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Week 34 (June 15- June 20) Done
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ak, trying to think of a story!!
Epitome of RejectionShort Story thing: No
Becka strolled as slowly as possible down the ally, trying to reach the end leisurely. She had paced back and forth dozens of times that very night already, it was starting to get repetitive.
Suddenly, someone from behind rushed her, slamming her shoulder first into the wall. Her heart pounded with shock and excitement as the man took her face in one of his hands and turned it painfully toward him, into his own face.
“Oh,” He said, a little startled, then quickly let her go. “Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
“Someone else?!” She shrieked. “Oh no, don’t you dare do that! I’ve been here every night this week waiting for you!”
He stepped back, holding his hands up defensively. “No, really, I’m sorry. You have the wrong person.”
“No I don’t!” Becka insisted, walking toward him. “I know it’s you! Every single one of my friends gave a very specific report of what you look like, and it’s definitely you!”
“Miss, please.” He said weakly, still trying to back petal from her.
“Don’t please me.” She spat. “What’s wrong with me huh? Every single girl that got raped got raped right here! I’ve been strutting down here for hours, each night this week, and nothing! Am I that unattractive? Do you know what this does for my self esteem?” She demanded.
“Look,” He sighed, “You just aren’t my type.”
“Type?!” She shrieked. “You are a fucking rapist! You can’t afford to be picky!”
“Business has been good.” He admitted.
Becka had backed him far enough back that his back hit the opposite wall he had pinned her against. She took the advantage and lunged for him, grabbing at his belt.
He fought back, but for as desperate and strong as he was, she was quick and determined. When he saw her get the upper hand, he began to scream, and kept screaming as she clawed his pants away.
“I’ll show you, not your fucking type!” She spat.
Someone from behind grabbed her, pulling her from her almost rapist.
“Miss, what’s going on here?” The new man demanded, fighting to hold her. “I’ll call the police.”
“Please do!” The rapist cried.
“Great! Now I look fucking desperate!” Becka cried.
-END
Charley's StrangeMeet Charley Schultz. People think of him as quite the strange one. He does so many weird things.
To begin with, he talks to himslef. OOOO! There is a huge crime. I haven't talked to anyone yet who doesn't talk to themselves when they are alone. Talking to yourself is normal. It is abnormal to not talk to yourself. Charley is a normal guy and I certainly am. At least, that's my take on the subject.
Charley likes to swing on the swings wherever he finds some. At least as huge as talking to yourself if not more so. Do you know how therapudic swings are? The swaying motion is a for-sure relaxant. I am not going to take away his relaxant, are you?
Charley hears and sees things. Another crime. Maybe I should have the police come and get him right away, because he is doing nothing but sitting there seeing and hearing things in private. He's not hurting anyone. What is the big deal? Medicine can take care of that.
Sometimes, he looks down and like he doesn't want to be out. He is extremely depressed. Wow!! I think we will have to have half of the population under arrest for this one, including me. Once again, depressing isn't against the law. Medicine can also help this problem.
Sometimes he is skipping and jumping and laughing. I think it doesn't need to be said, but I will say it anyway. There is no law against happiness last time I looked. Overly happy is called manic, and medicine will help with that also.
Sometimes Charley is suspicious of others. Well, you know, there are people in this world that are out to hurt people. What is wrong with protecting yourself by being cautious about people he doesn't know?
These are the main crimes that Charley is being accused of. I don't think Charley is strange at all. And neither are half of the rest of the population.
I think the only problem with Charley is that he has more than one "diagnosis of mental illness". It is harder to look ordinary if you are one of the unfortunate people people with more than one diagnosis. I think it a conspiracy between the drug companies and the doctors to make everyone think that they are "mentally disturbed" so the drug companies and the doctors can both make a profit in the deal.
I hope this helps people realize that just because you or I are "mentally ill" doesn't mean we have to act like a "psycho". We can function very well in society if we are on the right medicine. We can look and act "normal" (which is a setting on a dryer).
Title: Nanny in VegasAuthor: Sunny
Words: 639
Short Story Contest: Yes
Notes: Sorry, this is odd and rambling and has no real point. I was in a really strange mood when I wrote it…
Why the hell did I ever become a nanny? Taking this position had to be the single dumbest thing I had ever done… well, at least the single dumbest thing I’d done in the last five years.
The plane ride to Vegas had been terrible. Mr. Vernig, Mrs. Vernig, Devan Virnig (their son and my charge) and I all had had first class seats. You might think was a good thing. It’s not. Not at all, first class seats are quite a bit larger than the regular ones so I couldn’t simply squish Devan up against the window and prevent him from escaping. He had repeatedly slipped out of the seats and run along the aisles or locked himself in the bathroom. Thankfully the Vernigs had had several to many drinks and were utterly oblivious to my complete lack of control over their six-year-old son.
