Fortnightly Writing Competition: Brooding flash (Ended)

[KyriakosCH]

This is a flash fiction contest, so you are allowed to write up to 500 words.

Like Mandle, I'd also like to keep the voting to "favorite","second favorite", "third favorite" etc.

Regarding the theme: To be on-topic you just need to be brooding, in whatever way. You can still try to twist that in a humorous way, but have to include something actually menacing/depressing in the story

You can post your story by October 15.

[Sinitrena]

Brooding: The feeling when you come up with a nice idea that's based on wordplay, then realizing that it - probably - doesn't work in the language you're supposed to write in. 

That's not my entry. Interesting topic.

Edit:
Question: Is the title to be included in the 500 words, or is it 500 for just the text of the story itself?

[Stupot]

I’ll definitely have a go at this.

[KyriakosCH]

Edit:
Question: Is the title to be included in the 500 words, or is it 500 for just the text of the story itself?

You can have up to 10 words for the title (so up to 510 with the title)
Obviously I won't be refusing a story if it has up to 10 words above the limit anyway. Just don't write a lot over 500 510 with the title should be enough.

[Mandle]

"BROODING BOBBY"...

... they called him down at the fire station where he worked the phones, back in '55 when the phones were still answered at the station.

They called him this even before he flunked out of training. Even before he got married. Even at his wedding.

They called him this as his brooding got darker, like thunderhead clouds gathering low over flat farmlands, turning everything into a black and white movie.

Bobby's life had become a black and white movie to him, ashen and grey.

He came home every day, after a day-full of jibes and jabs at the station, to his wife, Dreslie, who had an endless account in which she saved up her complaints and spent them every night while never running dry:

"I have to do everything around here!"

"The cat litter isn't going to clean itself you know!"

"Would it kill you to mow the lawn once a year?!"

"I asked you to water the garden in the mornings!"

"Now the gardenias have died!"

"Oh! You finally cleaned the cat litter?! The cat died three weeks ago!"

"I wish the cat had lived and you died!"

"Stop throwing your butts in the hydrangeas when you come home! I know you haven't quit!"

"Keep on smoking! You'll die faster! Just not in the house!"

At the station they kept calling him "Brooding Bobby" even after the divorce. Even after Dreslie took him for everything and he ended up living in a corner upstairs, on a sleepover cot.

Then, one day, someone called him "Brooding Bobby" just that one time too often.

Bobby leapt across the room and yanked down the big fire alarm switch. He jumped onto the brass pole and slid flawlessly down to the garage below. He sprung behind the wheel of the firetruck and punched the siren button.

He tore out of the station, his scream of triumph matching that of the truck's wail, and sped across town to the house he once owned, hands spinning on the wheel as he took every turn perfectly.

The approaching siren and the scream of brakes outside brought Dreslie out of her romance novel.

She rushed to the front door, throwing it open to see:

Bobby spooling out the fire hose like a pro. He aimed the nozzle at the bed of hydrangeas and knocked open the valve lever on the truck with his elbow.

Water spewed from the nozzle like a blast from a shotgun. It bit into the soil of the hydrangea bed and blew every plant sideways and skywards. One of them was found, later that day, lodged in the grill of a neighbor's car half a block away down the street.

A magnificent geyser of mud slewed upwards, far above the power lines, splattering down on both rooftop and hanging backyard laundry alike.

Petals fluttered from the sky like purple snow.

Bobby screamed through his laughter "OH, HI, HONEY!!! YOU ALWAYS WANTED ME TO WATER THE GARDEN!!!" as Dreslie was showered with a lot of mud and a couple of cat bones.

[KyriakosCH]

Mandle, I see this is 545 words. Why? :/
You know I set this rule cause I am lazy.
If I allow it, how could I not allow someone else who will write 600 something, and then who knows 

[Mandle]

Mandle, I see this is 545 words.

I guesstimated... But a 555 word limit is much more flashy and cool!

Or I can cut it down.

[KyriakosCH]

Mandle, I see this is 545 words.

I guesstimated... But a 555 word limit is much more flashy and cool!

Or I can cut it down.

If the others agree to keep themselves to 510, and don't mind yours staying, I have no issue. I just don't want the stories to be larger and larger

Edit: alternatively, you can indeed just cut it down to 510 (with the title  )

[Baron]

You had one job, Mandle.  One job! 

