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Nov 3, 2018 04:17
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 07:38 |
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The Rabbit Room 709 rwords My parents once told me that the wallpaper in my infant bedroom had been decorated with bunnies. And sure enough, as I lay in the enormous crib, in a room clearly modeled after that same nursery, I could see the cartoon rabbits on the wallpaper. I had to hand it to the aliens. Though they didn't get everything right, that little detail was a nice touch. Perhaps they were getting pretty good at abduction. There was a mobile hanging above the crib. They'd gotten the basic idea down. They knew there were supposed to be planets and stars and rocket ships, clearly, but instead of golden foil star shapes, there were miniaturized, glowing, gaseous orbs. And they didn't know what an Earth rocket was supposed to look like, so they used their crooked spinning opal crafts. They knew cribs had bars, but these looked more like metal than painted wood. A creature that looked like my mother entered the room. They knew to try to make it look younger than the original. They'd turned her gray hair brown and removed her wrinkles, but they hadn't accounted for how she shrunk or how her back had bent or how the bones in her jaw had dropped. It was like the skeleton of my mother was wearing her younger self as a costume. It spoke a gibberish with the cadence and phonemes of English. "Come on guys! You can do better than this!" I yelled up at the mobile. "Shhhh," whispered the Mother in a tone imitating soothing. "Sticko cay. Ohgoo wheat. Mommy sneer." It started to unbutton its blouse. "Come on! Let me out! Do your experiments if you like, just get me out of here!" It revealed its breasts. They were too round, and they floated instead of hanging. "Stop it! Bring me home!" And then, as if waking from a dream, I was sitting in the palm of one of the alien's hands in their ship's observatory. They hadn't been this big when they'd first taken me. Had they grown? Had I shrunk? They put me in a little tube and launched me from the ship. Untold light-years passed by in seconds, and I was back on Earth, in a room filled with people I knew. My siblings, my friends, my co-workers passed by somberly in their best clothes. At the front, sobbing in front of a casket, was my real mother, wrinkled and gray. My abductors had never needed my body to run their tests. They'd left it behind. I felt my consciousness start to move away from my funeral. Their point was made; there was no need for me to stay further. I was pulled back across the stars, back to the ship, and back into the nursery with the cartoon rabbit wallpaper. The Mother was still there, chest exposed, and it picked me up. I pushed the nipples away. "No! You're not my mother! Put me down!" I felt a shock through my artificial infant body. My captors did not approve of my disobedience. Still I resisted. "This isn't real! End it!" Another shock. "Kill me!" The Mother made a horrible shrieking sound like the screeches of the alien creatures. With a strange metallic coil, it tied my short-fingered wrists together, then jammed its iron-hard nipple between my lips. I made a muffled scream, but then I tasted the milk, and no sugar on Earth was so sweet. I closed my eyes and sucked. As I drank, I realized how warm the room was and how safe Mommy's arms were. Nothing could hurt me here. I wanted to drink forever. Then she cut the cord, set me down in the crib, and buttoned her blouse. As she turned to leave, I pulled myself up by the bars of the crib. "Mommy!" I shouted. "I want to drink more!" But I couldn't form the words, so I made a monotone shriek instead. Mommy turned around and shushed me. Then she walked out the door. I kept shouting. "Mommy! I want to drink more! Mommy! Mommy! I want Mommy! Mommy!" When I had calmed down, I looked around at my surroundings. Just what were these strange creatures on the walls, with their big teeth and long ears?