Things didn’t pick up much after the plain landed. Devan had to be pulled from the luggage carousel three times and then bodily dragged away from the coffee shop’s iced cinnamon buns. I had thought that things might be better once we had gotten to the hotel and I could fence him out from the rest of humanity.
It turned out that the hotel wasn’t so great either. Mr. and Mrs. Vernig had a large and luxurious suit. Devan and I had a tiny room several floors below with two double beds, an adjoining bathroom, a TV and absolutely nothing else.
“So Devan, what do you want to do? Do you want to play a board game?” I asked, trying to be friendly and not sound like I was picturing strangling him.
“No. We lost most of the pieces on the plane,” he answered as he started to bounce on the bed.
That was true. I hoped that the flight attendant hadn’t find the games pieces in the ketchup dispenser until after we had left the plain. “Well, then let’s explore the room then,” I said, pulling him from the squeaking bed.
There wasn’t much exploring to do. A family of mice was living in the TV cabinet along someone’s old sock, the closet was empty and the bathroom hadn’t been cleaned. “How’s the view?” I asked Devan, hoping to find one good feature of the room.
“Icky,” he answered and moved aside slightly so I could see too. We were on the ground floor so it looked out into someone’s back yard, whoever owned the yard had some personal hygiene issues. The yard was fun of piles of junk several over-flowing garbage cans, I started gagging.
Glancing around some more I noted a number of wooden crosses pounded into ground, marking the resting places of Mittens, Spankie, Panda, Jumno, Bubba, Tony, Mia, Jones and Sparky.
Good God, our window looked out on a psycho animal killer’s hide out! “Alrighty, Devan, that’s enough of that! Just a view, let’s go watch TV now!” I said, hustling him back to the bed and closing the curtains.
It took almost an hour and six arguments later he found a channel he liked. I listened to Spongebob out of one ear and watched the shadowy figures walking in the yard outside the window.
* * *
At six-thirty we had room service bring us up some Mac and Cheese and continued to watch Spongebob and I tried to keep Devan from throwing toys at the TV during commercials.
Finally by eleven-thirty Devan had fallen asleep and was drooling on the pale green pillowcase.
I sighed in relief, as soon as the Virnigs got back from the casinos I was resigning!
Mod
by: Arthur
Words: 2472
Short Story Contest: Yes
………………………………………
Dream Machines
Alvin and Chip; what a couple. They had been brothers. Chip was the older of the two boys. They had to share friends in the neighborhood. They had to share the bus to school. They had to share clothes, toys, Christmas vacations and everything else. There was nearly two years in age difference. Alvin had taken over the computer. And he signaled himself out as a computer nerd. The first significant trade difference between the two boys. Chip had liked to read books. He liked having friends and going out with them to show off sometimes. He sometimes wrote poetry and short stories in his notebook.
Alvin didn’t like the parties. The hair styles. The drag of it all but he liked the computer and all things with it. He loved the internet. He loved joy riding it. He had developed a thumb print for his backup disks and electronic notebook. He suddenly realized though one day that he was behaving differently than his brother Chip. Chip still had the nice clothes, he was a senior in high school and had a steady girlfriend, and the type mom didn’t approve of. Alvin had no friends, he didn’t care about driving in a car or any of the things his brother and he once did together. Alvin realized they had suddenly grown different and apart.
When Chip came home Alvin in his loneliness for his brother’s company would hide his feelings. Instead of saying hey let’s go somewhere sometime together Alvin would just pretend he was busy on the computer. Alvin would sit up suddenly and play smart for Chip. But Chip never seemed to mind, as if he had grown accustomed to Alvin being lazy and staying on the computer. Chip would go off to his end of the room and pull out his notebook and write his stories without as much as a word to Alvin most nights. Chip really feared he had lost his brother to bad influences and that dumb computer and at the same time hoped there was still time to save him someday when he thought of a way.
That was about when Alvin grew bored one afternoon after he returned home from school. He knew Chip would be playing soccer so he gave up his logging in on the computer to go on to Chips side of their room. He took out the top notebook and looked inside. Inside he found a romantic play written by Chip. With a gushing sensation Alvin put it back and forgot about his peeking into Chips notebook for about a week. Then one afternoon after Chip came home to change into swimming trunks, Alvin took out the same notebook to see what else Chip had written. It was good.
