Alumni Event 2
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Here’s the junk we write……
Stories in 1024 characters or less, by Patrick Johanneson
The Wait
She planted the seed and waited. After a while rain came down from the sky, pelting her skin, chilling her. She shivered but didn’t leave, not yet.
The sun came out, warming the soil, driving the cold from her bones. She waited. Clouds scudded by overhead, in a hurry for some reason. The moon rose, stars wheeled, and then the sun rose again.
She didn’t just wait, of course. She prayed, she sang, she read the old stories, the myths and the legends. On the seventh day she snoozed under a cloudless sky, waking only briefly when a dragonfly happened to touch down on her nose. She observed its cathedral-window wings, irridescent with refracted sunlight, and drowsed once more after it left her.
Rain, sun, moon, stars: she endured them all. The seedling broke the soil with a questing green curlicue, looking for all the world like a question mark in the Old Tongue. She sat on it and waited more: days, months, decades.
A boy came along and asked her why she’d climbed to the top of the tree.
“I didn’t,” she said.
Eating Everything There Ever Was
It started with a local hot-dog eating contest. Lou Verbain took first place, and moved on to the provincials, where he placed second. But the first-place contestant bowed out when his stomach ruptured, and Lou was on to the nationals. At internationals he placed a distant third to a whip-thin Japanese girl.
Lou wasn’t about to take that lying down, so he went into hard-core training. He ate all the hot dogs in town, then in the province, and eventually he caused a continent-wide shortage in meat-ish products.
He moved on. Hamburgers, pies, cookies, anything he could stuff down his gullet. He grew and grew, too, expanding like a weed, like a balloon. It was surreal.
The day he started eating cars was probably the point of no return. He started small, with a rusted-out Datsun, but by week’s end he was devouring Hummers and limos.
At some point hydrogen fusion started up in his stomach, but he didn’t notice.
Long story short, now he’s a black hole, Verbain X-1, and the Universe is slowly falling into him.
The Inversion
They shot me at dawn for my sins, gave me a pauper’s grave and a bunch of wildflowers plucked from the riverbank. They regretted it, so they told me, wished I was still alive. I listened from my black home beneath the dirt. What else was I to do?
What else, indeed.
When the sky split and the world everted, I thought it was perhaps the Last Trump, the Apocalypse of St. John come to take me home. It was an apocalypse, but not the second coming of the Messiah. No, nothing but missiles of proton-fusing power, wiping the living away, freeing the dead from our bonds, loosing us upon a world transformed.
In my yard a tree grows that weeps blood, and my lawn, which I cut with a black iron scythe, is made of souls. This is a queer new world I have been granted, and I intend to enjoy it.
I only wish my wife had been killed, before the bombs fell, so that she too could enjoy this black-sun utopia, where no one’s pulse races because no one has a pulse. But nothing is perfect, is it, eh?
Would you fancy some tea?
Food Network boards the new Celebrity Silhouette
Foodnetwork cruise storyFood Network boards the new Celebrity Silhouette
By J Kapp
