Why I'm a Dropout

Like the title implies, this happened back in high school. Which was a long time ago and a long ways away, but some stuff stays with you. I've never told any of my psychiatrists about this, but this feels like the place to talk about it.

I went to a small school in an almost dead mill town in upstate New York. We graduated eleven people the year before I dropped out. My class was nine. Five guys, just enough for a basketball team. (Which, amazingly enough, we fielded. Even won a few games, because our point guard, Jimmy Piersall, dropped 50 every time he stepped on the court. We were all sure he was going pro, but after what happened to him at UNC, he never played again. But that's another story.)

It was a gorgeous May day, not a cloud in the sky, when I jogged up to the school that Monday morning. I was twenty minutes late, so I was hustling, but I came up short when I saw the sheriff's car idling empty at the curb in front of the school. The shotgun was gone from the rack behind the driver's seat.

Calling the Bonegod

The stolen cube shatters in Cheapgrim's hand and its callingspell spirals around the burial hill. Eternities pass. The spell sinks in. For hours Cheapgrim prays.

And Galia wakes.

Human, it rumbles.

Cheapgrim fists his trembling hands.  "Great One," he pleads. "Your enemies approach. Feigning a wedding party."

Scarlet eyes flare within deep sockets. The bonegod's snarl rides an osseous splattering dustspray. Desssstroy.

Galia thrashes free of its prison, the splintering clatter obliterating Cheapgrim's triumphant cry.

But first, Galia growls, I feed.

Cheapgrim stands stricken, a sculpture in skin.

How could he ever have believed his vengeance would require no price?

----

This was a 100-word story challenge from www.reddit.com/r/fantasywriters. Write a 100-word story with a beginning, middle, and end; the story  must contain the words cube, heap, hill, sink, and splatter.

What is Absurdism?

Overtly Absurdism seems to me to be about imagery and incongruity and the illogical extension of logical conclusions.

Secretly, it's a matter of putting the correct badgers in the correct desk drawers.

Tethered (NSFW)

The idea of atomic funerals has always captivated Willow-in-Clay. There's the reek of brimstone about them, the feel of a dark and disfigured god laughing at Man's latest doomed attempt to avoid the Plague's spread. She prayed her way through her share of gravesites, back before she came to realize that it was all for nothing. The bomb is just the next evolution.

So now she lays naked in the lead-bottomed gondola of a hot-air balloon over Mad Hat Canyon, waiting for the updraft. Her companion of the moment, a deceitful little mandroid named Silas-of-Truth, slumps barechested in the bottom of the basket across from her, picking at his fingernails with a rusty pocketknife. She wishes she could hate him, but he's just a generic Bad Boy Survivalist package, not even real enough to despise.

Flames flare above them, and the balloon bobs at the end of its tether.

"What I mostly hate is how cynical it's made me," she tells him, continuing a conversation they'd never begun.

Fears of a Clown

In the bed before him, her hands were thrown above her head as if she were a drowning woman in need of salvation. With the portal's green light washing over her in waves, it was an apt comparison. Chuckles couldn't help but smile, but it wasn't a happy smile at all.

He took a breath and bent near, painfully aware of the sour tang of his own sweat and the greasepaint's bitter odor. But the drugs had done their work, and she did not so much as twitch at the smell of him. Chuckles carefully placed the white knight on her nightstand for her family to find, and let the breath free.

"Here we go, then," he told himself, and picked her up. He stepped into the portal.

On the other side, Dr. Mendoker waited, gowned and gloved in the gleaming operating theater. "I was worried," he said gently.

Love Underground

The vampires drop in flights, their shadows blocking the starglitter as they fall. Cameras capture the images but no one watches the cameras anymore.

Tonight in the shelter, Sumi huddles with Allison, bodies pressed together in the dark, breath mingling.
"At least it would be over," Sumi breathes.

After the Plague (NSFW)

If it was only the memories that the Plague stole, we could have found a way through. We could have talked for days, watched all those videos we never quite got around to playing back, read all the notes that we wrote in the days before it all came apart.

But instead, the Plague stole him from me, left me with the thrashing body, the stream of vulgarities, the piss and the shit, the erections he'd pound until his hand was slick with blood. It stole him and left me, and I stayed, and I stayed, and I stayed.

And now he's dead, this glorious man I gave myself to until death do us part, now he's dead now he's dead, and all I can think now is thank God now I'm free.

~end~

-- 

This one from a /r/WritingChallenges challenge - "Move me in 5 sentences." How'd I do?

One Last Stitch

Given that his operating theater was an open casket, Alvin Marks thought he was actually doing a damn good job. If Oretty Whiting hadn't been so determined to find fault with his technique that she ripped her late husband's arm off, no one would even have noticed the way the flesh gave beneath your fingers like squid sushi. And that could hardly be blamed on him.

Besides, Alvin wanted him whole.

"Is this the best you can do?" Paul S. Whiting, Esquire, asked from the casket. "I can pay more, if that's the concern here."

The concern wasn't Paul Whiting's payment schedule, though. It was the smell. Paul Whiting smelled like . . . well, he smelled like a dead man too long in the coffin, was what he smelled like. Alvin only hoped the body would hold together long enough to sew.

Scene from a Post-Apocalyptic Amusement Park

On the ninth day west of Des Moines, the little company came across a crumbling Ferris wheel tilting drunkenly above a starveling cornfield. Here and there, crows picked among the scant remnants. They showed no alarm at the squeaking wagon's approach.

 Angler flapped the reins and Missus Hammeril's pair of horses came to a halt.

 "Oh," Missus Hammeril said, a little sadly. "Orry and I rode one of those, when he was first courting me."

Angler, facing forward with his mistress behind him, rolled his eyes. Exactly who he was rolling them for, he could not say. The crows, maybe.

Crawling Back (NSFW)

When Chrysta's eyes rolled back, when she warned us about the storm, she'd said nothing about dildos rising on the floodwaters.