This is Five Minute Fiction. I think you can figure that out.
The Rules
* You get five minutes to write a piece of prose in any style or genre.
* You must directly reference today’s prompt: incident
* Post your entry as a comment to this post.
That’s it. I’ll close the contest at 1:45. I think we know how this works, but if you are confused or just want to whine, feel free to email me.
At the close of the contest, this week’s guest judge, Sam Adamson, @FutureNostalgic will nominate five finalists. I’ll put the nominees in the poll on the side of the page, and at 9:30 PM EST I’ll close the poll and declare the winner.
For updates, you can subscribe to my RSS Feed, or follow me on twitter.
What’s the prize? Well, nothing, obviously. But we’ll all agree to tweet and/or blog about the winner of today’s contest so their fame and fortune will be assured.
A Few Notes:
* In the interest of time and formatting, it’s best to type straight into the comment box. It’s also smart to do a quick highlight and copy before you hit “post” just in case the internets decide to eat your entry.
* I reserve the right to remove hate speech or similar but I’m not too picky about the other stuff.
* This is all for fun and self-promotion. So be sure to put your twitter handle at the end of your post and a link to your blog if you have one.
Now GO!
Okay, I’m in.
So it’s just honor system on the 5 minutes, I guess. Homey can play dat.
🙂 It is honor system, but there’s not a ton of room to fudge.
Five minutes includes the conceiving, writing, and the editing? Yikes. Should be fun 🙂
This is Suzannah Burke @pursoot ‘s entry:
(Note, I sent her this picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rolan/3100275310/ but then realized it was all rights reserved so didn’t use it for you guys. If there’s any confusion.)
“Why?”
“Does it matter,now?”
“Well…no…I guess not, it’s too late…I know that, it’s just…”
“I hate it when you don’t finish your damned sentences, Alice. For fucks sake, it’s just what?”
“Well..I was just thinking…?”
“One of these fucking days i’m going to shake a full sentence out of you. Now shut the fuck up and let me concentrate on what I’m doing!”
“But?”
“Shut…UP!”
“Okay…if you’re sure…”
“Aaargghh…!”
“I’m going, all right. Not another word… I …”
“If I break just one of these while you are standing there dribbling your inane shit, I promise you I will kill you!”
“Oh–oh nooooo…oh my God! Look at what you made me do…all of them…all of them smashed…I…I”
“What are you fucking laughing at…you moron. I’ll lose my job for certain now.”
“Yeeees…pity! Never mind… I must be going. Oh and by the way, the boss said to tell you not to worry about removing the glass with the water paint in it. He had a friend set it up as a joke for his bucks night.”
The sweat dried on my body as I stood on the balcony smoking my last cigarette.
I never knew what lovemaking was until this very night. I always thought ‘lovemaking’ was just a nice way to say ‘fucking.’
I met him only a few weeks ago at a business meeting. There were glances and sly smiles. Then a lunch and laughter.
I hadn’t laughed for a long time.
The meeting lead to a business trip to London. And the lunches turned into dinners. Then finally to this weekend’s incident in Rome.
I take another slow drag from my cigarette and turn to see him sleeping peacefully. In our bed.
The man who taught me how to make love.
If I were single, this would be the answer to all my prayers. It’s perfection in every sense of the word. A fairytale come to life.
But life isn’t a fairytale. There are complexities and realities that should be dealt with.
Should be, but I won’t. I’m a coward that way. And probably a little bit selfish. I want this moment—this feeling– to be my last.
I take the last drag and jump.
I expected to scream on the way down. At the very least piss myself. But none of that happened.
I will tell you that my last thought was one of peace. My wife would never know I’d found true love in the arms of another man.
@rbwood
Larry Flotter and the Incident of Alcatraz
“You SHALL NOT PASS!”
“Dude, that’s Gandolf.”
“Oh.”
“Go, go gadget scissors!”