[Mandle]

I'll cut it back.

EDIT: Editing ones own writing is always fun! You see where you needed one or two less words to convey the same meaning, which means you are trimming the fat instead of expanding a 100 page book out into a 300 page book like Dean Koontz loves to do. Luckily for him he has pretty good stories to tell (mostly) and gets away with it. It should be under 510 words now.

[KyriakosCH]

Ok, with the title it is 512 words, so (but) I'll allow it...

To the others: please, PLEASE, do not go over 510 512 words including the title 

[KyriakosCH]

It doesn't have to be part of the contest (I said I wouldn't take part - and I set the topic and word-count, so this shouldn't be in the contest) but I thought of posting this flash of mine here

The Immortal Evil

I read that the central head of the Lernaea Hydra was immortal, and unlike the rest couldn’t be annihilated by Herakles who instead kept it subjugated under a large rock. I don’t doubt that Herakles would have chosen a very heavy rock, one which couldn't be moved by just anybody; and discovering the buried head of the monster by chance would have been virtually impossible. Yet now, countless aeons later, with most people having not heard of what happened back then, is it that unlikely modern means for moving weights already equal in strength the demigod and can provide any mortal with the ability to lift even what was once an immovable rock? If so, it is just a matter of time, and inevitable, for the immortal evil to be free again.

[Mandle]

Ok, with the title it is 512 words.

512 is a very PC number! 

[KyriakosCH]

Just a reminder that only a few days are left (you can post by the 15th) 

[Sinitrena]

Brooding

With a guttural sigh, out of the deepest corner of her throat, she sank to the ground. Tiredly, she let her head sink to her chest and with an even deeper sigh she shuffled her coat around her plump body.

She looked around her yard and distorted her features into a duck-faced scowl.

“What ruffled your feathers?”, her neighbour asked through the wooden beams of the fence.

“Phuuhck,” she answered and fawned the dust away and with it the question. “Men. Always strutting around, thinking he’s the cock of the walk, leaving me alone here to brood. It’s always the same.”

“Ah, I see.” He really didn’t. Nothing in this description seemed unusual or noteworthy to him. “Well.”

“And I’m sure he’s got other chicks as well.”

“Of course.” What else was he supposed to say? “That’s too bad?”

She noticed his lack of understanding. “Forget it. I’m sure you’ve got a bitch on the side too, don’t you? Men. It’s always the same with them, always. They are the stallion in the stable and we are the good little clucking hen who stays at home and takes care of the kids...”

Her own were running around in the yard, making a ruckus. She did not feel like doing anything about it but sigh again and adjust the straw under her arse. No matter how much she tried, she just couldn’t get comfortable today. But then again, when she sat down to brood, she never felt comfortable.

Her roommate, who had heard her grousing and gaggling, came over to her and fluffed herself up in front of her.

“Oh, come on!” she already called from afar. “Thinks he’s the cock on the walk? Maybe because he’s the rooster in the yard. Come on, now! It’s not like you didn’t know what you would get yourself into here. But no, as always, you counted your chickens before they hatched.”

“I did not!” she said.

“Of course you did.” the roommate cackled with her own guttural voice. “Might want to get your arse up and count them again. Some of ‘em are mine, you know. As if you didn’t know perfectly well that he has several chicks. You are so strange...” Her head jumped up and down in a pecking motion as she cackled again and then left as quickly has she had come by.

The plump hen ruffled her feathers again and looked out at all the little chicks in the yard, now trying to count them up and find her own among the chaos, just to proof her roommate wrong. After a while, she got up from the straw, leaving the eggs she had been brooding alone for a while. She didn’t bother to count those.

And so she didn’t notice the little bark of her neighbour as he slyly alerted the farmer, or the human tiptoeing to her nest and stealing some of her eggs.

After a while, she sank down on them again to brood some more.

----------------------------------

Going by the automated counting of LibreOffice, this is exactly 500 words, including the title.

[KyriakosCH]

Thanks for following the rule ^_^ 

[Mandle]

Obviously I won't be refusing a story if it has up to 10 words above the limit anyway. Just don't write a lot over 500 510 with the title should be enough.

