Fortnightly Writing Competition “Altered Reality” (OPEN)

[Stupot]

Altered Reality
Word count: 500-800  |  Deadline: May 26th

Think of a true event or scenario from your own past and write a fictionalized story by changing something about that event and exploring how the change might have affected the way things played out.

You could simply rewrite the ending to be something more favorable or flattering. You could insert a new item or a new character to the story to see how that would have changed the dynamics. You could change the setting, or tell it from a different POV, and see how that affects the outcome. Use your imagination, but focus on how the change or fictional element affects the outcome of the story.

No need to provide the real version or background context (unless you really want to), and it doesn't have to be written in the 1st person. This is a work of fiction, but it should be based on a real moment from your life, whether that be a childhood memory or yesterday lunchtime.

Good luck.

[Mandle]

COME AS IS

Spoiler

      The sign on the seedy motel placard was hard to read, the neons behind it buzzing and blinking.  What Simon could make out read: "Faux Reunion", but there was a dark line between, where the tubes must have fizzled.  He had no idea what a reunion of foxes meant.  Whoever planned this was a moronic speller.  Or probably one of those arts graduates trying to do everything in French.  Looked like fucking French for "fox".
    He got his wife and kids out of the car.  Had to slap Jason round the head a bit.  Seven years old and still reaching back, whining for his plushie to take with him: "Mr. Winton"; what kind of name was that for a kid's stupid support toy?
    "Aw, grow up, you little fuck," Simon said, missing the final slap as his kid ducked.  Had his dad's sports' reflexes, at least.  Simon's eyes almost attempted pride, but then he looked over at where his daughter was headed and shouted, "FUCK, Fiona!  The retard's getting away!"
    He turned away from his wife scrambling across the tarmac, chasing down Lia, and back to the motel itself.  The drive-in reception window was dark.  Probably run by immigrants.  Only eight o'clock and already slacking off.  Turning his head on its pillar neck, he saw that the main entrance was lit up, though.  Between rows of dark windows, the entrance to the motel's conference hall was ablaze with light.  Was it even too much light?  Were those two extra spotlights on either side, running off a droning petrol generator somewhere out back, his tradie ear asked him, even needed?
    As his wife finally roped in his daughter behind him, and the probably gay son of his raced ahead, Simon walked down the cobbled path between the spotlights and into the hallway leading to the school reunion.
    Behind the family, across the cracked, weed-ridden parking lot, the "Faux" at the top of the motel's sign turned off, and the darkened neon row below it came on.  The complete sign now read: "Foe Reunion".

                                                                                                                                                  ***

      Roth sat in the cracked, moldy chair of the control nest he had built after buying the abandoned motel site.  After ten years of planning, and a vast swath of inherited McMillen fortune, the third victim of his revenge cycle was here.  The first two, Greg Stavros and Lakey Wilbury, had already been dealt with.  Over the blue-and-white feed of the security monitor, Roth saw the child dash by. 

                                                                                                                                                  ***
 
    Simon called out, "Hang up, Jason!" down the crumbly, moldy corridor, starting to feel worry.  It was mainly the smell.  Three decades of money entrusted to a classmate should have resulted in at least a slightly better place than this.  The hallway spilled out into the motel's conference hall.  Jason was shouting back ahead, somewhere through the darkness, "Hey, dad, there's no one else here yet!"
    Simon took out his phone and tried to remember how to turn on its flashlight to look for his son, real worry starting to growl in his heart.  Then the lights came on, anyway.

                                                                                                                                                  ***

    Taking his clunched knuckles off the rows of switches he'd pushed up, Roth looked down over the deck of his elevated room.  The floodlights he'd had installed, around the corners of what had once been a disco back in the '80s, fixated the arriving family in four overlapping ovals. 

                                                                                                                                                  ***

    Simon whipped around, looking for where his wife and kids were, protective instincts kicking in, but the blazing lights blinded him.  Putting a forearm over his brow, he peered around, and shouted, "Fi!  Where's our kids?!"
    "I can't find 'em, hun!" came back her desperate-sounding call.
    Simon put his heels under him and ran out of the fanlights.  His eyes adapted slowly to the dark of the corners, but he quickly found Jason curled up under the shelf of a crumbling DJ table.  The kid was bawling, mumbling, "mr. winton... mr. winton...," drooling snot from his nose.  That hurt Simon's heart.  The damn kid wasn't even calling for him.
    "Can't find Lia!  Have you?!" Fiona yelled back from the dusty darkness beyond the stabbing lights.
    "NO!"