“Inspector Gadget”
“Yeah, that didn’t sound right.”
“My spidey senses,”
“Spiderman.”
“Give a guy a break, will you?”
“Get it right and I’ll shut up.”
“Well I can’t, OK? Is that what you wanted to hear?” *sob*
“Dude, what the hell’s the matter with you?”
“I never saw the movie, all right? I never saw the movie! And no one bought me the books. Oh, no. Why would anyone buy ME books? And do you see what’s happened to me? Do you? I’m in for 20!”
“Yeah. OK. Dude, you suck at this game.”
Martha Blumenfeld picked up a dusty slab of wood, being careful not to pick up any splinters in the process. It begins with one thing. Then another.
The entire apartment complex, an antique of old Detroit, lay in rubble. Shards of glass, fragments of an old dresser. Bricks that might have been a hundred years old. Keep going, old lady. You’ll find it.
It wasn’t that her husband had been buried under the heaping graveyard. It had been a long time since she enjoyed having his heavy body lay on top of her.
I’ll find it. The ring is here somewhere.
@MosesSiregar
(lil_monmon)
“Let us never speak of this incident again,” said Thoki climbing out of the rubble.
“I’m sorry, Thoki,” said Lor. “I didn’t know that the carpet would catch fire like that.”
“Yes, welll…” grumbled Thoki picking wood splinters out of his hair.
“Or that the fire would ignite all those cats.”
“Hrm. I thought I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Or that the cats would then try to eat all the lobsters that escaped,” added Lor, probing his memory like a tongue probing a tooth cavity.
“Well the lobsters wouldn’t have escaped if you hadn’t knocked over the hockey sticks,” sniffed Thoki.
“In my defense, I think leaning them against those hydrogen tanks was a bad go to begin with.”
“Yes, but your stupid camping magazines were taking up floorspace,” said Thoki testily.
“I like camping,” said Lor sadly.
“Well I’m not sure the plan would have worked anyway,” said Thoki kindly.
“It was a long shot that the bear was going to eat the petit fours anyway,” agreed Lor.
“Exactly. I think holding the world for ransom is going to require a lot more effort on our parts.”
“Yes. It made so much sense when we wrote it out last night.”
“Everything does at 3 am,” sighed Thoki looking around him at the devastation. “On the bright side, here’s one shopping district that won’t be seeing it’s parking lot for a while.
“I guess.”
“Now let us never speak of this incident again.”
“What incident?” asked Lor who had the memory of a stunned rabbit.
“Exactly.”
It was 8:30 in the morning and I was running late again. The third time this week and it was only Wednesday. Well, 3 for 3 isn’t bad. This wasn’t like me as I was usually punctual.
Of course the reason I was late was because she had stayed the night. I can’t bring myself to crawl out of bed while her head is lying on my chest and she’s sound asleep. So instead I lay awake and watch her sleep staring at her brunette hair.
I flip on the radio as I hop into my car. The music blares at me; a side effect of driving home angry from work last night after a construction company was blocking my exit from the parking garage. I flip it to the local talk show after turning it down and suddenly I hear there has been some sort of incident downtown. It sounds like it’s by my building.
“We have reports that the city is still trying to figure out what happened” says the porn star voiced news anchor.
Finally, I arrive at my destination and see that the local construction company has knocked down the building that I work in mistakenly. They were supposed to take care of the building directly behind ours.
Time to head back to that brunette…
Angela Stewart walked down to the cafeteria for lunch. It was about time. The day was lasting longer than the engergizer bunny, and she couldn’t wait for it to end.
“Hey, Angie! Over here!”
Angela looked towards the sound of the voice. There waving her over was one of the other secretaries in the building. While she is slightly older, she’s one of the only people Angela can talk to here. She smiled fainlty and held up an index finger, asking her friend to wait. It was lunchtime. At least this could go right, couldn’t it?