To be fair, this gives some mixed-messages. Of course, 545 was too many. I just guesstimated that I hadn't written 500 yet but I was wrong. If you want me to cut back two more words I can.

[Baron]

If you want me to cut back two more words I can.

That's awfully accommodating of you, Mandle.  Please remove the two uses of the word "litter" from your piece.   

---edit---

A Brooding Menace

   Life is full of problems that are not easily resolved.  It bears not dwelling on this much, as this very act will make you even more unhappy.  However, not thinking about how difficult one's problems are is a good way to unwittingly make them even worse.  This is what a wise owl might refer to as a “double bind”.  I'm just a chicken though, so I'm calling it a “rotten egg”.

   Now I know what you might be thinking: a chicken that thinks too much is bound to be unhappy, no matter what she thinks about.  And you'd be right.  Except in so doing you yourself would probably be thinking too much, which would also make you more unhappy, and who would be the winner of that?  Think about it....

   So I'm on my nest in the coop, right?  And it's a chilly spring evening, so I'm hugging my clutch like I'm never going to see them again.  All the other hens are chattering to keep themselves warm, nattering on as they do about the moulting process and the pecking order and blah blah blah.  It's not entirely useless information to share, but they rehash the same themes over and over so much that one tends to tune them out.  One could literally wring one's own neck following the arguments around and around: who's popular, who's fighting, who's next for the block....  If one could actually harness the vindictiveness from the tiniest squabbles to a heating machine we'd all be roasted by halfway through the evening.

   So anyway, this fat hen named Penny stands up and declares that the cold is gnawing at her like an itch she can't scratch.  It's like a gap in her soul where the cold droughts can blow unimpeded.  The only thing that will warm her up is a fire in the pit of her belly, and with that her beak stretches like she is about to swallow a watermelon and out comes this hungry looking fox.

   Everyone gasps at this shocking revelation.  But then this scrawnier hen named Patches yawns and out pops a hungry looking snake.  The snake tells the fox that he'd been working the fat Penny hen for a week because she'd make such a great meal.  The fox tells the snake he'd been working the mangy Patches hen for a week because she seemed like an easy mark.  They get into a big fight, with the fox trying to bite the snake and the snake trying to strangle the fox.  Well, eventually they both succeed and fall down dead in the middle of the coop.

   What follows is complete and utter silence.  Suddenly my mind is in this zen-like state of clarity.  That moment lasts for about three seconds before the gossip erupts once more: who suspected when, who might still be in disguise....  But for me the rotten egg is now rolling around in my mind.  Who else needs to die in order to get some room to think?

[Mandle]

Now edited down to 510 words including title.

[KyriakosCH]

Thanks, although 512 would have been ok as well. ^_^
So, given here it will be still 15 of October for another 8 hours, that is when the time for submitting a story will end.

(unless someone asks for a brief extension, not to exceed a day at the most)

[KyriakosCH]

Ok, unless anyone has a story to post, I suppose you can now start voting
You vote for 1rst, 2nd, 3rd (seems we only have 3 stories, so everyone is a winner!)

[Baron]

I require voting deadlines.  Otherwise I procrastinate indefinitely.... 

[KyriakosCH]

Well, is the normal 1 week? I think it should be enough (?)
In that case, you can vote until October 23.

[Baron]

A week off, woot woot!    See ya next Thursday!   

[Sinitrena]

1: Mandle - I can't say I'm a fan of the nagging wife stereotype. It comes up often enough and more often than not as a way to validate abusive behaviour from the husband character, as one can also see here. It too often confirms the belief that women are lazy and should do all the chores in the house for their husbands, because the husband "brings the money home", even though women in this day and age also have jobs. Is this what is in your story? We don't get enough information about the wife to tell if she's a shrew or has valid concerns, but the narrative plays up the stereotype. Still, the story is written well enough, so you get first place from me.

2: Baron - You went for the same premiss as me, that the brooding is a bit more literal than Kyriakos probably had in mind. Your story took a bit of a weird turn in the middle and I'm kind of confused what is going on: the fox "comes out" as in, it was wearing the hen as a meat suit? Yeah, I liked the story well enough up until this point, then I just wasn't so sure any longer.

