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April 27, 2007

4.27.07

Write an entry for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Which is to say, the most wretched opening sentence you can commit, a veritable crime against the English language. Prose that isn't just purple, but actually bruised. Then pad it out to 100 words.

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Jim: Senus Fugit

The sun hung like a hot, molten orange against the desert sky’s blueness while small desert creatures slept, panting in their burrows, except for those who were scurrying around from rock shadow to rock shadow trying to pry small seeds - shriveled dry – off of the few brown plants sprouting from the shifting sand.

With his shirtsleeve, Jacob wiped beads of sweat from his wrinkled brow and grimaced down the straight highway to the horizon where it vanished in shimmering waves of heat. He suddenly grinned and retrieved a pistol from the truck’s wreckage.

A car would pass by soon.

Read more from Jim's .

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David: Epic(ac)

It was in the summer of my seventeenth year—or perhaps it was after my birthday and therefore my eighteenth year—as I was staying in the little cabin in the backwoods of Tennessee that my parents rented every year and dragged us all up to each summer, whether we wanted to go or not, like the world’s worst timeshare, and pondering the metaphorical map of the road my life was meant to travel, that I was bitten, not by a Lyme Disease-carrying deer tick, but by the tick of Love that would scramble that roadmap like a shaken Etch-A-Sketch.

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Dave: Their Relationship was Like a Simile

Their marriage had slowly ground down like a decrepit eighteen-wheeler shuddering to a fuelless stop a hundred yards short of a desert truck stop whose weathered sides featured a faded ad for a soda brand not produced in decades but which once might have been delivered by that very truck, back when it didn't have rusting-out tanks, flatulent air brakes, a transmission that sounded like a metal shop in heat, and an aged driver who really, truly didn't want to have to carry a ten gallon jerry can of diesel over a hundred yards of crumbling and sun-baked asphalt.

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Jeff R.: Perils

Even though my sister, the wisest and also ugliest woman I know, had told me beforehand that Samuel was not the kindly old man he seemed when we met at the same Roller Derby where I first met John and Stacy, (seperately, not together, amazingly enough) but was in fact bent on corrupting my soul, which I still don't really believe in, despite everything, by introducing me to his twisted variety of paganism, which was mostly bondage-based, I still was unprepared when Satan appeared and demanded that I wash his feet, which were totally disgusting goat-hoof things, with my tongue.

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