryan crawled towards him, although he could not think of anything he could try to help the man. When he arrived, he had perished. And in that moment, a realization came upon him. He had seen many of his fellow non-Syrians die here today. And yet, none of them had returned from the sky. It was Roman soldiers, Muslim conquerors, farmers, housewives, slaves. All people who were born, and had died, in Syria. People were coming back to where they were coming from. Bryan got up and sprinted towards the central building. He had not made more than 20 meters when another corpse hit the large main tent, and when dodging the toppling supporting structure, Bryan stumbled, fell, and came to rest, unconscious, in the shadow of the cement walls. When he awoke, it was dark. Nobody was there - nobody but corpses. Suddenly, a hooded figure emerged from the shadow, tall and skinny. Carrying a machine pistol. Bryan grunted in pain. Then, the shadow removed its veil and Bryan saw long, flowing blonde hair. "Franka!" She kneeled beside him. The barrel of the gun touched the floor right next to his face. "Don't worry, it's empty", she said. "Why did you ..?" "Because", she said, "the priz*e being right, wouldn't you?" Bryan managed a smile. Then, he said: "I love you too. But we have to go. Find some place where no humans have lived before." --- I have a request to reviewers, please only read once you're done: Can you tell me how obvious it is I'm not a native speaker? Not meant as an apology for it being bad, I'm just wondering. * gently caress you. I do what I want. If you ask me to shake your hand, I may well suck your dick, if I feel like it that day.
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Aug 27, 2015 14:16
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Are there any stories of people coming here, and being at first truly terrible, or at least mediocre, and then perpetually improving and eventually winning and embarrassing you all and poo poo?
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Aug 28, 2015 14:01
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Mercedes posted:See, the trick is to get a poo poo ton of DMs, so it doesn't faze you anymore. Then you're completely free to experiment without the fear of failure holding you back. It's the way to go bro. 
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Aug 28, 2015 22:07
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Broenheim posted:kayfabe edit: though you probably wont get published because you're all a bunch of poo poo writers that make me want to claw out my eyes every week i judge
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Aug 28, 2015 22:16
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Broenheim posted:you can take the poster out of gbs but you cant take the gbs out of the poster
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Aug 28, 2015 22:28
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Broenheim posted:interprompt 4 words, prompt: "exploding into poo poo" Broenheim made a post
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Aug 31, 2015 16:34
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Posting to see my new Avatar of Shame
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Sep 1, 2015 11:51
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I hate all of you. In
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Sep 2, 2015 09:17
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 02:21 |
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Okay, the topic is nice and all, but I most likely won't make it by the deadline. One more week of shame
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Sep 7, 2015 03:51
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