APRIL 2023 -- 75 Word Writing Challenge -- VICTORY TO EMROSENAGEL!

[Lawrence Twiddy]

My Becoming

I was going to die.

My insides threatened to burst out. A life of gluttony had brought me to the limits of my skin. I had no choice but to let my existence be appropriated by the natural order.

Caspases dissolved my body tissue, as I slowly digested myself. Imaginal discs refashioned my existence in the metamorphic soup I had become.

Then, awakened, my iridescent saffron hued wings spread, freeing me.

I was reborn.

 

[Elckerlyc]

If

The dungeon is oppressively silent, not a sound infiltrates my new four square meter residence. Inside, darkness reigns. Outside, dawn might be near. Execution hour.
Dawn could be the last thing I’ll ever see, if the Empress decides I’m guilty.
Robbed from sight and sound, I smell only Death. Involuntarily, I keep getting visions of lengthy, public proceedings and inept executioners.
If the Empress desires my head, let it be done swiftly!
If, if…

 

[sule]

Truth or Death, Hope or Despair

Simon claws at the muck, his naked skin sickly pallid in the half-light of near dawn. A distant demon's voice barks German commands.

He works in haste, shaping hands and head and feet. Slicing a mouth, hollowing eyes.

Squelch.

Rough hands seize him. Simon shouts - an animal's cry. He kicks air as he's carried past silent billets, into lengthening shadows.

In the mud a man-shaped mound slumbers, half-aleph star on its brow.

 

[johnnyjet]

Objects Left in the Spaces Between

My manager wants to see me.

We’re under new management. Their offices are across the hallway that nobody enters.

I step into the hallway. The world dissolves into a dull haziness around me. I nearly trip over something. I look down.

Bodies. Scattered. As far as I could see.

I recognize Frank. Carol. Sid. They used to work here.

I scramble for a doorway in the gloom. But…

There is no doorway.

 

[StilLearning]

The Forbidden Traffic Island:
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Imagine approaching a big, old, roundabout. Big enough for a copse on it. Five circular lanes in north London - nonstop traffic. As you wait, interminably, to join the flow…
...the undergrowth moves…

[Later, reading reveals that urban campers vanish there. And the term ‘island gigantism’]

The question, auguring your brain, isn’t the animal - Mr Fox writ as big as your car - watching you.
It’s… do you tell what you saw? Even disguised as fiction?

 

[Starbeast]

Roger Corman’s
The Black Hole​

“Captain Holland. This is insanity! We’re millimeters outside the event horizon of the black hole’s gravity. We’ve got to stop Dr Reinhardt from entering that destructive vortex.”

“Quiet, Harry. Here comes Reinhardt and his mechanical bodyguard, Maximilian.”

“Thank you for being patient. Now that I have an audience to witness my grand undertaking, I shall begin. Maximilian! Let’s rock! Hola! Darling you got to let me know, should I stay, or should I go?”

 

[mosaix]

Arrival

Rob saw Mary by the church gate. He smiled. He’d waited a long time. Meeting and marrying her had made a man out of me, he thought.

Then he saw his daughter and fondly remembered her birth – a moment that changed his life forever. The next generation, her children, were too young to understand the solemnity of the occasion as the coffin – his coffin – passed by.

Mary waved. He always knew he’d see her again.

 

[Abernovo]

Uncertain Initiation

The lockmaster signalled. "Ready?"

She nodded, lying. The Solo Walk, final test before space engineer graduation.

#​

Alarms sounded even as a micrometeoroid hit her right thruster.

"Rotation Arm B compromised! Leak, Lock 5."

Think! Left thruster only, three second forward burst, five second wait. Lateral shift, forty metres? Delta-Vee…er…four seconds, pointed eight o'clock.

"Suit compromised."

#​

She woke. "I'm alive?"

The lockmaster nodded. "And, as you saved the section, you qualified, Engineer Smith."

 

[Parson]

How The First Perfect Applicant Was Hired

Human Resources Manager: “I see that you say you’re completely honest.”

Applicant: “Yes that’s true.”

However, I see that you claim you graduated from Harvard with a 4.0

Great huh?

If it were true. But Harvard has no record of your attendance.

So far, I’ve only attended Harding University.

Explain yourself.

I live in liminal time. I’m transforming myself; so, I claim to be what I am becoming.

Fair enough. Hired! Pay awaits your transformation.

 

[rejndzer87]

The Portal​

Where shall you take me next?
Barren planes, to find my charitableness?
Darkness unending, to confront my fears?
Desolate icescapes, to test my resolve?
It is no trivial thing, stepping through the portal — each world is a new, cutting lens to examine your soul with.
But a soul unexamined is a life unlived.
Teach me of the worlds, so I can know myself.
Tightly clenching my fists, I pass through: "Ianus, guide my steps."

 

[chrispenycate]

Frontiers of Choice

Difference subliminal,
Universe holds respiration.
Acts benevolent or criminal,
Information saturation.
Choice no longer indeterminate,
Seeds of future always germinate.

Systematically predisposing,
Variation, other lives.
Static future, change foreclosing
All opposing alternatives.
What I am's not what I have been,
What I dream's not what I have seen.

Once the milestone has been chosen,
Once the path before's a fixture.
All mutation is deep frozen,
No more modifying mixture,
Onward March, into the picture.

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[Far Stranger]

Actaeon And His Hunting Hounds Disturb The Goddess Artemis Bathing

Ever faithful pack, we snarled back at the dripping wet goddess.

But as master writhed, change came to the air. Juicy flanks appeared – antlers, begging to be wrenched to the forest floor – swift, pointed hooves now, inflaming our blood, insult to our supremacy. The leader made a small creep forward. The fiercest broke first: we must move as one.

Later, in an exhausted pile we gnawed bones somehow familiar, sure of master’s praise back home.

 

[Daysman]

running between raindrops

Interstitial Mode is miraculous, but if it glitches, it'll strand you between frames of proper time.

It stitched us from the hotel to the meeting place unseen...

Found Billy and the moon-faced gangster waiting.

Always had it in mind to ditch 'em, but they knew it.

They unleashed three canine chimaeras, second we cut-in.

I got mauled.

Reno made it out, took the monsters with her, dumped them mid-stitch.

Tres Cool.

 

[Ambrose]

Site-finder General

Notice had been given. The venerable house in which they served was to be demolished. Knowing of nothing in the vicinity that could serve their needs they asked for help.

That afternoon help came. ‘You will have to escape to the country,’ he said, and took them round some possibilities.

In their new place they thanked him profusely.

‘Not at all. You’re welcome,’ said Janus, shepherd of the lares and penates.

 

[Ursa major]

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It Wasn’t Aloud​

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“I can’t stand this.”​

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“Grace will be fine,” my husband said. “Her renunciation was perfect.”​

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“But—”​

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“—nothing. No one could be so certain of their future role.” ​

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I said nothing, knowing my husband had removed the liminality from Grace’s rite of passage by means of subliminal suggestion. Her ‘certainty’ was really his.​

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My husband squeezed my hand tightly. “Why’ve they seized her?”​

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“I know, and they know, what you’ve done: condemned our child to banishment.”​

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[Ursa major]

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POLL -- April 2023 75-Word Challenge -- READ FIRST POST!​

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