While getting in line, she picked up a plate and proceeded to make herself a nice salad. Eating healthy could be a step in the right direction. And speaking of stepping, as she moved away from the lettuce, she slipped in a perfectly placed puddle of something. She didn’t really care what it was. All she knew was that she was airborne in a few seconds, and a few seconds after that, flat on her back. Her plate of lettuce was on it’s way down on her face. Trying to avoid it, Angela moved slightly to the left, colliding with someone’s leg.
The man grunted and joined her on the floor, his lunch making a nice design on the both of them. They still layed on the floor completely in shock. They turned to look at each other…she recognized those angry charcoal eyes from anywhere.
“Miss Stewart!” her boss snarled and glared at her, trying to get up. “Mind watching where you’re laying?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she tried getting up and helping him along…only for them both to slide back down on the ground.
He pushed her away, all her attempts at help as he spit out, “Just…let me go. You’ve done enough today.”
Angela sighed as she sat in the mess of food, suddenly losing her appetite. Her friend walked over and helped her up. “Some incident. What’s going on with you today?”
Angela sighed. “I don’t even care anymore.”
@shells2003
Jeremy looked at the pile of rubble, all that was left of his cozy home. He carefully picked his way through the shifting debris, digging out an heirloom here, a forgotten treasure there, all the while attempting to ignore the clenched fist currently residing in the pit of his stomach.
“It’s not so bad,” his boyfriend attempted. “Okay, it sucks, but at least you can salvage a few things.”
Jeremy lifted a sodden piece of clothing – it was impossible to determine its original color. He waved the charred, dripping rag in Michael’s face. “This is NOT what I’d call salvageable.”
“You’re right, my bad,” he agreed. “But at least we both escaped.”
“It’s all your fault this happened,” Jeremy began to rant. “If you hadn’t decided the kitchen counter was the best place to have sex . . .”
“You wouldn’t have lost control and grabbed hold of the stove knobs for balance?” Michael helpfully supplied. “That may be true, but I refuse to take the blame for the fact that you threw my shirt onto the lit burners.” he bent and captured his lover’s lips in an apologetic kiss. “Let’s just try to put the unfortunate . . . incident . . . out of our minds and get back to what we were in the middle of.”
“Here, in the burned out house?”
“Well, look on the bright side, there’s nothing left to destroy.”
@SesshasWorld
I wasn’t sure what to make of the scene. My platoon and I entered the facility through the eastern gate — the only gate of the small stone-wall fortress. The door had taken 20 minutes to break down. Once we were in, we could see bodies in the yard. Dozens of them, all lying motionless in pools of blood, their bodies ripped apart.
“Let me know if you find any survivors,” I called to the troops. But I knew immediately there would be none. Every one of them was either disemboweled, decapitated, or quartered. No one could survive such an attack.
Then it struck me: Who attacked these men? How could anyone have escaped? The murderer or murders must be inside. Or else among the bodies. But how?
@elephantguy68
Oh yeah….@shells2003 you think I would have learned my lesson last week.
The stones and glass cutting into her knees were the least of her concerns. Sydney held her hands over her ears as if it would block out the words just spoken to her. The tears were instantaneous, they welled in her eyes and began to spill down her cheeks before he finished his sentence.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am, we regret to inform you of your husband’s…”
She knew as soon as she opened the door. A uniformed officer on her door step, a uniformed officer at her home, a uniformed officer-the most feared thing for the war wives to see when they look through the peephole.
Even through her sobs she could hear him, “The incident happened…” she wailed, “friendly fire…” What does that mean? she thought. “Unknown explosive.”
“Unknown?” she muttered.
“Dead,” she sighed.
It didn’t matter anymore.
Nothing mattered anymore.
The worst part was she’d lost Danny long before this moment. She’d lost him when he’d driven away without looking back. She’d lost him when the world became cloaked in fear and he felt he needed to defend his country. Even though she wanted to, even though she knew she should have, she hadn’t been able to stand behind him. He left her. He took his crooked smile and piercing blue eyes and went to war, leaving her alone.