                                                                                                                                                  ***
   
    "Who are you, mister?" a small, high voice from behind Roth said.
    He spun his chair around.  In the doorway of his nest of hate he saw a little girl.  She had pee running down from her cut-off jeans, into her tiny sneakers. 
    Roth looked into her face, so earnest and small, and said, "I'm just some guy that got angry, sweetie.  Go back downstairs.  I'll turn off the lights."
    He pulled his fingers back down the switches.
    She left.  They'd done better than his other guests.
    "Yeah, 'Come as is', indeed," Roth said, looking over those words on his invite list, at the names remaining below, as the family fled back to their car.

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[Baron]

I will not be altering reality by submitting early. 

[glurex]

THE INTERN

Spoiler

After a couple of interviews, he had finally gotten the job. He was the new intern at the Faculty of Fine Arts. And at the beginning of each month, for a whole year, he would receive his corresponding stipend. Although the amount was rather meager, the job itself was free of major complications. One could even say that his tasks were quite simple, even if, at times, professors would call on him for technical help with such vehemence that he ended up feeling a bit overwhelmed.

His workplace, shared with other employees, was set in a spacious office on the same floor—and just a few meters away—from the office of the faculty's dean.

The dean was an old, gray-haired man. He hardly resembled the professor the intern remembered from taking his course not that many years ago. Still, some spark of youth must have remained in him, because every now and then he would make a bombastic entrance into the office, striking some exaggerated pose he assumed to be amusing, while squinting his eyes. For some reason the intern had yet to figure out, these appearances left him feeling somewhat... uneasy. In fact, something about those papery eyes, secretly, terrified him.

Earlier I said the job had no major complications. That was a lie—there was something that unsettled him. A kind of almost agonizing howl that, every so often, could be heard in the distance.
  "Must be one of those drunken vagrants that wander around the entrance," the dean's secretary would mutter, as if trying to downplay it.

The intern was quite lazy. One afternoon, to escape the mob of professors constantly pestering him with errands, he left a few minutes early. But the secretary, who wasn't stupid at all, noticed it, and he eventually had to make up for that moment of revelry. How did he make up for it? By coming in after hours to sort through some papers that had been piling up for months at the front desk. At least, the task wasn't as draining as the things he'd been doing lately. And everything would have gone smoothly if not for that deep, gravelly voice that called out to him from one end of the hallway. It was the dean, requiring his presence. So, with a heavy heart, he walked the short corridor which, at that hour, was completely deserted.

The dean's office was smaller than one might expect, but it still featured a plush armchair, some handsome books, and a shelf stocked with assorted liquors. The dean liked his drinks. The only element in that office that struck a discordant note was a rickety door behind the armchair.
  "Student, could I ask you a little favor?"—those words were murmured in a voice both sweet and trembling.
  "You see, it seems I've unfortunately misplaced the key to my liquor cabinet. Surely you can understand that a poor old man like me needs a little something to warm his throat, especially on these cold autumn afternoons."

His glassy eyes glimmered for a moment before dimming again.

  "All I ask, student, is whether you might be so kind as to go through the door behind my chair and into the adjoining room, where I keep a copy of all the keys to the building. I'd do it myself gladly—it's not my intention to bother you. But the lighting in there is dreadful, and my eyes are quite tired from dealing with the faculty paperwork this late. Besides, there's a bit of damp in that room, which does my weary bones no good. You, on the other hand, are young and spry. I know you won't deny me this small favor."

Indeed, the intern couldn't say no. He opened the door and made his way as best he could through a vast room, filled with who knows what. It was all in shadows and smelled terrible. The only thing visible was a faint light glimmering in the far back. Since he could barely see anything and found no key anywhere, he decided to feel his way toward that distant source of light.

Imagine his horror when he discovered, tied up on a table, the tortured and lifeless body of the dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts.

He had, at last, uncovered the mystery behind that agonizing howl he sometimes heard from the office. Now, he only had to unravel the last enigma: what was it that, at that very moment, was breathing behind his ear?

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