[KyriakosCH]

Well, I can't vote for the chicken stories, so Mandle it is for #1

[Sinitrena]

I don't think we have any Chechens in this competition. 

Okay, joking aside, it took me far too long to understand Kyriakos post. 

Also, I forgot to comment on Kyriakos' story. Even though it is not an offical entry, I usually write a few words for all stories here, so...

KyriakosCH: These are some interesting musings, but very much lacking context. I don't actually see any connection to the topic, other that someone is thinking about something, but thinking is not brooding. I also don't see a story. There's no plot, character, nothing at stake - it might be a concept, an idea. One could make a story out of this. So, a nice consept to work with but not very original or special. Maybe if you had used up the 500 words you were allowed...

[KyriakosCH]

Good enough for greek myth, but not for people in this forum 



Originally I thought your story was about some trailer trash, then identified it was a literal hen.
Like Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart, I also dislike chickens!

[Sinitrena]

Originally I thought your story was about some trailer trash, then identified it was a literal hen.

That's the whole point! You were supposed to figure it out with the line "The plump hen ruffled her feathers again and looked out at all the little chicks in the yard, now trying to count them up and find her own among the chaos, just to proof her roommate wrong." (If you figured it out earlier - Kudos!)

[Mandle]

1: Mandle - I can't say I'm a fan of the nagging wife stereotype. It comes up often enough and more often than not as a way to validate abusive behaviour from the husband character, as one can also see here. It too often confirms the belief that women are lazy and should do all the chores in the house for their husbands, because the husband "brings the money home", even though women in this day and age also have jobs. Is this what is in your story? We don't get enough information about the wife to tell if she's a shrew or has valid concerns, but the narrative plays up the stereotype. Still, the story is written well enough, so you get first place from me.

To be honest, it's just a comedy with no further comments on society. I set it back in the '50s to distance it enough from modern values so that it might be funny. I just found the final image of the main character cutting loose on the garden with the firehose to finally "water the garden" hilarious to me.

I always loved Stephen King's takes on apocalyptic suburban battles like in his books "The Regulators", "Needful Things", and "Tommyknockers", between small-minded people who suddenly find the power to fight back in unnecessarily over-the-top ways, and this was a bit of a tribute to that.

I think neither of my characters are to be taken as the heroes or victims. They are both idiots in their own ways.

[KyriakosCH]

Just noting that you have 30 something hours left to vote

[Baron]

1st = Mandle.  He had some good imagery: saving up complaints in an account and "spending" them on her poor husband, the scream of triumph that matched to wail of the siren.  And I got a kick out of the ending (not so much the petty destruction of the garden but the fact that the shallowly buried cat's bones came raining down in the very very end).  I felt that 50s vibe of people not making any effort to empathize with the struggles of others, as well as the building rage within Bobby which reminded me of the Honeymooners: "One of these days, Alice!".

2nd = Sinitrena.  Punny!  Something smelled a little ...fowl right from the first line, and you kept the poultry puns going the whole way through.  I'm torn when it comes to the voting, because I think you nailed the chicken characters pretty well (petty squabbling, not terribly intelligent, doomed to be taken advantage of).  But I feel, in the instance of chickens, that the brooding over gender inequality is a bit over the top.  I mean, your main character can't even count or keep track of her own children or sustain enough attention to defend her own eggs - this level of intelligence does not believably lend itself to analyzing gender power imbalances.  But then maybe I just secretly feel threatened by her growing empowerment.... 

[Mandle]

1st favorite: Baron... I felt entertained by the story and then thrown off balance when shit got real. 

2nd Favorite: Sinitrena... I guessed very early on that the characters were chickens and then got a bit disinterested because the "twist" element was already gone.

[KyriakosCH]

Ok, so all votes have been cast and here are the results:

1. Mandle
2. Baron (apparently? I mean due to Mandle's vote)
3. Sinitrina

I guess you now regretted making me contest organizer 

But here is your reward: 1 week vacation (for all three) in the Alex Jones militia-camp:



Made it myself, cause I'm talentedz.

[Sinitrena]

Congratulations, Mandle. I'm looking forward to the next (halloween?) round.

[Mandle]

Oh shit, I won?

WOOOOO!!! New round coming in a moment.