She’d lost him then. Before the incident. Before his death.
As her emotions drained out of her onto the pavement, her tears and snot mixing with the concrete, and the uniformed officer, looking miserable for doing this for the tenth time that day, shifted uncomfortably, Sydney remembered when Danny had come home last Christmas. It wasn’t him. His eyes were empty. And the hardest part of everything, was she remembererd what he was like before. What he was like before the war turned him bitter and took the light from his eyes.
She remember his soft kisses; the way he shook her hand when they first met; the smell of his cologne. And now all she had was memories. And an incident.
@TL_Tyson
The incident was something we were all worried about. My mother and father especially. Grandma had gone down to the store with Dad, and somehow she managed to piss everyone off.
Dad sincerely apologized for her, but Mr. Bart did not appreciate his employees being called “Damn Lessers.” Grandma was always a bit on the touchy side. I don’t know why Dad took her to Bart’s anyways. We all knew she didn’t like the non-magic folk. I guess it was because it was on the way home from bowling.
Anyways, the incident has turned out to be more than Grandma’s bad mouth. Our whole family shops and Barts, well we used to, and now we’ve been banned for life. I guess I won’t get to her that cute boy say, “Hi Rosaline” anymore.
But that’s not where it gets bad. The village judge, Hon. Johnson, has summoned us to appear before the court. The whole family! I can’t believe it. One bad comment out of Grandma and we all have to appear before the judge. His family used to be well-respected Magickers, but now they can only do parlor tricks.
We are all being charged with the worst crime imaginable, Superioritus Magicus. Thinking we are all better because we can use magic. I know I’m not better than everyone even if they have to do manual labor and cannot harness the powers of the Universe. Of course I have no idea what we plan to do about it. I think Grandma said we’re going to do a Circle and enchant the town. Dad said that sounded brilliant. My mom was in favor of setting everyone on fire. I have to pick a side, and have to help because the punishment for this incident in Severing us from magic. I can’t lose that. We’d die, literally. I’m going to support Grandma and Dad in this one.
Andrew
@snowppl
The incident happened quietly, suddenly, without aplomb, on a sunny Tuesday morning.
Theresa had a doctor’s appointment she was late for and she failed to notice the line of abandoned cars in the road until she had reached the door of her own Honda hatchback, keys in hand. She stopped and looked around.
Her house was on a two-lane strip of road that was used as a highway workaround by anxious morning commuters. The road was lined with cars, as usual, but they were not moving. In fact, they were driver-less, their doors ajar, keys in the ignition, open-door chimes ringing in the air.
It took her awhile to locate the drivers. They were staggering on the side of the road, some holding their hands to their throats, some gagging, some covering their faces with the crook of an arm. One motorist was hunched over vomiting into a privet hedge.
“What’s going on?” she wondered aloud, perplexed. Chemical warfare? She called out to one of the shell-shocked commuters, “Excuse me! What’s happening here?”
“I can’t,” the dazed man said, eyes watering. “I can’t get back in the car. It’s too much. The oil. The smell of it.” He staggered away blearily.
“You people need to move!” Theresa cried. “I’m late for my appointment and you’re blocking my driveway!”
To emphasize her point, she opened her car door, intent on revving the engine a bit to demonstrate her impatience, but as soon as she did, it struck her. The smell. The stench. The sweet and smoky smell of burning oil.
She reeled away from her car, gagging. “I can’t get in it,” she thought to herself. “It smells like death in there!”
More helicopters in the distance. Two more, circling the motel parking lot like angry bees come to avenge the hive.
Nathan peered out from the darkness of the highway overpass, interpreting their movement. It would be a little while—ten to fifteen minutes—but a pair of detectives would arrive, accompanied by yet another highway patrol squad and national media. He wasn’t concerned with any of them. But the ones he did have to worry about would arrive any minute now. The men and women in the suits and the strange headgear.
