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I'm in.
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Jun 7, 2023 03:07
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| # ¿ Sep 12, 2024 00:44 |
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Title: The Walkman Sport crackled out its mournful tune- synths, electric organs, a veritable orchestra of the last instruments of modernity that washed over me with the slowness of molasses. I knew the battery was getting low; already it was sounding like a dirge for a coked-up discohead. I didn’t have any replacement AAs. Outside the wind howled fiercely, warning me that if I went outside I’d get chipped apart like a piece of whittling wood. I watched the sickly orange flurry pass by the windows. Twirling my box cutter over and over in my hand, I slid the blade in and out of the handle in a personal ritual, reassuring myself of its edge. Looking outside longingly, I tried to remember exactly why I was in this derelict skyscraper, creaking into its foundation like an obese sexagenarian getting ready to die in his La-Z-Boy. I tried not to let the years that had passed cross my mind, to not obsessively try to reason out how stable it was. With any luck, the storm would pass and I could be out of here shortly. I looked over at the unmanned desks, word processors stuck in monastic silence, and wondered where the clerks and wonders of years gone by had ended up. Surely not all of them had died? My own brother worked in a place like this, a mechanic turned office busybody. It was one of the funnier stories of success in an otherwise mediocre family; an upper manager watched how effortlessly my brother typed out his expense report for bodywork on a Mercedes and offered him a job on the spot. He made his way up from there from a typist to an idiot savant of the business world- one of those rare success stories that kept people going. The idea that maybe, just maybe, they might get adopted into the world of upper management. As the tape wound down, I reminisced on one last memory of my brother– the night we got split up, somewhere near Topeka. I tripped over a piece of destroyed masonry as we ran away, bumping my head when I hit the ground, and by the time I had regained my wits, he was gone under the cover of a dark, dead city. All that could be done was hope he was alright, wherever he ended up. I smoke the last of my cigarettes in my emergency stairwell, watching the smoke rise up to the roof access door, as it rattles in the frame from the gusts outside. Returning to the office, something black and plastic with a red button catches my eye. I realized quickly it was an everyday generic voice recorder, and with a fierceness befitting a hungry man snapping up a mouse, snapped off the back. But inside, the batteries had corroded beyond use. I sighed. Every day with this poo poo man.
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Jun 10, 2023 03:10
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LurchinTard posted:Title: gently caress forgot the title like an idiot cause i noticed a spelling error before i posted. the title is Cutting up the Hours. 481 words LurchinTard fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Jun 12, 2023 |
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Jun 10, 2023 03:11
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In. Flash me!
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Jun 14, 2023 05:12
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splendid
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Jun 14, 2023 05:20
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Title: Whispers of the Sun Words: 1135 He loaded another shell into the chamber; birdshot. This was his last, and he couldn’t miss it. His heart pumped with the feral intensity of a hunted animal as he brought the silver bead up and the shotgun to bear against his shoulder. His finger shuddered in the guard before pulling in a single, quick motion. The concussive boom, the burn of the powder, his sweat launching off of him from the recoil, and he knew he had hit his mark before he had the time to blink. The orange clay exploded into a thousand different shards. Galath cheered for his dear friend as he lowered the shotgun, but Valin had no joy on his face. The birds in the grove took to the skies, the trees shaking with gusts of wind as their mammoth wings worked with clock-like precision, and after only a few moments their flock blocked out the red midday sun. Shadows crossed over the two and the heat of the day was relieved, if only for a brief second. It was so drat hot these days; it had been for decades. Things were cooling down, from what Valin understood, but there were still many decades to go. The official party line for some time had been a “gradual downshift”, but the gradualness of the entire affair was somewhat in question after ‘36. After all, it was somewhat difficult to maintain an industrial infrastructure when the world had torn itself apart; such misfortunes contributed greatly, their damning costs aside. The harvest party was soon, Valin thought. According to his watch, couldn’t be more than an hour or two. He had just in time been able to brew up some foul-tasting moonshine, and Trell from a few miles down the way had been able to make some sweet grenadine; with any luck, they would be the talk of their peers. The walk back that evening from the clay shooting was quiet and tense. Galath knew why, and Valin knew Galath knew but felt incapable of manifesting the building pressure under his gut, that torturous feeling that seemed to strangle his heart. As the two continued their trek back, their path was obstructed by a dead raccoon. It was still and didn’t appear to be bleeding or wounded, but without a doubt it was dead. “poo poo, maybe it fell out of a tree,” Galath mumbled. “Don’t think they can die from that. They’ve got bones made for falling or something like that. Like cats do.” Valin responded in turn. “Huh. Should we bury it?” “It’ll stink up the place if we don’t.” The two sat down their packs and slowly but surely began clawing up the dirt path with their hands, wide enough to store the creature, but not very deep- the two were tired quickly by such a task, and the humidity of the early evening was beginning to outweigh their sympathies for the dead. With very little ceremony, Galath cut off a chunk of his shirt and used it to shuffle the racoon into the hole, before they both covered it up. Valin spat into his hands, and tried to rub the dirt off, before giving up and simply smacking them against his shorts, and to Galath’s surprise, he spoke. “They don’t think Pa will make it to see autumn.” There was a pause. Heavy, sodden with internal anguish. “Cancer’s spreading from his leg, even after the amputation. They think it won't be long before it gets his heart, or his kidneys, or something similar. He just spends most of his days on the rocking chair at this point, barely talking.” “It’s a drat shame. But he got to raise you, and you got to know him for a good 19 years. With his health, I think that’s a solid bargain.” “It just wasn’t