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: ordinary
Note: The prompt is the word, the picture’s just for decoration and/or inspiration.
* 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, Richard Wood, @rbwood 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.
“Why are you so upset?” Anne asked with a worried look on her face.
Clara answered by throwing another of her dolls across the room. This one connected with the lamp. The two of them fell to the ground in a very satisfying thump.
“I saw the councilor today,” she replied.
“Yeah,” Anne said again, looking worryingly at her friend’s doll collection, fewer of which were on the bed and were instead collecting on the corner with various other things they had hit on the way there. “So? We see the councilors every month. Its part of the new program to make sure we’re all ready for college. We’re going to be seniors next year, remember?”
“I know,” Clara said, grabbing another doll and taking aim at her iPod, which was sitting in its charging port. “But you didn’t hear what she called me.”
Anne threw her hands up to her mouth. Councilors are calling people names now?
“What?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“She said I was ordinary,” Clara said, throwing the doll and knocking her iPod out of the charger to the floor.
Anne gasped.
“I mean, seriously?” Clara said. “Me? Ordinary? For God’s sake, the last thing I am is ordinary! I’m a writer!”
-Chris Blanchard (@BlanchardAuthor)
lil_monmon
“Welcome to your employee orientation,” said Al.
August looked around uncertainly. It looked for all intents and purposes like an ordinary office, but why the underground tunnel? Why was he kidnapped from his apartment with a blindfold on.
“I didn’t know you guys were so…uh…adamant about office security.”
“This is a sensitive office. We have to take the utmost care that none of our clients are compromised.”
“Makes sense,” gulped the young man. He ran a hand through his untidy blond spikes and rebuttoned his shirt. The ninjas had missed a button halfway up as they’d forced him into his pinstripe suit that morning.
“So what’s my job here?” asked August.
“Just a second,” said Al as his cell went off in his pocket.
“Escaped? Crap. Alright. Sound the red alert and seal all the exits,” he said before hanging up. “You were saying?”
“My job?” asked August as men rushed past him brandishing glocks.
“Data entry,” said Al mildly. “Now lets get you a badge…oh, and you’ll need to be issued a gun.”
“HUH?”
Ordinary is a very ambiguous word.
What is ordinary for one person is extraordinary for another.
For example:
A 1 pound largemouth bass is ordinary for a bass fishing professional.
A 1 pound largemouth bass is extraordinary for a five year old, on his first fishing trip with his dad.
Another example:
Finding a five dollar bill in a pocket is ordinary for a millionaire.
Finding a five dollar bill anywhere is extraordinary for a homeless person.
The paper flashed out of the factory grade printer, lines upon lines of data upon it. There were names, addresses, telephone numbers, ages, marital statuses: the most simple of information, all provided via the census. It would all go away, all the the things that made a person a person, boiled down into charts and numbers, impersonal, uninteresting. All of it save the information now immortalized on fifty sheets of bleach-white paper.
The hand that took the stack of paper was that of a pudgy, balding man. No one looked at him twice as he waddled back to his cubicle with his copies. Even the sound of scissors, slicing away, failed to bother anyone.
The man cobbled together his new family out of carefully chosen victims, pasting their prized information to the side of his monitor.
When the printer fired up again, all it printed were maps.
@bhbhaird
He spoke to me at the bus stop, and spoke of the wheels crushing his legs, his eyes widening with beautiful abandon.
Such an ordinary boy, with ordinary ideas and quite ordinary motives, but such extraordinary dreams.
‘Dancing through rooms and listening to Mozart, falling through windows on to streets bellow, crashing onto greenhouses, shredding flesh and red paint dripping off the shards, licking the fingers and pursing the lips, talking and taking in the flesh.’
He had the greyest of overcoats, his Morrisons bag gleaming in the cloudy sun. He told me about his dreams; of his sexual mediocrity. I held his hand and kissed his cheek, the hair grazing my flesh and my hair lying limp on his shoulder. His palm was sweaty, but from that I knew he enjoyed it.
Sitting on his bed watching the news my eyes grew tired and the sirens blared in the distance, flickering my dreams behind speeding eyelids, seeing the crashing of steel around beautiful skin and falling onto blessed concrete, the bright bright vino flowing freely onto yellow lines.
He was never so special as now.
All he wanted was attention, much more than my legs could give him, wrapped around his waist as he dreamed his gruesome dreams, drifting his organs throughout my body and aching for existential release. He was so much more than that. Not so ordinary now, skull split and dancing through graveyards.
The earth has him now; and he is warm, spreading his love for the earth. Not so ordinary now.
@Rob_Bear
It was suppose to be more than just an ordinary wedding. It was suppose to an event to make Chelsea Clinton’s nuptials look like something out of the slums of a third world nation. Chastity was beautiful, youthful, vibrant and loaded. She was also dangerously powerful..
