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Grandma was such a good host And could give magnificent toasts But it cost him his life When he found his young wife With two guests, pretending that she was a roast.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:04
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| # ¿ Dec 3, 2024 11:36 |
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Rules: Finicky Host Someone's got to take a bath The color black An aversion to wells An affinity for throwing What We Don't Talk About 1,583 words. Three hours into Davis’s fiftieth birthday, he paced in the kitchen while his second wife smirked at him. The two caterers shared a look with each other, wondering how to deal with their employer for the night—and the giant erection tenting his pants. “Jesus Kim, I can’t go out there like this.” Kim pretended to cough to hide her laughter. While it might have cured his erection, his self-esteem would take weeks to recover. “Maybe you shouldn’t have taken the blue pill before people started…you know,” she said while twirling her finger in a circular motion. He hissed at her through clenched teeth. “Shhhhhh. Jesus, just advertise it to everybody.” Kim turned to the male caterer, who was busy arranging oysters on a bed of ice. “Do you care that my husband has to take erection pills?” The caterer just blushed and looked away, pretending that the fresh oysters were taking all of his focus. “Well, there you go. A perfect stranger doesn’t care that you take medication for your little man,” she said, leaning in to tease her husband and flick the tip through his black leather pants. “Jesus Davis, these are tight. Did you really need your friends to see your entire hog?” Rolling his hips aside to avoid the flick, he told her, “These pants are sexy.” Davis was dressed in a pair of black leather pants and a lavender silk shirt slashed open past his breastbone. With his combover good and glossed up, he could have been Zorro, the accountant. Kim, meanwhile, wore a dress that was a second skin to her. Every inch that wasn’t exposed was hugged and cupped and shaped to perfection. “Those are the kind of pants you wear when you’re playing bad cop in the bedroom.” She pressed her index fingers together and pointed them at him. “Hands up! You’re under a sex!” “No one at an orgy is going to sleep with the sex cop. You gave me a pass and I’m drat well going to use it.” “And how exactly are you going to get everyone to just hop into bed, Officer Sexy?” He groaned. “Kim, I wrote on the invitations that people need to be open minded and expect a night to remember. The only way I could have been more obvious was to say, ‘There’s an above-ground hot tub, bathing suits are optional.’” “And you think that people will just start getting down with each other? All of your friends? The Hodges are going to suck and gently caress with the best of them?” “Yes, god drat it. Their kids have gone off to college too and Jim was telling me how boring their marriage was. This is the perfect opportunity for them. And for me.” Kim stepped behind him, gently kneading the tensed cables in his shoulders. While he melted just an inch, she leaned in and whispered, “You know, we could just go upstairs. Let these people party each other out. We’ll go upstairs, I’ll draw us a hot bath together and we can make soup.” He turned around then, stopping the massage. “I think you’ve just invented something less sexy than sex cop,” he said. Unfortunately, it had no effect on his pants problem. “gently caress it,” he said. Davis walked past the caterers to the seldom-used cabinet way up over the oven and pulled out a good bottle of Armagnac. With practiced ease, he pulled four highball glasses from the glass cabinet and poured two fingers for everyone else and four for himself. “To the good years,” he said, raising his glass. The caterers immediately stopped prepping and grabbed their glasses, clinking them to his. Kim scrunched her nose and sipped anyway. With three gulps, he destroyed $200.00 worth of Armagnac and thunked his glass on the counter. “All right, let’s go make this fuckin’ orgy, happen” he said, striding long-legged and straight-spined from his kitchen into the foyer. At 10:30, the combination of martinis and oysters and chili peppers had caused the party to saunter into a casual state of bedlam. Spaghetti straps began to drape from shoulders and ties lolled like tongues from open collars. When Davis entered the room, one of the other equity partners threw an arm around his shoulders. “You know Davis,” he slurred, “I wish I had been smart like you. I wish I had saved my money and bought a place like this.” Davis