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Nov 4, 2018 02:26
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I am IN
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Nov 16, 2018 15:46
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The School Shooter 596 words A number of my classmates are lying dead on the tile, but I can't waste any thought on who they are. There are fifteen feet between where I am at the entry of the science hall and the nearest cover, the rows of lockers. I can't see the shooter, but I imagine he's probably thirty feet away given the volume of the gunshots. By now, everyone still alive has scrambled for shelter, so if I try to cross the gap between the hallway and the lockers, I'll be his only target. And if I make it across, the lockers don't necessarily mean safety. His bullets are surely strong enough to go clean through the aluminum and the papers and backpacks inside. But at least he won't see me. I won't have time to enter the combination. There's a spot on these cheap lockers that'll open any of them if you hit it hard enough. I'll get one chance to get it right, I imagine. Now or never. I take a deep breath and bolt across the gap. The shooter sees me and fires three times. All misses. I leap over some sophomore girl's body and I'm across the gap. On a regular school day, I know which locker is mine by muscle memory, but the shooter's dashing footsteps are irritating my intuition. What's my actual locker number? I forgot it the first week after I'd committed its location to memory. 683? Yeah, that's it. The shooter's almost here. 687, 685, 683. The locker's sweet spot is just underneath and a little to the left of the lock. I have to be precise. I mutter a little prayer as I pound my fist against the locker. The footsteps behind me stop just as the locker door swings open. He starts firing. I'm hit, but there's no thought to waste on where or how it hurts. With the only arm that works, I pull my own pistol out of the locker and start shooting. ... The NRA people decided that a bigger cast would look better on TV. It helps with their "good guy with a gun" branding. They were initially worried I wouldn't want to do the morning talk show circuit, but I've delivered. It's kind of fun to see my face on magazines. They've coached me through the tough question: why did you bring a gun to school that day? Why, Mr. Seacrest, I bring a gun to school every day. I know it's against the rules, but I knew if something like this were to happen, somebody would need to protect this school. I'm just using my second amendment rights. The studio audiences eat it up. I'm proof that guns save lives. A couple states have changed their laws since the shooting to let kids keep their legal firearms in their lockers. I'm lying to them, of course. By happy coincidence, I only brought the gun to school that day. I've gone my whole life unnoticed and unrewarded, but that's changed now that I'm a hero. Of course, if that weird junior hadn't shot up the school, people still would have noticed me. Maybe if I had started shooting first, he would have gotten to be the hero. I like it this way more. I get on the stage for my next interview. As I look out at the cheering crowd, I wonder for briefest moment how the public would react if I pulled out a gun and shot them all dead right now. But that thought passes, and I am satisfied by their admiration. For now. Saucy_Rodent fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Nov 17, 2018 |
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Nov 17, 2018 22:54
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I edited the post just to add a word count.
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Nov 17, 2018 23:01
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Yeah, sorry I forgot about the editing rule.
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Nov 18, 2018 04:43
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In
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Nov 20, 2018 00:50
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Kimberly 385 words She tiptoes Kimberly across the carpet, smiling Kimberly. Then she Kimberly falls, as if expecting to land Kimberly into someone's arms. She appeared in the apartment sometimes in the middle of calm cloudy nights, always when I was alone, repeating the same slight steps and vanishing mid-fall. I never told Katie our apartment was haunted, and if she knew, she never brought it up. It felt like cheating to watch the ghost scamper across the living room carpet. I loved Katie, and I'm happy I married her, but I never saw her as drunk with happiness as the ghost girl did whenever she tumbled into those invisible arms. Slowly, I came to secretly love the ghost. I tracked down the previous tenants, an old couple who'd lived at the apartment for decades before moving to someplace warmer. When I described the ghost to Harry, the old man, over the phone, he confirmed it was his first wife, Kimberly. She killed herself in 1970 at the age of twenty-three. No one knew why she did it, but Harry admitted he wasn't entirely surprised. Katie and I moved out of the apartment a few years later to be closer to her family. Since then we've lived in many different apartments and houses, none of which were haunted. We had a marriage near as happy as any really can be. Katie died a couple years back, younger than most but not by that much. A few days ago I got a phone call from a young woman, Tanya, the current tenant of Kimberly's apartment. She asked me if I knew anything about the ghost she sometimes sees on calm lonely nights. I was about to tell her about Kimberly but the ghost Tanya sees is Katie. Tanya will see Katie shouting at an invisible someone about not listening to her. I must have forgotten about that fight. There are no true ghosts in that apartment, I've realized. There are no souls trapped there, no one doomed to walk its carpeted hall. The apartment is a photographer, taking snapshots of moments; the fleeting happiness of a tormented woman or the momentary rage of a happy one. All those years ago, I had fallen in love with a photograph. Tanya thanked me and hung up, leaving me to my memories.
