What is 5MinuteFiction, you say? It’s an adrenaline-fueled, instant-gratification sort of writing contest. Sound fun? Great! Get in there and get dirty!
The Rules
* You get five minutes to write a piece of prose or poetry in any style or genre
* You must directly reference today’s prompt: drill
(Note: The prompt is the word. The picture is for decoration/inspiration.)* Post your entry as a comment to this post.
I’ll close the contest at 1:45. That gives you 5 minutes to write and ten to accommodate the vagaries of relative time, technology, and the fickle internets. 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, Jessica Olin, @olinj, will nominate five finalists. I’ll put the nominees in a poll, and at 9:00 EDT tomorrow I’ll close the poll and declare the winner.
For updates, you can subscribe to my RSS Feed, “like” my Facebook Page, 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. If your entry doesn’t appear right away, email me sometimes comments go into the suspected spam folder and I have to dig them out.
* 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.
I stand there, sad
waiting for her response
she looks at me,
waiting… and then
it finally comes to her
She drills it into my head
over and over,
“I do not love you”
“I do not… love you”
The words, they coil
through my brain
like a drill bit
boring down into my chest
forever, leaving a hole
in my heart
~ Joanne Clendening
Twitter: journalartz
“Drill, baby, drill!”
“That woman’s certifiable.”
“No kidding.”
“Insane, I’m telling you.”
“Umm, yeah. I know.”
“Someone should do something about her.”
“Ignoring her works for me.”
“A lot of people buy into her crap. We have to do something. For the people. For America!”
“Sounding a little Beckish there, man.”
“Oh please, she put up those pictures with Obama in crosshairs. Someone really needs to take a gu–”
“OMG, dude! You can’t talk about stuff like that! This is the internet!”
“Oh. Well, just delete it.”
“Doesn’t work like that. It never really goes away.”
“Well what am I going to do, then? I have to run. Somewhere no one even knows about.”
“How about Alaska? I hear you can see Russia from there.”
“Not funny, man.”
It couldn’t be dirty, not a sign of any of the past fun it might have been involved in. In fact, a little piece of trivia the papers would love is the fact that he boils them after each use. To keep them clean, to keep them pure. They sat like little silver soliders in a small three drawered tool box. Each of them a different length and thickness, you could never use the same one twice. Each one had a different purpose. All heads were different.
For the pretty girl he had strapped to the table, it would have to be something thin and long. He could tell when he licked the skin at her temple, this would have to be a delicate job. It would hurt more this way, and he hardened thinking about her screams.
Clicking the drill bit into place, he tore the duct tape off the girl’s mouth. She didn’t scream yet, just looked up at him with terror filled eyes, the sound of the drill starting causing tears to fall down her cheeks. Oh, it was so much sweeter when they cried.
@adenpenn
“Go! Go! Go!” The drill sargent barked the order over and over again, giving each of his charges a brusque slap on the back as each reached the front of the line. One by one they dove into the course, bobbing and weaving but never quite meeting his satisfaction.
“No! Faster! I want to see you really moving out there!”
The last of the new batch entered the course, and the drill sargent began his walk to the other end, shaking his head at the miserable things he’d been given to work with. One was wallowing in a mud puddle, unable to get righted in the mire. Another had hit the wall too hard, and was sprawled on the ground. One was simply curled up into a ball. It happened. The stress broke them, the stress was supposed to break them.
It was all about finding the best.
At the end of the course a few recruits stood there, watching the sargent approach, snapping to attention as he did. From a distance the general approached from his vantage point watching the whole of the sorry affair.
“Well, sargent, what do you think?”
He looked at the miserable piles of gears and plating that surrounded him, grinding and wheezing from the relatively simple course. “Going to have to be a few more years of humans, I suspect.”
@DL_Thurston
The nearest hospital was three hundred miles away. I looked over at the truck, the smoke still billowing from under the hood.
We would never make it by foot.
He was bleeding everywhere, it pooled at my feet and as a result I made bloody footprints when I paced around in the dirt. “What are we going to do? I cried.” I didn’t know how to handle this, I was supposed to be in New York already. Sam just grunted and his breathing grew rapid.