smiled and demurred gently, his eyes glancing over to his partner’s wife, Samantha, whose platinum hair gleamed from across the room. Her delicate waist curved inwards, hugged by the satin of her gown. Even though he loved Kim, Samantha ignited some fierce longing in Davis. The necklace resting on her collarbone drew his eyes gently downward towards the dark, inviting space between her breasts. The throbbing only got worse. “Don’t ever get divorced, each god damned time it’s like starting over.” “I just got divorced five years ago,” Davis said. “Well drat, don’t I have my dick in the punch bowl.” The partner glanced down and laughed. “Looks like I’m not the only one.” “If you keep looking, I’m going to brush your teeth with it.” The partner paused a moment, his brain calculating just how to parse that sentence through the haze of alcohol and polite sensibilities. With a laugh, he slapped Davis on the back, spilling some of his martini on him. The liquor bloomed into a wet stain near Davis’s belt buckle. “I’ll try anything once, and I’ve tried that once and it isn’t for me.” “Excuse me,” he said, plucking his partner’s arm from his shoulder like a diaper from the bottom of a trash can. “There’s something I’ve got to do.” From a mixture of gin, Armagnac, oysters and spice, Davis’s second voice had completely shut down—the one that told him to think through the consequences of his actions, or the reactions of the people around him. With an awkward grunt, Davis hefted one of the empty chairs from the dining room into the foyer before standing on it. “Hey everyone,” he yelled. The eyes all swiveled to him, twenty people stopping their conversations, expecting to hear a self-congratulatory toast or platitudes about their own worth. With a deep breath, he spewed it out. “Who wants to gently caress?” Two or three of the women started giggling. Kim hid her face in her hands from the threshold to the kitchen. Samantha’s eyes met his, two dark holes. Even though her eyes were blue, they looked like black wells, drinking his confidence. When the realization hit, he smiled and tried to play it off before running upstairs. Kim gave a small wave before following him. When she got there, Davis lay despondent on the bed, a starfish in a tidepool of his own pity, his uncomfortable pants in a crumpled heap. He grunted as Kim sat down on the bed beside him. At that point, she was glad he couldn’t see the smile on her face. “You doing ok, honey?” “No,” came the muffled voice from the pillow. “It wasn’t that bad,” she said. When he looked up from the pillow, her serious face came back. “Kim, I just humiliated myself in front of our friends and my business partners.” She shrugged. “Tell them you were drunk. It’s not any worse than when your brother got a DWI last year. On the big list of things that could go wrong, this is nothing.” “It would help if you weren’t sitting over there like the cat who ate the canary,” he said. “God, I hated the idea of this whole loving thing,” she said. “It wasn’t about you. You’re thirty-three for god’s sake. Talk to me when you’re fifty.” “Can you blame me for not wanting to see my Husband cheat on me?” “It’s purely physical,” he said, thinking about Samantha’s hair, thinking about how he wanted to throw her on the bed and just destroy her. She’d be walking like a cowboy for three days, if she was lucky. She ran one of her hands through her hair, buying herself a moment to put her words together. “That’s the thing. I didn’t want to give you that pass. I wasn’t even going to use mine.” “You weren’t?” “The only man I want to gently caress is my husband,” she told him. “I guess it’s different for women,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed next to her. “Well yeah, everyone’s been eye-loving me ever since I grew tits. Having someone not trying to sleep with you is a relief, except when it’s your husband.” He ignored the dig. Instead, he took his pot belly in his hands, peeking out from under his silk shirt “What everyone always tells you is that if you get rich and powerful, everyone will want to gently caress you. Look at me, I’m 50. Big house. Lots of friends. Good business.” “Hot wife,” Kim added. He smiled a little bit. “And that’s kind of it. I’ve got to be sexy to someone. And I just need that.” She leaned over and bit him on his earlobe, not hard enough to draw blood but just enough to express her disapproval. “That’s so rude,” he said. “C’mon,” she said. “I’ll go draw us a bath.” “One thing first,” he said, standing up. He touched his two index fingers and pointed them at her. “You’re under a sex.” “You’re an idiot,” she said, kissing him before he said anything stupid.