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Nov 23, 2018 00:26
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Pink Glow 389 words. Second entry, after "Kimberly." After my last breakdown, my friend Maddie took me in for the operation. It was quick and relatively painless, and by the end, there was a Lens right behind my eye. Although it couldn't get rid of my hallucinations, the Lens could differentiate between what was and wasn't real, giving every imaginary object a pink glow. I had never been more at peace. I could now identify the eyes popping out of cereal boxes at the supermarket and the shadowy figures that circle my bed at night as figments of my disease. They weren't so scary, either, basked in silly hot pink. I was able to go back to work and move out of Maddie's guest room into my own apartment. A few months ago, I started having hallucinations I didn't have before I got the Lens. I saw pink cop cars and ambulances on the street, and pink security cameras in the stores. Since I hadn't imagined anything like that before, I figured I would take some time off of work to relax and see if stress wasn't the underlying issue. Just the other day, as I was relaxing and watching some morning show, I got a knock on my door. "Who's there?" I called. "It's me." It was Maddie's voice. "Sara, nobody's seen you in weeks. You're not answering your calls. Are you okay?" I got up to walk to the door. "Of course, I'm just taking some R and R from work." I opened the door. There was a figure like Maddie, glowing hot pink. "You don't look good, Sara," said the fake Maddie. "Have you been washing yourself? How about you move back in with me, just for a few days?" But it couldn't fool me, so I grabbed it by the neck and threw it to the floor. As I strangled the figment, it tried to push me away, and the hallucination was so vivid I could feel it pressing against my chest, but it slowly lost the strength to do so. Just to make sure it wouldn't try to trick me again, I grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed a few holes in its neck. It's funny. That happened a few days ago, but the hallucination hasn't gone away. It's still lying there on the floor in a pool of bright pink blood.
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Nov 24, 2018 20:25
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Thanks, anti. Yeah, I figured the ending to Pink Glow was both a little obvious and maybe insensitive to people who actually suffer from schizophrenia. But I also thought I would lose automatically because of the opening paragraph of Kimberly, so I actually came out ahead! Derp, anti is 100% right about The Rich and For Thanksgiving, but if it means anything, I really liked Eat.
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Nov 27, 2018 05:37
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In me, flash me
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Nov 27, 2018 19:07
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La Familia Orfeo 948 words Carmina had been worried that her family would be too embarrassed by the manner of her death to put her photo on the living room ofrenda, but there it was, right in the center and bigger than all the rest. Carmina thought they'd use one of the pictures from her quinceañera, but instead they'd chosen a picture of Carmina laughing genuinely, taken while she wasn't looking. The family itself wasn't as somber as Carmina was accustomed to them being on the Day of the Dead. Instead, they were busying themselves with the wiring on a strange metallic wheel. Mamá, usually seen making everyone else feel guilty about not respecting the dead and eating too much candy, was sliding glowing green cannisters into receptacles in the side of the wheel, and Papá was tinkering with the battery instead of insisting he wasn't that drunk on the mezcal. Carmina approached her older brother David. He was pouring deep-red powder into a gadget the shape of a tuning fork. He called something out to the rest of the family, but Carmina couldn't hear it. Living language had become muted and indistinct when she died. She called out his name, though she knew he would hear her as well as she had heard the ghosts on Days of the Dead past. "David, I am here. Every year we did this, I thought it was a game, but I'm here now." But David continued filling the bizarre wands. Carmina wanted her family to say something to her, even if she couldn't understand it. She would know from their cadence and their tears if they were allowing her the forgiveness she didn't deserve. Instead, they kept diligently working on the machine. Papá said something with the tone of a question. Mamá