I ran to the truck and got the tool box. What was going to dislodge this medioroite from his thigh? As a writer, my knowledge of tools was limited, but I knew I needed to make the wound larger to dislodge the mediorite, which was now oozing a purple-ish liquid.
Sam screamed.
“I’m coming, I’m coming!” I shouted as I grabbed a few items from the box and ran back to Sam. “What did you get” he huffed.
“Sam, this may hurt a bit.”
The last thing Sam heard before he passed out was the sound of the drill.
MaryAnne had been fumbling around the garage for the last half an hour. Harold had left the place in such a shambles she couldn’t find her way around without injuring one or all of her extremities. At the moment she was nursing a cut on her finger. She didn’t know where it came from, but suspected it was the rusted drill sitting out on a box of tens of thousands of christmas lights. Why in the world Harold would need that many christmas lights was beyond her, but that didn’t matter. She had found the old drill as instructed and been injured for her efforts. She grabbed it and tried snaking her way through the debris of the garage.
“I got it, Harold!” she called as she came into the kitchen.
She closed the garage door and made her way into the livingroom. The first thing she saw was Harold holding a brand new power drill with the box lying in front of him on the floor.
“Thanks, babe,” he said without looking at her. “I got my new one from the bedroom.”
by Katie
@katiebeme
Hot or cold. Take your pick. You’re either one or the other when drilling for Helium-3.
Working a mining operation on the moon is all about temperature. You are either freezing on the dark side, or burning up on the side that faces the sun. Today I’m on the dark side and I should be cold.
I work for Isotope Mining where we drill for Helium-3. Found within tiny particles embedded in the lower layer of lunar soil, Helium-3 is the Earth’s cleanest and most efficient energy source. When stored in an insulated container, about the size of an 8oz water bottle, its value on the open market is about fourteen million. It’s more valuable than diamonds and infinity more salable.
Isotope Mining jacked up their prices, again, causing quite a stir back on Earth. A thirty percent increase is outrageous by anyone’s standards, even for a monopoly like IM.
About an hour ago, the shut-down alarm went off, the drills stopped and all workers were sent to the decompression room for a thorough search. It seems a small amount of Helium-3 came up missing during a batch check. The company has multiple fail-safe systems in place to prevent theft, so I doubted anyone here would be stupid enough to try something. So, now we sit and wait…
Today I’m on the dark side of the moon, but I’m hot as hell.
@kadinseton
Beautiful. That’s the word that comes to mind as I watch the twisting threads of the drill. It’s thrilling. Hypnotic.
I find myself lost in its endless circling. I almost forget what I am doing, why I am even holding this drill in the first place.
Down it goes. It makes contact with a high pitched squeal. It’s music to my ears. As it goes deeper, so does the pitch. The harmony of machine and nature at its finest.
Smoke rises and fills my nostrils. This is why I bought the heavy duty drill with back up battery attachment. The drill gets stuck, but only for a moment as I pull down harder on the trigger. That’s why I chose the one with extra torque. It’s always better to pay more for better quality.
The blood splatters across my paper bib, but I don’t care, I relish it. The gurgled screams of a patient choking on his own saliva mixed with blood is exhilarating. His eyes look up at me as to question my intentions. Briefly he wonders if there was ever a God. Then he gives out.
Unlike my drill. It has a lifetime money back guarantee.
@briefconceits
Miles fired up the drill, the high-pitched whir of stainless steel in the dry air a pulsing lesion. He braced himself and lowered the tip of the bit, lining it up with the bones of his foot. A breath in, a breath out, forceful. A second later, the sickness hit him. Oh, god — a flash of pain, a whiff of copper, the searing odor of flesh.
Weak but determined, he continued, screw the bolt to the board below. Salt dribbled into his eyes, and he raked a hand through his greasy black hair to slick it back. Legs and arms tremoring, he threw his tool to the side and reclined, the bite of the wood in his back freeing him momentarily from the fog in his brain to focus on one point — the metal driven through foot.
The beat of his heart throbbed there, the fire spreading with each wheezing, sucking breath.
“Okay, Paul,” he called, faking his bravery. “Do it.”