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Nov 9, 2020 03:53
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This ruuuuuuules. I'm in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRT7nJd7Wno
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Nov 10, 2020 23:00
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Where to Go When The World Doesn't Need You 1932 words. The first time I see Kettrick, she’s down in the pits, grappling with something that looks half beaver and half crab. She’s bobbing and weaving and her opponent is hissing and spitting, snapping at her with two big furry claws, each the size of her torso. The beaver crab is getting so worked up that it’s blowing big, chittery bubbles from its disgusting, bucked-tooth crab mouth. And then, as she’s running up to drop kick this thing right under the chin, it whips around and slaps her with its big, flat tail. The audience cheers at the first crack when the tail slaps her and they groan at the second crack, the one where her spine snaps as her back hits the wall. When she can’t move, two of the clowns run out to distract the beaver crab while the medics remove her from the field. The audience cheers when she throws up her hand, a small victory even in defeat. She’s back the next night, screaming obscenities at a pig man twice her size. Kettrick’s so muscular that she looks like someone piled a woman out of boulders. The pig man makes her look like an eight-year- old fighting her own father. When he grunts a reply, she leans her neck back like a cobra rearing to strike and with a snap forward, hocks a fat, wet blob of snot right into his face. The pig man looks at her like she just poo poo on his dinner table. Then he grabs her, wraps one enormous fist around her shoulders and the other around her hips and cracks her like a glowstick, spraying her insides over the crowd. A few of them are vomiting but most of them are losing their minds, treating what used to be Kettrick like confetti, smiling and laughing and throwing their worthless betting chits down to the pig man, thanking him for making it rain. Meanwhile, I’m in the corner hyperventilating, running that moment over and over in my mind, because in three days, it’s my turn in the pit. Coach knows something’s wrong the next day by the way I’m working the pads. Normally I’m able to stab right through the padding; today, I’m barely able to scratch them. He tells me to take a break and when I stand up, he shakes his head. “Your head’s not in it today, Marky. What’s wrong?” “Nothing, Coach.” You don’t talk about your feelings in the gym. It’s one of those rules—no matter what happens, you focus on the sport. The art. Not the feeling behind it. You want to talk about feelings, you go find someone who wants to talk about feelings, who gets warm and fuzzy from helping people. “You’re fighting like you got butterknives instead of spears. You really that worked up?” I look down at what I call my hands, the serrated green spears that are only good at making things bleed. They used to tease me for these things growing up, trying to hunt and peck on a keyboard. No one is going to hire a mantis to run a daycare or enter data. I wouldn’t know how to start getting a job, anyway. No one really works anymore unless they want to. “Nah, coach. Just thinkin’.” He claps me on the back. I know I answered correctly, saving him the trouble of baring his soul to me. He runs into his dingy broom closet office, set dank and cramped, just the way he likes it. He comes back with his phone and with nimble thumbs, he texts me a location. It displays right across my retinas—I stopped carrying a phone after stabbing through the fourth one. “I got a friend you should talk to,” he says. “A fighter. She works the bar. Tell her coach sent you.” I try to avoid any excuse to talk to people. Most nights I go home and plug in to the simulations and pretend to be someone else for a while. But tonight my stomach feels like a black hole, trying to solve my problems by cramping up and sucking me into nonexistence. I walk to the bar anyway, hoping maybe a drink will help me relax and knowing it won’t. The bar itself is programmed for 1950s Ireland, dark and cavernous and homey. The yellowed glass windows are printed with blocky letters, “Finnegan’s.” When I open the door, Kettrick is working the bar in a tank top, work pants and suspenders. A couple of patrons look up before returning to their drinks. She sees me gawking and waves me over. “What can I get you?” I have trouble talking to her and accidentally ignore her question; I can’t stop focusing on how I saw the pig man turn her into a Christmas popper the previous night. “I didn’t think you’d be back so soon,” I told her. She flashes me a grin, showing off a mouth of perfectly straight, white teeth that don't belong in the mouth of a pit fighter. “You saw that, huh?” “I thought it took weeks to get reborn.” My parents used to terrify me with death, telling me that by the time I got back, all of my friends would be taller than me and the cat wouldn’t remember me. “Maybe twenty years ago,” she said. “Absent something really big happening, there’s usually not a line.” “How quick were you back?” “Twenty minutes. Two people got into a lover’s quarrel and shot each other, so I was third