nodded. David handed each of his parents a tuning fork, keeping one for himself. Mamá, Papá, and David gathered in a circle. "What are you doing?" Carmina shouted, going through her parents into the center of the circle. "Why are playing with this toy? I've been gone all of two months, and these machines are more important than my memory?" And of course they ignored her spirit amongst them as much as they did her picture on the ofrenda. Each held their tuning fork to their temple. Though Carmina couldn't hear their words, she knew they were counting down together. "What are you doing? Have you forgotten me?" Carmina cried as she read David's lips. Tres...dos...uno... There was a bright red flash. When it had cleared, Mamá, Papá, and David still faced the middle of the circle, but their eyes were focused more specifically, their jaws agape, their eyes wide. Mamá was the first to speak. "Oh, Carmina, thank God you're here. We knew you'd come." She started to weep. "Mamá, Papá, David," said Carmina. "You can see me. You can hear me." "We don't have much time," said David. "We need to get to business." "I'm so sorry..." started Carmina. "It doesn't matter. None of that matters," said David. "A couple days after you died, scientists announced they had discovered a new form of energy that the human consciousness is made out of. It leaks out of the brain after we die. But without the brain to keep it in place, the energy doesn't hold together very long. So when we die, we get a few months of..." He gestured towards Carmina. "But don't worry, sister." "How can you see me?" Papá held up one of the tuning forks. "These let our brains detect the energy you're made of for a few minutes." "You have no idea what we went through to get our hands on the batteries to use these and the Stabilizer just once," said David. "Mamá got lucky on a scratcher, we sold all the cars, I know a guy at the university, I made a deal with some... it doesn't matter. What matters is you're here now, and we have an Ectoenergetic Stabilizer." He pointed to the giant wheel. "That will keep your ectoenergy together for another year. And then, next year, we'll figure out how to make the money to do it again. And again after that. We're going to keep you alive." "No!" said Carmina. "This family will not go broke so I can be an invisible ghost." "Carmina, were you here when we heard the news that you died?" yelled Mamá. Carmina shook her ghostly head. "This house was a tomb. When we learned that you were still here in this form, there was no question." Carmina felt herself weeping, though her astral body had no water to expel. "I'm so sorry." "We had so many chances to help you," said Papá. "And we just yelled at you every time. We're sorry." "Look, Carmina. The money's already spent. Stay with us just one more year. We won't do it again," said David. Carmina nodded. "And then you'll keep me alive in the same way we've been keeping family alive for centuries," she said, looking at the ofrenda. She stepped into the wheel. "Stay around the house," said Mamá. "Just so we know you're with us." "What do I look like to you?" Carmina asked as David activated the Stabilizer. "You're wearing the dress you would wear to church," said Mamá. "You're so beautiful." Carmina smiled gently. "I love you all so much." The wheel ignited in vibrant green lights, spinning faster and faster. And as her family's voiced faded back into a muted blur, the emerald lights blended together in spectacular harmony. As she faded from their sight, Carmina looked proudly upon her family and felt a wonderful togetherness, a feeling of being made whole.
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Nov 30, 2018 03:43
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La familia orfeo, please.
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Dec 10, 2018 06:01
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In
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Dec 11, 2018 05:47
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 07:38 |
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I'm new to the forum; PWoT (the Cracked forums) shut down and old-school message boards are the only way I know how to internet. Most of my posts have been in this thread or the spooktober contest. Everyone talks about how SA is dying but the fact that some threads get a thousand posts in a day is mind-boggling to me. Same with a story contest that can reliably get ten entries weekly. I wasn't there for the Glory Days, but what I see looks incredible.
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Dec 26, 2018 20:43
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