Chip took a sudden interest with Alvin as everyday he came home Alvin was no longer tinkering on the computer but had been attempting to assemble one instead from a scratch box. After a few weeks Alvin built his own computer. After that jobs of repairing one became rather easy for the interested young boy. Chip notice too how Alvin was being cheerful and less his antisocial self lately. He had begun to think Alvin would soon break out of a cocoon of some kind and join the rest of the world. That was when Alvin began a job at the near by fix-it shop owned by Mr. Hornsby another computer wizard. And Alvin was out every afternoon after school until evening. Chip’s hopes faded away. But his writing didn’t deter. And Alvin dipped in it ever now and again to keep up with his brother even if they were both busy ships passing in the night so much lately. As summer ended they would have to go to school again. Chip would graduate and leave home for college and Alvin would have to quit his job until the next summer.
Alvin grew surprised by the disk player machines. First they had a big machine called a Laser disk player which operated on a disk the size of a nylon record. Then came the CD and computers had them installed. The internet grew into a heavenly tool for users. One day after work Alvin stared at the Laser Disc machine and figured out a way to copy the movies onto a CD of his own.
An encryption code are in the Laser Disks and he wrote a basic code program in some ASCII and then began building his own recording machine. That was when Chip saw what Alvin had built. Chip was surprised and had instantly begun to think that someday Alvin surely would be rich. Rich wasn’t in Chips fate. He finished high school with a scholarship in football. But he never felt good in college not having a father. Their father ran out on them when Chip was young and Alvin was only a little baby. Their mother raised them on her own. Chip hated his father for that except Chip doesn’t see his father because he died when Chip turned fourteen. He died from lung cancer from mining coal in the mines. Chip still felt regrets and he knew deep down inside he would never forgive his father for what he did and hate him still but he also thought it interfered with his ability to concentrate on the field. Chip wasn’t a loser like his father was but he wouldn’t be drafted either and he had used up his scholar money for college. He needed cash. That was when the Laser Disk was a flop on the market and they introduced the Compact CD and Video cassette machine. Alvin built a computer that compiled movies to a VCD which was a compact CD only it contained computer ASCII’s of a video in data.
Chip had a fantastic evil idea. He urged Alvin in building him a machine so he could copy on to VCD’s and sell them at a profit on his own black market prices. Alvin agreed to do it because he could build it with used computer parts. That was a smart idea he thought. Chip sold VCD’s to his college roommates. But college was busier than high school was any day. Chip decided he needed a higher flow of stock to sell to his friends and hired Alvin to help him copy movies together. Together they net some money illegally off of pirated movie VCD’s. VCD’s play in most computers so the money triangle scheme was working out for them. Alvin hoped it would bring them close. He wanted to ask what Chip had written but he grew afraid Chip would jump to conclusions that Alvin had snooped all this time. Alvin wasn’t a peeping tom snooper he just missed his dang older brother.
Alvin had worked again the next summer and made a new machine to copy the latest format of DVD’s. This type of disk played in any stand alone home player box which increased the pirating stock flow to students saving money by purchasing it right from Chip. Chip could organize parties at school and introduce a movie that a crowd would cheer for and then sell copies he made after the party to his friends. That was when Alvin invented the ultimate machine. He called it his Dream Machine. It copied a DVD inside his machine by inserting a rented DVD into side A and out of side B came out a duplicate. The copies format was perfect. The labels on each disk was perfect too. There was only one difference, Alvin left a little thumb print in an encryption in the ASCII on his copy so that once he inserted a disk in side A and alarm would go off if it read his thumb print. This prevented him receiving one of his own inferior copies and attempting to duplicate it by mistake. A case on disk genetics he called the cloning perfection of his Dream Machine.
~con't
Mod
“How did you know I wanted to write?” Chip slammed on the breaks of the car. He knew Alvin hadn’t learned to drive a car because he was too antisocial to have even done that. Chip knew to get a serious answer out of Alvin all he had to do was apply pressure in the right place and that was far from home. Alvin would eventually crumble rather than step out of his brother’s automobile. Alvin would rather give in than find a bus ride home. Alvin would compute to his brother’s bent ideas to remain calm and his antisocial self behavior. “I snooped by mistake. ONCE! Oh god, it was stupid of me I know. But I also knew how important it was to you to go to college even if Dad or Mom never did! I knew how you felt about . . .” But Chip cut him off with a slap across the jaw and Alvin’s lip bled a little and he could taste it. It wasn’t his brother’s blood but his own. “How can you compare me to Mom and Dad? The Dad you never had?!” Chip shouted. He wasn’t about to restart the car and pulled out the keys to it. “You idiot. You don’t even remember them together. You only know Mom!” He yelled as loud as he could without caring.