in line.” As she’s polishing the glass in her hand, she’s also preening, making her muscles appear bigger than they’d normally be and standing so that the light makes her hair glitter. I envy that she can polish the glasses without dropping them while she's looking at the sharp tips at the end of my claws. “Does it hurt?” “poo poo, yes it does. You never forget how you go.” “How many times?” “Too many to count.” “And are you still…you know?” “Still what?” “Still you.” Kettrick makes a show of examining her body, running her eyes down her biceps and the thick lumps of her quadriceps, flexing her surprisingly delicate fingers. “Yep, all here.” “You’re not afraid that you’re not you?” “Are you afraid of going to sleep at night?” I shake my head. I’m afraid of a lot of things but sleep has never been one of them. “Just like that. Except instead of waking up in your bed, you just wake up somewhere else.” The muscles in my stomach unclench the slightest bit, just enough to get back to my normal levels of nervous. “Thank you,” I tell her. “Coach send you?” she asks. I nod. “Said it’d help.” She gives me a wink and a thumbs up. “You’ll do fine.” Two days later, I’m in one of the locker rooms on the side of the pit, fighting off the shakes. I tell myself that it’s the anticipation, like racehorses get before running. I tell myself this is what I’m made for. I could care less about what the betters think—they’re here for status. The pits hand out fake money they let people wager and keep track of who’s got the most. I could care less about some old men in a pissing contest. What I care about is how to fit into a world that doesn’t need me. The locker room is almost a hospital, with several doctors eagerly waiting nearby for their chance to help the fighters. As I sit and wait for the call, other fighters are here with their coaches, getting wrapped up and going through the motions. Maybe in a couple more rounds I’ll invite my family to show them what we are best at, at least, if I can get them unplugged from the sims. One of the pit workers comes to grab me, to let me know it’s my time. I stand up from the bench and crack my neck, walking out to the pit while the audience screams its approval. I don’t even see them, because my eyes are on the other gate. Whoever it is, he’s so big that he has to crouch to get through the door. My heart drops when I realize it’s the pig man Kettrick fought. Even though I’m tall, he still has a good four feet on me—up and to each side. You could fit six of me into his pants. I don’t have time to be scared, because as soon as he enters the pit and sees me, he puts his shoulder down and charges, trying to smash me into the wall and hammer me with those clubs he calls hands. Since the pit is about 20 feet wide, I have a couple seconds before he reaches me. I wait for him to get just close enough, then roll out of the way, carving a chunk from his thighs with one of my spears. He screams, more rage than pain, before trying to square up with me. Even though he’s big, he’s slow, and his punches and kicks are so obvious that he might as well be yelling out his combinations. I pepper him with lots of little slashes, opening up tiny red wounds all over his body. And for the first time, I’m not thinking about how scared I am, or how my hands are useless, or that I’m a waste of space in a society that doesn’t need people. I’m in my element. The blood is running down his arms and legs but he’s got so much of it that he’s not tiring. Without a debilitating injury, he’s just got to catch me once. I wait for him to put weight on his left knee and as soon as he does, I dive and try to carve through it like a butcher, tearing through the cartilage. And it would have worked but he collapses his knee backwards, pinning my spear with his own weight. He opens his mouth in a cruel imitation of a smile and rears back one of his enormous, chubby fists. His sadistic happiness is the last thing I see before he pops my head clean off my neck with his punch. It’s just like waking up, except the bed is different. I figured they’d have some nurses but Kettrick is waiting for me by my bedside. “You had a rough time there, Marky,” she tells me, giving me her hand to help me to take my first steps. I give her the best smile a Mantid can, the one that doesn’t scare other people. The muscles in this body are smoother than my old one, not full of clicks and pops and scarred-over wounds. “I think I’ll be seeing this place a lot,” I tell her. "How you feeling?" she asks me. I shrug. "Honestly, a lot better than I used to. How'd I do?" “You nicked an artery on him. He almost bled out. I think that’s the best anyone’s ever done on him." Kettrick pulls the tip of one of my spears from her pocket, six inches of serrated chitin. "You ok with me keeping this and turning it into a knife?” she says as she swishes my old hand in the air a few times. I nod and start moving towards the exit. “Just don’t use it on me,” I tell her. “No promises,” she tells me, holding my elbow even though I can walk on my own. There's nothing romantic about it; it’s nice while it lasts, though.
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Nov 15, 2020 21:52
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In it to win it. One something I remember, please.
