Week 4 Wrap-Up

Hey everyone! Here to wrap up Week 4. Thanks for the great reads.

Also... yep, Brooke, I suppose I do have a thing for manners prompts. XD I'll change this the next go 'round...

A quick recap:

1. Madeline's Please explored the narrator's relationship with her deceased grandfather and with her distant, dispassionate, (delicious,) Antarctican lover.

2. Brooke's story created a torturous, hungry dystopia ruled by a beautiful murderess.

3. Michael's Another Shore gave us a simple man with a simple love in a crazy science-fictionalized world.

4. Jenn's Causing Silence brought us to a world where starving orphans, unable to speak, are caught in the war between the Protestors and the Patriots.

...and, off-set, Trisha crafted a high-school-and-onward relationship filled with insecurity and hopeless dependence. My own story was about a girl constantly denied, from keeping her dog from euthanasia at a young age to getting rejected from college at 18 and other stuff.

Thanks to everyone for participating! I hope I can get my story finished for tomorrow, eek.

-Winter

Winter's Story Pick, Week 4

Quite a late post, but I was reading through all the stories. :) I love all the responses to this, but something in the adorable innocence of Michael's main character drew me into his story. That's why it is my pick for this week! Enjoy. I know I did.

Another Shore

They didn’t believe him, because he wasn’t a scientist. And in the year 2113, when the world had come together peacefully at least under the shining banner of the Planetary Union, when science was reaching unprecedented heights of discovery and exploration, when shuttlecraft were flying daily from colonies on the Moon, Mars, and three of the moons of Jupiter, when plans were even then underway for building a massive light-speed ship that could leave the solar system and venture out into the glorious unknown, a person who wasn’t a scientist just wasn’t worth listening to. Jack Jenner was most certainly not a scientist. He hadn’t entered the Solar Fleet Academy or even graduated university. Besides which, as Admiral Susan C. Presterfield had so eloquently testified in her committee’s hearing on the subject, Mr. Jenner’s suggestion was completely and totally wacko. “Our long-range scanner arrays have been searching the universe for years and years,” she’d said to the swarm of holo-cams and droid-reporters of the world’s myriad media outlets. “Never have we found even the tiniest sign that another world exists. Even if one did, it would take centuries to travel there even at light-speed. It would be absolutely impossible, as Mr. Jenner says, to travel there through some sort of magic cave that he stumbled upon in the woods. Honestly, he’s completely delusional.”

Trisha's Story Pick, Week 4

I'm cheating a little bit with this week's story pick, as it's Sunday but I'm changing the date to Saturday (when I was SUPPOSED to post it). My excuse is that my brother got married and it was an all-day kind of thing. :D It was a great wedding!! But anyway, this week I'm choosing Brooke's story, because I think it's pretty nicely gruesome. This demon chick is EVIL. But my favourite line was probably this one:

" All the while, the little demon cackles in the background, circling them."

But anyway, read on if you don't mind shivering from the creepiness. :)


Prompt #4

The room is dark and swathed in shadows so the man can not see her face. He can, however, see the deformed features of her hideous servant. The demon would have been bad enough by itself but the look on its face is enough to make anyone feel like heaving. Longing is written clearly across the gagged surface; that is not the disgusting bit though it feeds his terror. The look of pure pleading admiration for its mistress is the source of his stomach’s discomfort. It is the expression of an insect gazing upon a god; of a creature so low that it is not even worth stepping upon. It is proof of what she can do to a person.

“Do you know why you are here?” Her tone is conversational, some might even call it friendly.

The man gulps. He has angered her. What did he do? And more pressing, what should he say? His mind races for a response. It does not find one. Even if it had, his throat is too dry to speak.

“I see you do not,” her voice is sharp like a knife but somehow she manages to add a layer of softness to it.

Causing Silence

My name is 78H5J1PX-FEM, I am mute, like all orphans, and I am hungry.

I hear the music from the little toy helicopter a second before I see it. My empty belly rumbles as I crouch down, pick up a rock and launch it at the helicopter’s blades. The rock hits its mark bringing the little chopper crashing down on the torn asphalt. I run to collect the ruins. There will be hot soup tonight.

Since my twelfth birthday, when I graduated from the orphan asylum and was cheerfully booted off its doorstep, taking down the Protesters’ toys has been my main source of food. Because I am not yet seventeen and old enough to fight, I do not have credit at the shelters for even a single ounce of gruel. In better times, there had always been some scraps in the dumpsters behind the houses of rich Patriots, but there is a recession and even trash is tight now.

Zah-om-bie! Zah-om-bie! Zah-om-bie-e-e-e! . . . The toys always sing. With both feet I stomp down on the last living speaker. The woman’s low voice wavers a second before dying under my feet. I don’t know why the Protesters bother anymore. Or why they bothered in the first place. But who am I that anyone will answer my questions?

PROMPT NUMBER FOUR

Write a short story of 1,000-10,000 words based on the following:

"The correct answer to 'no' is never 'please'. What a lazy, grotesque, sickening, pathetic way to get through life. Have some self-respect."

Best of luck!