Alvin scratched his head on the right temple as he always did when he couldn’t figure out a simple solution to a simple thought. He felt sorry for Chip because he did know their father before he died although Alvin never saw him not once. “I know!” Alvin shouts. “I know I think about him, but I loved him!” he said. “Oh, so he was the one to teach you to snoop you stupid bastard?” Chip screamed. “I don’t doubt he was or at least your image of him. You’re an ungrateful stupid little bastard Alvin!” he yelled. Alvin grabbed the keys from Chip and flung them out the window. “You retarded antisocial stupid! . . .” he kept cursing as he flung open his car door and stepped out. Just then a transport truck carrying a load of timber logs squealed its brakes but still slamming Chip into the next decade. Alvin lost his breath and sat in silence then ran out of the car to see what had happened to Chip. The truck rolled into a ditch part way and the driver was climbing out to safety, but Chip lay sprawled all over the road. Alvin screamed as he realized what happened. He ran to his blood covered body and wilted as the timber broke free from the truck and rolled over him crushing Alvin to death.
“Not my Alvin? No! Not my Chip? No! No!” Cried the mother of two boys when she received the report and condolences from police. She wept for weeks.
“You have to get out some time Flora.” Said the neighbor. “It just isn’t healthy to weep and cry every night and you being alone. It isn’t good.”
“Thank you Millie, but I just can’t give up. I still feel as if they’d come home and I’d forget they are dead. You know?” Flora said. She was holding back a flow of tears that would fly in every direction if Millie wasn’t careful. If Millie wasn’t careful Flora would never come out of her house again and be just another typical sociopath in the community.
“You need to get out Flora. We all does in time. You need to get over it. Tonight I am having a bridge game like I usually do and I’d be honored if you come. Please?” Millie asked. “Yes, alright.” Flora said.
That night conversation went on about several topics. Flora hardly considered it helpful hearing all the other ladies weep about deaths in those families. Bertie’s great-uncle passed away when she was nine and she’d missed him for fifty years now. The ladies were trying to cheer Flora up. Then one of those ladies had an idea how they could all be best friends, she suggested roguishly how to join a movie rental group, that way they share the movie they rented. One in the bridge group would join the rental club, and then between the six of them they would alternate what movie and take turns watching it. It sounded like a good idea because who knows. One night while Flora was watching Titanic with Leonardo DiCaprio: she inserted the DVD into Alvin’s DVD player and watched the first hour before her popcorn bowl was empty and her eyes felt heavy and she fell asleep. When she woke she grabbed the DVD from the fancy machine that shuffled a DVD because it came out of slot B and stuck it in the static free envelop and wrote a note to herself to remember to give it to Bertie later. In fact she didn’t care for the movie and decided she would tell Bertie it was a boring movie for teenagers.
Needless to say Bertie had returned talking about how it made her niece’s all laugh, but that it was her turn to return the DVD, but that her car broke down and was towed to a garage and if Flora could return the DVD to Next Stop 99¢ Movies. So Flora did. Then she rented the next movie.
A few weeks later after the police had a search warrant and had confiscated all the original DVD’s still in the Dream Machine in Flora’s house and a dozen copies returned to the Next Stop 99¢ Movies she went psycho when she learned she had to make a televised court appearance for her one and only chance to prove her innocence.
Mod
**GO VOTE**
good job people, pulling all the stories together... Randi, LOVE the last line in your story!!
Mod
But for now I will congratulate and thank the winners. Congrats for Christy and her story titled Epitome of Rejection. Congrats
Camerandi with her short story Charley's Strange (who I personally voted for – hope that wasn’t strange). And last but not least, the final winner in the tie Jimmy aka Sunny who wrote the short story Nanny in Vegas. Again congratulations to each of the winners. I appreciate everyone posting their stories and hope to see everyone writing more.
Thank you for making me one of the winners. I had fun writing it. Congratulations to all of the other participants. This was a hard one to vote to decide this time.
Camerani, do you want your story up on Short Story Galore?
Wow, that's a big tie! Congrats to the others
hahaha, a three-way tie. lol, that's different!
no, thank you. I'll put it in my writings.
Please do not use a story previously used on goodreads. After the week's contest, you are welcome to put it on your profile writings, but please refrain from using stories you have already put on there.
You have until Saturday afternoon to post a story on here. Please post it directly onto this topic, rather than posting a link. Also, please do not discuss stories on here. You must go to Weekly Short Story Contest Discussion for that. This will avoid any clutter and confusion, so that people can simply come on here and read the story, without having to read comments on the story.
This week's Topic is Psycho If anyone has any objections to this topic, please go to the Objections post. The rules are pretty loose. Write about a psyco person, psyco situations or just have the word in the story!
Weekly stories must be at least 500 words long to 2,500 words long. (if the whole story won't fit in one post, divide it into two)
Good luck!
Clare
P.S. PLEASE say if you would like to have your story on Short Story Galore, if you win. This way it wouldn't take me ages to get your consent afterwards. This includes adding a link to your stories. If you want to have your story on the Short Story Galore, but not the link, just say so.