Word Count: 300 max
How: Submit your stories as a comment to this post, along with your name, word count, and title (and Twitter handle or blog if you've got 'em!). One entry per person.
Deadline: Midnight tonight, PDT!
Results announced: Next Wednesday afternoon.
Remember: Your entry must begin with the prompt! The prompt can be mutilated, but not beyond recognition. (Pictures do not need to be incorporated into your stories, they're for inspiration (and sometimes our amusement)).
Prompt
"I said we were safer. Not safe."
(I felt like gifs today. Studio C & Newsies)
Kelly Griffiths
ReplyDelete@KLGriffiths
300 Words
Hallucination
I said we were safer, not safe. I said it so she'd quit challenging my authority. I never lie. But a leader must be careful with the truth. I'm green, not stupid.
Like all underlings, she disrespected me.
"I told you we shouldn't land here, and you didn't listen," she said, "You never take my suggestions... now we're going to die. Alone. Together."
I never lie. Obi Wan Kenobi truths are the closest I get. The last time we slept was Thursday, and we've been walking for three days straight. The ache in my legs wasn't as bad as the one in my ears from her mewling chorus saying we'd die alone together. All because I chose this planet instead of her planet. Her planet-- volcanos out the wazoo. No way. I'm the captain.
She snapped in the woods. I think she touched them too many times. It's hard not to touch the vines, but the truth is, I think she stopped caring. Like she was drowning.
Woods bear a likeness to these things, except these were purple and not so angular like earth trees. Cursive trees, is what she called them before she went nuts. If they touched you, you started hearing... what? voices, I guess. A song I couldn't recognize and words that sounded like forks and knives scraping plates. The trees got her screaming and hollering we were going to die alone-together in this forest of adolescent purple trees.
The problem with adolescents is they claw at you. Adolescent trees are thickest right where you need to tread. You'll bleed out from a thousand little welts before you're through them. We're safer in here. And death is the safest place of all. I told her that, and she just sort of buckled where she stood, accordion like.
There’s Never a Good Plan B When You Need One
ReplyDelete“I said we were safer. Not safe, numbskull.” My admonition was too subtle a difference for McGurk to grasp. The guy was more black and white than film noir. I shouldn’t have called him a numbskull though.
The entire operation had gone kablooey from the get-go.
Fritz would box in the Limo on the driver’s side, I would do the same on the passenger side, and Banger would block the rear exit.
McGurk would then smash the left rear window and position his AK-47 smack dab on the Politician’s temple.
Oleg would smash the right rear window and do the same for the Poli’s ten year old son.
It was going to be text book simple.
The Politician was notorious for underplaying his security.
What could go wrong?
Fritz’s assignment went as slick as a greased pig. So did mine. So did Bangers.
Of course we were each in big SUV’s.
Technology rarely fails us.
We hadn’t figured on the Nanny.
A real firecracker.
And the kid.
Who lets their kid play with an Uzi?
Before she could flutter her blue-hinged eyelids, the Nanny grabbed her Uzi, smashed Oleg’s wrist with the weapon and expertly ventilated him. At the same moment, the kid grabbed his Uzi, surprized old thick-as-Gumbo McGurk with a Uzi uppercut to the jaw that caused the big man to fall to the ground. This saved his bacon as the kid’s volley only hit the vacated airspace.
The kid then shot Banger through the rear window and the Nanny ended Fritz's hope of descendants.
McGurk scrambled around the blood bath and clamored into my SUV.
“Floor it, Donnie,” he’d said.
I damn well did.
At the cabin I casually told McGurk, “We’re safe.”
“Good.”
Which is when I said, “Yadayada, numbskull.”
Which is when he riddled me.
300 really good plans gone awry
@billmelaterplea
T.R.
ReplyDelete@_The_Mad_Monk
300 Words
Cobblestones and Carriages
Sheila slipped into the pages behind him. It was like falling into a dream. Lost in a wilderness of silence, she followed him through the fog. She forgot what came before.
The road split. The street signs lied. Head spinning, she looked down, then back up. Cobblestones and carriages.