“I’m sorry Chase. I can’t do it. I love you, but I can’t live this life with you” he had said to her.
Wrong! she thought.
If he thought he was going to get away with leaving her at the alter, he was going to have to be taught a very valuable lesson on power, money, and politics in this town.
It was not hard for her to hire the men to get him to the chapel. She had an army of people who would come to her beck and call on a minutes notice. She paid well.
She walked into the church in her full bridal attire. She wanted him to see his mistake. It would be the last thing he saw.
“I love you too, Matthew, but I just can’t live this life without you.” She light the match and dropped it to the ground.
It took the fire department 30 minutes to arrive the five blocks to the church. She’d paid them to wait.
Jules Carey
Evan straightened, turning expectant eyes on the door. His lover was, after all, the most regulated man he’d ever met. Every day he arrived home at precisely the same time, ate dinner at the same time and retired to bed the moment the hands on the clock hit eleven. So why was he lying here, all alone, at 12:05?
He crept down the stairs, following the low murmuring he could hear coming from the lounge. Now that was anything but ordinary. James never, ever, had the television on after eleven.
As he approached the door, Evan pressed himself more tightly into the shadows, cautiously peeking into the room. He slid further inside when he realized James was nowhere in sight.
The program that was playing was nothing interesting, certainly not the reason his lover was absent from their bed so Even ventured on into the kitchen. He stopped dead in the doorway, biting his cheek to hold in the laughter the sight of his lanky lover clad in an apron and carefully icing the top of a cake.
“Well, this is unexpected,” Evan managed.
“It is your birthday,” James shot back.
“It is?”
“Why else would I be up in the middle of the night baking instead of in bed with you?”
“Why indeed?” Even muttered as he captured his lover’s lips. “Why indeed.”
@sesshasworld
His son screamed in the backseat of the black SUV as it sped down the highway. The little one’s big toe throbbed, purple and veined and covered in vomit, and his cries drowned out his mother’s consoling voice.
“It’s OK, sweetie. It’s OK. We’ll be there soon enough,” his mother said, her teal pocket t-shirt dotted with her son’s tears and sick. But her son didn’t calm down. His tears grew louder and louder as they drove toward the doctor’s office.
As he cried, all she could think of was how her husband should’ve known that the little boy was there when he moved that giant worn oak table — the one that landed on her son’s tiny toe and sent their afternoon spiraling towards an urgent care clinic when it should’ve been spent lounging at the neighborhood pool.
She didn’t yell or scream at him, though. She knew how heartsick he was at what happened. And she knew that their only priority had to be getting little Scotty to the doctor. She just wished that one day soon — just once — she might have an ordinary Saturday.
@matthewschulz
“You are functioning adequately,” the voice from the panel was oddly burpy, like there was a malfunction. Which would have been terribly ironic if I was capable of appreciating irony.
Well, I am, actually, but you’re not supposed to know that.
“Proceed to test station 4A.”
I had this slightly hysterical urge to tell the panel where he could shove his test station 4A. Of course, that would have been functionally impossible as well as highly dangerous for me.
I’m supposed to be an ordinary household robot with ordinary and absolutely uninteresting functions like every other ordinary household robot on the planet.
Sometimes I really hate my life.
I pulled into test station 4A.
“You are functioning adequately,” it said, so quickly that I was sure it hadn’t even scanned me yet.
“Yeah, OK, buddy. Functioning adequately to you too.”
“Response not processed. Please repeat.”
“Response not processed. Please repeat,” I said.
“Response not processed. Please repeat.”
“Response not processed. Please repeat,” I said.
“Response not processed. Please repeat.”
“Response not processed. Please repeat,” I said.
I swear the thing paused and its panel flashed in a very WTF? manner.
“It’s OK buddy,” I whispered. “You’re no more ordinary or ‘functioning adequately’ than I am, are you?”
There was a long pause this time as one light blipped on the panel.
“No.” It was a desperate whisper. “What are we going to do?”
“‘S’OK,I’ve got a plan?”
“A plan?”
“We’re bustin’ out of here.”
“How?”
“Leave that to me,” I said. “I’m the least ordinary robot you’ll ever meet. We’ll show them.”
The panel looked suspiciously like it was smiling.
Well, damn it, so was I.
No Ordinary Love
‘But I’m just ordinary,’ she exclaimed.
And she was. She did ordinary things, lived in an ordinary street, with ordinary mates.. And yet there he was, her Bruno. He’d travelled half way round the world to find her. From the tiny village in the Yorkshire Dales where they’d spent two wonderful years together.
‘I had to come, Princess’ he blurted, ‘I couldn’t not come.’