“Are you sure?” His friend’s voice spoke of his reticience.
“Yes, do it now. I must atone.”
Without a word, Paul set to work and Miles held to the spikes in the wood above his head. Paul tugged on the ropes, heaving, and the cross crested, rising to stand upright. Miles groaned, the tug on his arms a relief from the fire in his foot.
“Laurie,” he called out, his eyes landing on the small woman with the tortured eyes. “It is for you. It is all for you!”
She turned and fled.
“Sir,” she began, “I don’t think that you appreciate the gravity of the situation.”
The surgeon’s head turned slightly to the side, his eyebrows rising as he looked intently at Shelly. “And just what weighty aspect of this situation is it that you think I do not appreciate, hmmm?”
Shelly’s eyes widened, taken a-back, her head turned slightly one way and then the other, her mouth obviously working as could be seen by the movement of the surgical mask. “I…, I…, Well I…” she stuttered.
“You obviously appreciate something of profound seriousness that I do not so please enlighten me,” the surgeon said as he stood up straight, his head leaning forward so that he was now looking down on Shelly.
“Well, Sir,” she began, “if the…, the…, the beings are creations of his mind and nothing more then I guess there isn’t so much going on here.” She paused, her eyes never breaking contact with the Surgeon’s own. “But if,…”
“If what young lady.”
“But what if these creations, these creatures, are in fact not a creation of his mind but instead a contact. An interaction with his mind. Will we be destroying a means of contact? Perhaps a first contact?
The surgeon looked at Shelly, his eyes showing that some activity was taking place. He glanced away for just a moment. When he looked back, he merely pointed at the shaved skull of the subject and said,
“Drill.”
@redshirt6
I’ve never seen it so dark. The peals of thunder had ceased a few minutes ago and I was left alone in the darkness, or so I thought. All around me I felt the weight of the world pressing in and it helped to magnify the thunder of my own heartbeat in my ears. I reached out with my right hand, scratching away at the cold stone underneath me, grasping for whatever was in finger’s reach. Finding nothing, I stretched my left arm, still free and with more room around it than my right and felt.. something. There was a handle and a cord attached to it. Jake Preston’s drill. He’d been beside me minutes ago, and now, as I lay here in the darkness with sixteen thousand tons of anthracite bearing down above me like God’s own black anvil… I held onto that vestige of the world we’d come from like it was my grandma’s own Bible. It’s tough down here, a dangerous life, I’m told. I never gave it much thought til the lightning sparked, the roof overhead screamed out at us all, and came down. Buried alive are the two worst words I could imagine.
@cedarlock
“Eeeek! What are you doing?” Dharma asked her brother.
“Dharma, please stop your whining, and stay right there!” Greg ordered her. He engaged his drill again into the floor of her room making sure she didn’t take off. Sirens were going off in the distance.
Greg pulled out a floorboard and retrieved a box. Guns. “What is this?” Dharma asked.
“Follow me,” Greg ordered while grabbing her hand. They left their house and entered the forest. Greg met up with twelve other men, all carrying weapons. “It’s time,” he told them, “It must be done.”
That was the day the revolution started. Dharma could still remember Greg frantically drilling for his revolutionary tools, weapons, and meeting his “cell.” Greg’s group of revolutionaries was so expansive that the state could not keep them under control.
“Is that all?” the interrogator asked.
Dharma paused. “No,” she said, “Now it’s time for me to leave and do what I should of done from the start.”
The walls exploded and the interrogator was shot. Dharma walked towards her brother. “Hey sis, believe me now?”
Carter still watched his young niece, Jessie, as she played with the orange tulips in the garden. He looked over when he heard his name called.
“I’m glad you came to see her. Beautiful, isn’t she?”
Carter nodded. “I see Alex in her.”
“Well, it is his daughter.”
It was silent as he walked over to the patio furniture his mother was sitting on. She fidgited a little with her fingers in her hair, crossed her legs and let out an uneasy sigh.
“You know, I’m glad you’re here. I need a favor.”
“Anything.”
She scoffed. “You say that now. You don’t even know what I want.”
“I’d do anything for you, mom.”