“Where are we?”
“Come on,” Gage said. “They’re here.”
They crossed the street, slipped down an alley.
“Who’s here?”
He held his finger to his lips. She peered down the alley but saw no one.
“What’s going on? Gage?”
Two voices boomed from the sky, so loud the ground shook and the buildings shuddered.
Where are they?
Here.
Where?
Here.
Blood trickled from Gage’s ears. He took her hand. They ran. The streets were empty, the world still. They ran until the felt safe. They stopped to catch their breath.
Then the sky tore in two.
It sounded like a page being ripped from a book, paper rending.
Then she remembered.
The book. The bitterness of the pages. Swallowing them, choking them down dry. The strange look in Gage’s eyes. The door knob jiggering behind them.
If we can’t run, Gage had said, then we’ll hide.
And then she felt the rushing sensation, like falling.
And now, this. Gods in the sky. Trapped in a book erasing around them.
“I thought you said we’d be safe,” she shouted. The streets around them disappeared. A blinding white light left in their place.
“I said we’d be safer,” he shouted. “Not safe.”
Gage climbed the stairs to the only flat left on the street and knocked on the door.
221B Baker St.
“It was the first book I grabbed,” Gage said. “Good thing, too. If anyone can help, it’s him.”
The door opened and a bent old man squinted into the bright light.
Okay, here's mine, 300 words, set in my 'capes' universe.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.agincourtdb.com/2016/07/forced-entry.html
Teodora
ReplyDelete@teo_rog19
276 words
"I said we were safer. Not safe."
Indeed, gunshots could still be heard, though farther away from where they stopped.
They had run for what seemed miles and miles. They were now in the middle of nowhere, a field of flowers which would have been beautiful, if it had not been of toxic waste instead. You watch movies of the Apocalypse all the time, but it is not quite the same with having your actual country invaded by terrorists and going on the run.
The day FBI Agent Dan Carter showed up at her door, flashed his badge and told her that basically she held the key to the next biological weapon that was being prepared due to her DNA specificity, changed her entire day. Then came a series of tests, analysis which left her totally naked and exposed (in more ways than one). That is why apparently she needed the support and protection of the FBI to boost and they were heading towards the safe house. Leaving in a compound had not been her lifelong dream either, but she hoped all of this would bring peace in the world and eventually establish a new world order.
She almost fell asleep dreaming of it. However, Dan woke her up abruptly shaking her, threw his coat on her and made her run some more. The smell was making her dizzy and she almost just stopped. Her feet were still trembling with fright though.
“Can we rest for a bit now?”, she timidly suggested.
“You can rest all you want”, Dan turned with the gun pointed at her. “I did warn you before. You are not safe anywhere”.
Hidden
ReplyDeleteBy @HomemadeHalo
About 270 words
“I told you it was safer, I didn’t tell you it was safe!”
“Don’t you give me that! You were the one who suggested …”
Whatever else she was going to say, came out in mumbles as I quickly clasped my hand over her mouth.
It was stuffy and dark in the closet. We could hardly see each other’s face amidst the sleeves of my shirts and jackets, but I could clearly spot the accusatory look in my wife's eyes from the air-slits in the wardrobe door. That look promptly faded and were changed into a look of alarm as her eyes grew as large as saucers. They were in the room! Beads of sweats were already falling like rivulets down my brows.
“We know you are in here! Come on out!” "yeah, come on out let's have some fun!"
Maybe we ought to have hidden somewhere else like the attic, I thought to myself. We could hear them as they opened doors loudly, and checked behind cabinets and underneath the bed. Then my allergies started working up, and I felt the urge to sneeze. My wife mouthed the words to me “Don’t you dare!”
I fought the urge in sharp gasps of breath, and finally controlled it…. Or so I thought.
I sneezed as quietly as I hoped.
My wife gave me the look that clearly said I had doomed us both.
The closet door bursted open and 4 pairs of eyes looked up at us.
Our kids had found us.
All our plans for alone time had gone with the sneeze of the wind.