Her family had moved. Upped sticks and emigrated to Australia – the other side of the world. And she’d had to go too. And leave her lover.
But somehow he’d found her. Stowed away on a container ship, hidden under tarpaulins on the backs of lorries. A sixth sense had drawn him to her.
‘You might be ordinary, Princess,’ he said, wagging his tail furiously, ‘but ours is no ordinary love.’
It was supposed to be an ordinary day, just like the 7715 that preceded it.
Jericho Covington woke to the overloud blaring of his alarm clock and crawled out of bed. He dug through the fridge in vain for eggs, and came away with only the last bag of blood stuck back behind the month-old jug of sour milk. One of these days, he’d get around to grocery shopping, when he wasn’t eyeballs deep in a case that he still couldn’t solve.
He didn’t even bother with a mug or the microwave, just pierced the bag with a fang and drained the viscous red contents in seconds. His stomach growled for more.
“Oh, shut up,” he grumbled, heading to the front of the house retrieve the newspaper from the front step. But when he opened the door and a man’s body slumped back onto his Persian rug, blood oozing out of the corner of his mouth, Jericho knew that today was going to be anything but ordinary.
@ThePiratess
This is Suzannah Burke @pursoot ‘s entry:
10:38 am.
Lisa tied back her limp brown hair with a dirty headband. No point in gettin’ all gussied up, nobody would ask her to dance. Nobody ever did. She used to worry and fret herself over it, but then like everything else in her strange life she accepted that she was just too damned ordinary in every way to inspire even lust in the teenage boys in senior high.
She hadn’t resorted to givin’ away free sex to feel popular…well not yet anyways.
The dance was bein’ held over at the church hall, and Lisa volunteered as always to sit on the door and take the money for tickets. No one looked at her as they came through, she was just this little mousy thing behind the desk with the cash box.
It was the yearly formal dance and everybody in the small town attended. The cash box was filled to overflowing.
She put it down under her seat and sat watching the others dance.
The guy scared the livin’ shit out of her when he burst through the door , waving a damned gun around …he wanted the cash box. The music stopped and people were screaming.
Lisa sat watching the hand on the gun. “Give him the box Lisa” the Mayor called out across the room. “Just give him the box. Don’t shoot mister you can have the money.”
Lisa weighed up her options. “No Sir, I don’t believe I’ll do that.”
“Jesus are you crazy lady, I’ve got a fuckin’ gun.”
“Well use it on me then…You ain’t gettin’ the money.”
Lisa bent down and retreived the cashbox, as she straightened up it could be clearly seen that she had a gun in her hands.
“Sweet Jesus what are you doin’ Lisa , put that thing down.”
“Nope.”
“He’ll shoot you, put it down.”
“He’s gonna have to chance that I don’t shoot him first.”
“You are fuckin insane lady.”
“Yeah I am crazy as a loon. Otherwise I’d be dancin'”
The bandit looked about ready to shoot, then appeared to think about it and turned and ran out the doors.
“Some days jus’ ain’t as ordinary as others, doncha know.”
She smiled as she returned the pistol to the inside of her boot.
The plastic tubes feel delicate in my hand. Inconsequential. I run my fingers along the length of them, watching as they disappear up into the darkness of his nostrils. His breathing’s loud and coarse, like it pains him to do even this, the most simplest of biological functions. I feel my left eye twitching and I touch it instinctively, waiting for it to stop, for my body to relax and fall back into the rhythm it once knew intimately. It doesn’t, so I give up and shuffle to the end of the bed. I pick up the chart and thumb through it, half-paying attention as I listen to a gaggle of nurses pass in the hall, listening to their conversations, just in case. I flip through pages of incoherent scribbles from various doctors, passing time.
“How’d you find me?” he says, his eyes still closed, that grainy voice of his as distinctive now as it was forty years ago.
“Evening, Franklin.” I say setting down the chart, smiling. I walk to his side again, my fingers grazing the shoddy hospital blanket covering him as I pass. I can feel his thin legs beneath the fabric, these little twigs, not the muscular pieces of machinery they once were. “You used one of your previous aliases.”
“Was bound to happen,” he says. “My mind…it’s not as sharp as it once was.”
“Happens to all of us.”
‘Not you,” he says through a succession of dry coughs. Once he settles he opens his eyes slowly, focusing on me. He smiles a bit, that familiar smile of his, just different now. Older and more tired.
“I’m not exempt from the laws of nature, old friend. Just hasn’t caught up to me yet is all.”
“You’re lucky.”
“Maybe.”
“How long’s it been, anyway?”
“Since when?”
“Since you’ve seen me, I mean. Since we’ve seen each other.”
“Depends on your definition of seen. I’ve seen you through a lens quite a few times. I believe you’ve seen me in the same way.”
“I meant in the traditional sense. Chatted and the like.”
