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Overloading the Machine
Playing Catch-Up
Outside Wal-Mart, the sidewalk was sloppy with wet Milk Duds and tears, the sky about to split.
"Again? Don't worry, sweetie, we'll get you another ice cream cone." She was trying to reassure last week's empty napkin, failing entirely to grasp the present.
Tears dripped steadily from the crushed carton, their salt a brief costume sugar ball for the swarming ants.
The concrete was cooling. I had to get it out now. I rubbed my ring, blew my nose, and tried to spit.
"You're stepping on my..."
A shoulder-tap turned me around. An aproned greeter eclipsed his toothless grin with a mountained cone, the wrinkled valleys of one hand running with chocolate, the other with vanilla.
"I saw what happened," he began, smooshing a pile of Milk Duds under his loafer and orbiting my head with the planet-sized cone.
Frustrated, I tried to wave him away, but he just waved back.
Like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built, Portia was sleek,
shapely, and gorgeous, her red jumpsuit moulding her body, which was as warm
as seatcovers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, her eyes flashing like
bright hubcaps, and her lips as dewy as the beads of fresh rain on the hood;
she was a woman driven -- fueled by a single accelerant -- and she needed a
man, a man who wouldn't shift from his views, a man to steer her along the
right road: a man like Alf Romeo.
-- Rachel Sheeley, winner
The hair ball blocking the drain of the shower reminded Laura she would never
see her little dog Pritzi again.
-- Claudia Fields, runner-up
It could have been an organically based disturbance of the brain -- perhaps a
tumor or a metabolic deficiency -- but after a thorough neurological exam it
was determined that Byron was simply a jerk.
-- Jeff Jahnke, runner-up
Winners in the 7th Annual Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing Contest. The contest is
named after the author of the immortal lines: "It was a dark and stormy
night." The object of the contest is to write the opening sentence of the
worst possible novel.
This page was last modified on 2011 December 20. "Playing Catch-Up" by John Sullivan is Copyright ©2003 - 2011, and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.