The Meeting

As the meeting dragged on, and on, and on, Ted found himself unable to take his eyes from Darla. He couldn't help imagining what she would look like later that night, stripped bare of her skin.

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Another /r/writingprompts story: Tell a horror story in 2 sentences.

The Red Stapler and What It Means

It's only a stapler. They don't really need it, and I do.

That's what I tell myself as I look at it on my desk. A Swingline stapler, perfectly quiet, perfectly innocent, red as the nails of a dead hooker.

Seven Days With the Dragonriders

On the first day of my captivity, Essen showed me the rows of the dead. Laid head to toe and draped in white muslin, flies buzzing drowsily in the cold air around them, there had to be fifty of them. All very thin, but all different lengths. Some very short indeed.

I steeled myself into expressionlessness so the hitch in my chest could not be seen. The Brothers of the Sun were the ones with the dragons. If they chose to wage war against the Empire--

Essen left me in the cold room with the buzzing flies and the silent rows. That was the first day.

The Unicorn Thief

The griffon was screaming at the fat man outside its cage. The fat man's hands were swollen with scrip. The seller's dark eyes were round with possibility.

Callie slid past them into the market proper, the braided horn warm between her breasts. Hoping the old lady would still be there. Hoping she'd found another unicorn.

Hoping she hadn't.

East Canton, Ohio

The bar I managed when I was eighteen was owned by an old woman named Hanna Novak. It was in East Canton, Ohio, which is about as glamorous a place as you might imagine. Looking back, I guess Hanna wasn't that old -- maybe in her sixties--but when I was eighteen that was old. Hanna had grey hair pulled back in a bun, arthritis that had turned her hands into knobby claws, and the upper body strength to carry kegs in from the beer truck. 

I was still on my way west after the thing at the school, but I was out of money and needed work badly. A help wanted sign leaned against the window. The woman who turned out to be Hanna was working behind the bar, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. She wore a ratty tee-shirt that showed amazing sleeves of tattoos starting at her wrists and running all the way up to the ragged sleeves. No pictures, only swirls and jots of color. It looked like a parrot had exploded on her arms.

This was back in '89, I think. I'd never seen a woman with tattoos before, much less an old woman with tattoos. So I was a little intimidated. But I tried to act older than my age and experienced, which mostly meant that I shut my mouth and grunted a lot.

I remember Journey was playing. Don't Stop Believing was just blasting away. It had always been one of my favorite songs, so I took it as good luck. Hanna turned down the music, asked me if I was there for the job. She had a thick accent that sounded a little like Ivan Drago in Rocky 4. I said yes. She asked if I'd ever managed a bar before, and I said yes, of course. She asked if I could keep my mouth shut, and I didn't say anything. She gave me a little closed-mouth smile at that.

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.