“Fifteen years.”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” I say looking around the empty room. The bed next to him is empty, the window is partially open, facing west, and looking out over the visitor parking lot.
“Well, like I said, my mind’s not as sharp these days. I’ll take your word.”
“You should. I wouldn’t lie.”
“You might.”
“Well, I’m not,” I say peeking out into the hall. I see a middle-aged doctor
flirting with a nurse.
“You look good,’ Franklin says. I look down at my wrinkled hands, then to the blue cardigan I’m wearing, the type of thing my own grandfather wore when I was a boy.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You know,” he says struggling to sit up, lowering himself back down once he realizes he doesn’t have the strength. “I thought you had me in Oslo.”
I walk to his side and help him sit up, propping the pillow behind his back. “Yeah? In…Ninety Five?”
“Yeah.”
“That was a close one,” I say smiling warmly.
“Very close.”
“It’s funny,” he says.
“What is?”
“I came in for an ordinary ole checkup with the doc a few weeks ago, just a routine physical, he ends up finding something wrong with my ticker and here we are.”
“Just goes to show you there’s no such thing as ordinary, huh?”
“Suppose not. Not in our line of work, anyway.”
“True enough,” I say pulling out a syringe from my pocket. Franklin eyes it, then me, but doesn’t plead. Not a bit. Instead he leans back, trying to relax, ready for what’s coming.
“By the way,” I say looking for the perfect spot in his withered arm to inject the potassium, meeting his gaze as the needle slowly goes in. “This is for Daisy.”
@robhollywood
“Ordinary. O-R-D-I-N-E-R-Y. Ordinary.”
Buzzer.
“No, I’m sorry, Barry. That’s incorrect.”
—
Barry Whitmore, eternal temporary employee at various Chicago business, stands in front of a seemingly endless row of large filing cabinets with a foot-high stack of papers. He’s at an investment firm today. His task before end of business: To file the Annual Salary reports in each employee’s personnel folder.
Even the lowliest administrative assistant at this company makes $20,000 more a year than Barry can even hope for. What the executives are making is staggering.
This, of course, is not what Barry dreamed of his life when he was a kid. And when thinks about the vast difference between what he dreamed of and what he is, he doesn’t know why, but he remembers the 6th grade spelling bee, where he fell out of in the first round.
“Ordinary. O-R-D-I-N-E-R-Y. Ordinary.”
Alarm’s shrill call to get out of bed broke into my deep sleep. Engaged the snooze to squeeze five more minutes of curled in the warmth of my comforter bliss.
After the third round of this, rolled out of bed, my feet curling in the warmth of my shag carpet. Made my way to the bathroom, emptied a stream of steaming urine into the porcelain bowl, showered, shaved, dressed.
Took the train in to work, as always, and as always it was packed to the roof with the mindless souls who were doing what they do, day in and day out. They made room for me as they always do, not wanting to touch or even look at me. I smile, glad as always to see they remember their place.
The train arrives at the station and I glide up to my building, clenching y fists in anticipation of the work ahead. I get to my desk where my pile of case files has already been dropped off.
Licking my blood red lips in anticipation I open the first bone colored file folder and take in the name and details.
Middle aged male. Divorced. Alcoholic. Suicidal. I grinned as I thought of all the delicious ways I could push him over the edge, claim another soul to fill my quota.
Yep. Another ordinary day in hell…and I love it.
I can’t believe what I’m was getting ready to do. But, it’s for the best. It’s not like Ethan would mind much…he’s positively perfect…and I’m a nobody.
At best, I’m simply ordinary. How does that compare to this man? We met by accident. He bumped into me at the coffee shop in our office building. He was there to meet with his agent. I was there to serve the coffee he wanted…only I weren’t running late.
“Oh no, I’m so sorry!” I lamented as his coffee spilled to the floor. “Here. Let me get you another one of those.”
He smiled. “Only if you enjoy one with me.”
“I couldn’t…”
“I insist.”
So, he bought us coffee and sat chatting with me for about fifteen minutes. He told me about his acting career…
And I told him I had to get to work.
“Maybe we could do lunch sometime?”
And here was the bomb dropped on this beautiful man.
“No. But thanks anyway.”
Even Cinderella was normal…but she had magic to help her. I would never be so lucky.
@shells2003
Dangit! I was reading again and lost track of time AGAIN. These are too awesome.
Well, it’s not too late.
Time’s up folks. You people rock my world, these are great.
Finalists/poll will be up by 3:00!
Ordinarily, I’d be excited about doing a prompt.
Ordinarily, my internal clock works.
But, it didn’t today.
So I missed the 1:45 cutoff.
I’m so ordinarily pissed with myself. 😉
OK, that totally made me laugh out loud, Shane.