The doctors.
He cradled Sophia like an infant, her long lashes fanning hot vapor in the heatwave. You have to run, she said, lips still pressed together. He felt the familiar tickling at the base of his spine when she spoke. You have to run now. Now, she said, and repeated the word, whispering, losing strength.
Nathan regarded the smoking carnage, the twisted metal in the motel parking lot. The cops strewn about in all manner of poses, baking in the sun. It was an incident the doctors wouldn’t forgive him for.
He knelt, setting the severed head down on a piece of unfolded cardboard box, regarding the dying milk white eyes of the psionic before him.
She had all but put the incident out of her head, had taught herself to think of pleasant things when even the smallest of details of that night found their way into her day-to-day thoughts, a technique she had developed on her own, yet as she crossed Michigan Avenue that morning, for reasons she wasn’t entirely sure of, it came back to her, roaring into her brain like a freight train. It was outside of a Starbucks of all places when the details erupted from their hibernation, painting themselves in her cerebrum with such detail as if they had just occurred that morning.
She stopped, set down her bag, and turned to look in the coffee shop. She first met her reflection as it stared blankly back at her, then beyond into the shop and saw customers scurrying to buy their coffees and pastries, coming and going like some sort of microenvironment completely oblivious to the world outside.
She gathered her bag again and slumped against the wall, watching as a gaggle of students and interns and business-types paraded by, talking on cell phones and generally lost in the shuffle of the morning’s activities. Yet there she was, trying hard to forget how he smelled as he crawled on top of her, a combination of nicotine and tequila with almost a hint of citrus. She tried to forget what his hands felt like raking up her thighs, those clammy hands digging and searching. Then she remembered his grainy voice as he told her how pretty she was, how ready she was for what was about to come, how she had been asking for it all night.
She winced hard and a woman pushing a stroller stopped to look at her, as if she might be able to help her out, but when she opened her eyes and met the woman’s, it became alarmingly clear there was nothing she could do, so she pushed the stroller on without looking back.
Her eyes closed again and she remembered how he climbed her like a ladder, positioning himself, readying himself, how the music was dulled from downstairs but the bass was still pounding through the floor and up into the be and through her skin, and she remembered how he almost danced to it as he shimmied up, holding her down and kissing her sloppy.
She suddenly sobered up when a cold breeze drifted by, waking her before she could remember the truly bad parts. She looked back into the coffee shop and the scene was exactly the same, carbon copies of carbon copies, then looked back out to the sidewalk, that busy sidewalk, and remembered, surrounded by all these souls, just how alone she was.
@robhollywood
She called me an accident, some stupid decision that would haunt her forever.
Until I was five I thought my name was ‘the girl,’ not certain if, to her I warranted even the smallest syllable. At six, in school, they told me my name and I wasn’t certain if “Cher” was much better. It was an endearment in our town, a gently spoken word offering affection and familiarity.
To her, that woman I never called Mama, I was still ‘the girl.’
Once, I asked her about my father and she frowned, her nose wrinkling into a cringe before she said, “there was an incident and then there was you.”
I left her by the car, wrecked and broken, not bothering to turn around or offer her help. It was her fault anyway– too much vodka, too little care.
I was sixteen then, frightened, but sure that I couldn’t return.
She said one word as my bloodied bare feet touched the hot pavement.
“Please.”
And I forgot her, leaving her behind.
@teetate
Oh! I was enjoying reading these so much I lost track of time! Time’s up folks!
Thanks for the entries, I’m loving them already. You fantastic writers, you.
Poll should be up by 3:00. See you in a little while!
I always forget my twitter: @teetate
Twitter:
@MosesSiregar
oops mine too @TL_Tyson
It didn’t even occur to me to put my twitter address in: @elephantguy68
If you’ve posted after the fact with your twitter handle, I’ve added it to your original post.