enough. He raised me, yeah, he lived with me and loved me even after Ma passed. He was never rough with me, he never had me hungry. But he never got to watch me grow past this. I’ll get older. I’ll maybe have kids of my own. But my last memories of my own drat father will forever be locked here, watching him slowly suffer, slowly lose the joy in his life. It ain’t fair that he only lived to see me be a kid, just some dumb sack of poo poo he raised. He’s gotta languish while I go out and drink whiskey and barely work. I’ve probably got another 60 years in me. And he wont be in any more of em.” There was more silence, as the dirt crunched under their boots. “Not any fault of your own. No one expects you to be making kids and working the earth at this age. Least of all him.” Valin choked down a sob, rubbing his eyes with the back of his palms before continuing on the path. “I’m sure more than anything he’s glad he gets to see you. Better he’s going then you; no one wants to be the father that outlives his son.” “That's a terrible way of looking at it, you know. Better neither of us then one way or the other.” “Better way then hating yourself cause your old man is dying.” “Fair enough.” Valin kicked a pebble out of the trail, and once more wiped the tears out of his eyes. “Best not to mope about the whole thing, or it’ll be like he’s dead before he’s even passed, V.” Valin nodded his head in affirmation. He could see his house in the distance now, and his old man on the porch, a flask next to him. As he approached the house, he sat down next to him, and knew that men have very few days of their life to enjoy with their fathers- better to spend as many as he could, rather than mourn the living. His father had already gone to bed by the time the harvest party had kicked off; warm with the burning of homemade liquor in his gullet and the syrup of grenadine ever slowly sliding down his throat, he felt for the first time in a very long time that things would be alright. Another set of shot glasses came down the line, filled once more to the brim of his concoction, and with joy in his heart and determination to impress every woman in the 10 or so mile radius that had come for the festival, he slugged it back. Galath’s cheering once more came, and this time it was invigorating rather than scraping. Standing up unsteadily, one of the women from a town over kissed him on his cheek, and as he tripped on a root and landed face first in the dirt, all he could think of was the warmth of her lips.
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Jun 18, 2023 17:13
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Fat Jesus posted:
admittedly I rushed through the description. But i gotta be honest, my family isn't rich- our grandparents grew up on a subsitence farm in southern georgia, and we'd go clay shooting out there all the time. You just gotta have someone throw the clays with a hand tosser, and with a little birdshot there's not much else too it. My grandfather used one of those old iver johnson single barrels for it. I hosed up the worldbuilding in the story a lot admittedly, but for the sake of my own family history, i gotta fight the idea that clay shooting is a rich person thing.
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Jun 20, 2023 03:55
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in. 348
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Jul 24, 2023 22:15
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Antivehicular posted:Your dog breed is the Schipperke (unless you wanted to pick one yourself) to clarify, my prompt is just the dog breed?
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Jul 25, 2023 01:03
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| # ¿ Sep 12, 2024 00:44 |
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FEAR AND BARKING ON I-95 PROMPT: week 348 extreme flash: someone needs to get something done by the end of the day or face Dire Consequences That fuckin dog was yapping the back seat again, screaming at me while I maneuvered on 95 going a smooth 90MPH. My 10 year old car was groaning while everything around me seemed to be collapsing, I was too goddamn high behind the wheel and the cigarette wasn’t doing me any favors. Boss’s dog. Boss’s screaming dog, yelling, fuckin trying to courier the thing between Brunswick to Atlanta before 7PM or I was dead meat. By this point I really wasn’t sure if that meant I wasn’t gonna see any sort of promotion for the next few years or I was gonna get a new .45 sized metal plate in the back of my head. I wasn’t keen to find out. Schipperke. Meant to be alert, curious, and confident by dictionary definition. Goddamn did I get the short end of a stick with that. Why couldn’t have he owned a cat, or one of those dogs you can give xanax to? Looked like a cotton ball someone stretched out and gave some legs, this stubby yapping passenger of mine. I was getting some serious over-stimulated jitters while my face felt like I had stuck it into some arctic snow from the coke numbing me out. It was gettin real cold in our car, heat aside. The numbers on my dash were unreadable with the shakes I had, and this dog wasn’t helping me one bit. I tried to light up a joint in the car and level myself out a bit, but by the time I was finished I was thinking too hard about nuclear war. Some bitch in a BMW didn’t turn on her turn signal as I sped through and I nearly crashed into her as I swung into the shoulder to avoid a fireball collision. My tires were gonna get replaced after this journey. As I reached the peak of a hill and slammed my foot on the accelerator going down hill, the dog got pushed into the back seat, unable to cope with the G’s I was throwing down. I had a good 40 miles left and maybe an hour before I reached my target spot. At current rate, I should make some time to spare. Atlanta traffic was a fickle sort of lady. It couldn’t be on the outskirts of city, it couldn’t be at some gas station, he had to get this dog to his apartment. I watched a state trooper pop up in my rearview, and hit the brakes, slowing to a mellow 60 degrees. The car rank of weed. I still had a sugar mustache. God knows what was in the glove compartment. I couldn’t risk getting arrested this late in the game. Eventually, after 15 of the most tense minutes of my entire sorry life, he takes a offshoot exit and pulls into a burger king. Like a leaden brick falling off the leaning tower of pisa I slam the gas pedal and see my RPM counter hit 6000. There could be no affording failure, no “five minutes late”. Now or never. The dog kept yapping, nipping and scratching at my leather seats. Maneuvering my way through Atlanta, I eye the BMW stadium like some leviathanic beast, some alien mothership here to submerge our world in slick angles and luxury dashboards. It passes quickly under a bridge as I call my boss. 6:55. “Dog’s here. I’m outside.” He hangs up. gently caress this job man. LurchinTard fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Aug 2, 2023 |
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Jul 30, 2023 20:20
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