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Nov 16, 2020 20:25
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Week 429 delayed crits You know, the one where you got unlimited word count and I lost my crit documents. Magic Cactus - Homesong You've got to understand that Idle Hands are the Devil's Playthings is one of my favorite episodes of almost any media ever and it's definitely got some fingerprints all over this story. It made me smile but the conflict feels very, very rushed. There's no specific reason why these things really revolt and there's no big foreboding presence about it. It just happens suddenly for me and I wish it had been done either in a different capacity or with a different conflict. I'm not really invested in the homonculi is what i"m saying. 5/10 Take the moon - skinwalker- You've got this immutable style that breaks all the rules but you've tried to do a lot here. Two perspectives. One alien set of rules. I loved some of the word choices and some of the imagery you used. You've created an interesting world and I'm conflicted on how we're dropped in the middle of it. But the last line fell flat on its face to me, given your ability with words. 5/10 Path - Degenerate Stars 8.5/10 You've definitely nailed postcolonial fiction. The interplay of the different languages definitely helped show that it was two different cultures smashed together. There are some issues with telling as opposed to showing- things like "Long-haul space travel was not easy on the body." and I loved the scene with the Xibalba reveal. And then you put in something like "It was a station—no— it was a citadel—no—it was. A lot." which completely took me out of the picture you had painted. I enjoyed calling the gods Deaths but you've brought some things completely out of whole cloth when it would suit you-- new rules when it was expedient, which I wasn't a huge fan of. Like "You love play, right?" A hell of a first entry. It needs some editing but I'll probably say that a lot this week. Simply Simon - Take the Stars I'm going to shoot straight with you-- this one's hard to follow. And I think it's supposed to be, because being an empath is confounding and a jumble of emotions and tangles, of getting lost in the names. There's definitely growth here. The problem is I'd like a little more background as to what's going on instead of being immediately dropped in. You had the words to do it, young man. Promise, though. 4.5/10 Uranium Phoenix - What Lies Beneath You took the concept of post-colonial science fantasy and nailed it. It's a setting I never really thought about before but it makes sense in your context. There's an outlying world, it's not too confusing and your universe makes sense-- it has rules. The scenes are great and I enjoyed the action going on here. The characters, unfortunately, fall a little flat. It's a little tough to follow who's who. While there's motivation, it ends up being a little...forced. 7/10. A Friendly Penguin - Battle of the Senses Things are a little stilted. Some uses of double negatives that don't appear to be stylistic and some awkward phrasing. Things like "He’d have to share any secrets of efficiency that he learned when he returned to work." Simple grammatical mistakes, like missing commas. "This was a simple matter they said." It kinda peters out a little bit. It's your main character being annoyed. Exploring the world but being annoyed and he doesn't really change as a result. 4/10 Gorka - Song of the Depths This one was out of your comfort zone, I can tell. You're doing a lot more telling me than showing me things here. "Strange, the previous squad should've noticed the alert." "He actually knew what to do in order to refill the water levels, and he could do more than just signal the problem. He could report its resolution" "As the youngest member of this expedition, he wasn't given any meaningful tasks. He still wanted to prove to himself and the rest of the crew that he was capable." "It was the only time he did something unsupervised, and it went wrong." Then it's such an abrupt shift to talking with the whales and...what? You kinda lost me. It just got really, really rushed. 4/10 Sparskbloom - Institutional Memory You've got good, solid prose here and I love Grandma as a character. Your main character has motivation and there's a concrete plot line with a conflict. I've got an issue with the ending, though. If she's a revolutionary and tried to commit a coup, you'd think that'd be the last person you'd turn into. 7/10 MockingQuantum - A Spark So this is a crit I've gotten before-- you've fallen into the pattern of "This happened. Then this happened. Then this happened" in your story. It needs to be broken up with a little flavor text every now and again or some description. Not necessarily dialogue but depth. Give me some flavor. There's not enough to really get into here-- but I want more. Show me more. 6/10 Thumbtacks - “Excuse me, would you be interested in a timeshare on Callisto?” It's cute. But it's passive. Your character elaborates and complains but ultimately nothing really happens. It's a dry turkey sandwich on white bread. All the elements are there and you've checked the boxes but it's not deep. Give me growth, give me something to root for. Give me action. Having a character die at the end of a short story is kind of like the sad trombone sad from Price is Right. 4.5/10 Tyrannosaurus - Anyway Your Honor Looove it. Was my pick for the win. 12K words and I was excited to read all of them, holy poo poo. Love the characters, love the setting, it's definitely post-colonial. You've got three fully-fleshed characters, a cogent story and frankly, I'd pay money for it. You done good. Any criticism I could make is purely stylistic. Sorry. It's hard to crit good stories. 9/10. Crabrock - Countdown I think you played a bit too long with the physics instead of the characters and setting. I liked the parts about Dan, not so much about how physics works. I think it detracted from what you were going for. If you had more words? Sure. But with this space, you tend to need to condense it to what you need or color in what what you've got a bit more. 6/10 Sebmojo - V I like it. It's very short. I would like some more, please. It's tough to crit something this short. Dr. Kloctopussy - Vampire Dad and the Magical Sword from Space (Part I) I loving love this kind of stuff. John Dies at the End is my favorite book. But much like John Dies at the End, it needs editing. You need to crunch it down and keep it on focus. But it's FUN. Where's part 2? 7/10 G-Mawwwwwww fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Nov 28, 2020 |
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Nov 28, 2020 02:43
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| # ¿ Dec 3, 2024 11:36 |
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I'd support making it a toxx consequence. And also making it garfield.
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Dec 23, 2020 01:22
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