For a few brief seconds, she smiled. Too quickly, that smile softened into a sadness he wished she didn’t feel. “Of my two sons, you’re the one I’d trust to do this. But, I wonder if I should.”
At this, Carter took her hand. “What is it, mom? I don’t like you this upset.”
She sighed and said, “Got a call from a friend. She had a pretty bad heart attack and wants me to come. She has someone staying with her, but she would like me to take some of the strain off of her.”
“So, you need a ride? Of course, I’ll do it!”
His mother sighed again and shook her head. “This isn’t the usual drill, Carter. I’m not just going to the hospital to visit her. She would need me to stay for a week or so, and I’d…I’d really love it if you stayed, too.”
“Okay,” Carter looked confused. “You made this sound like it would just be a burden, or something.”
“Might be. My friend who called for me is Greta.”
Carter went through his mental list of those he knew…Greta…Greta….
He only knew one Greta…but it couldn’t be…
“Now, he get’s it,” his mother said softly. “You’re not wrong: it is Leah’s grandmother.”
Carter couldn’t stop his heart from nearly leaping from his chest at the mention of his name. And neither could he start it back when he thought of what that meant.
“She wouldn’t want to see me,” Carter huffed, his fingers trailing through his close cropped hair. “She hasn’t tried contacting me for months.”
“Oh, and you have?” his mother scolded softly. “The only mother that woman has ever known was her grandmother. You had to know that’s where she’d go. You just didn’t bother going back for her. Instead, you’ve got this crazy routine of binge drinking and feeling sorry for yourself. Get out of the drill of pity partying and get your woman back.”
“It’s…it’s not that simple, mom.”
His mom pushed away with her hand. “You’re the one making it hard.”
He thought heavily of her words as she stood and said, “If you still want to take me, I’d like to get moving first thing in the morning.”
As he watched his mother walk away, he knew he’d drive her. If anything, for his mother.
And for every other reason, to see Leah again.
Well where that came from I’m not sure I want to know. Shoulda known better than use an odd prompt like “drill.”
That’s it, folks! Now for the judging and I’ll post the finalists as soon as I can. Can’t promise 3:00 this week, but definitely as soon as possible after that. See you then!
@WritingDystopia on twitter! Sorry!
sorry I missed this week. Or maybe not so sorry. I can’t think of anything about a drill.
Working a mining operation on the moon is all about temperature. You are either freezing on the dark side, or burning up on the side that faces the sun. Today I’m on the dark side and I should be cold.
I held onto that vestige of the world we’d come from like it was my grandma’s own Bible. It’s tough down here, a dangerous life, I’m told. I never gave it much thought til the lightning sparked.. 😛
I reached out with my right hand, scratching away at the cold stone underneath me, grasping for whatever was in finger’s reach. Finding nothing, I stretched my left arm, still free and with more room around it than my right and felt.
It was silent as he walked over to the patio furniture his mother was sitting on. She fidgeted a little with her fingers in her hair, crossed her legs and let out an uneasy sigh. | 😛
I thought all around me I felt the weight of the world pressing in and it helped to magnify the thunder of my own heartbeat in my ears. I reached out with my right hand, scratching away at the cold stone underneath me, grasping for whatever was in finger’s reach. Finding nothing, I stretched my left arm, still free and with more room around it than my right and felt.. something. There was a handle and a cord attached to it.
I’m not just going to the hospital to visit her. She would need me to stay for a week or so, and I’d…I’d really love it if you stayed, too.
I held onto that vestige of the world we’d come from like it was my grandma’s own Bible. It’s tough down here, a dangerous life, I’m told. I never gave it much thought til the lightning sparked. | 😛
I stretched my left arm, still free and with more room around it than my right and felt.. something. There was a handle and a cord attached to it. Jake Preston’s drill. | 😛
I didn’t know how to handle this, I was supposed to be in New York already. Sam just grunted and his breathing grew rapid. I ran to the truck and got the tool box.
I reached out with my right hand, scratching away at the cold stone underneath me, grasping for whatever was in finger’s reach. Finding nothing, I stretched my left arm, still free and with more room around it than my right and felt. | 😛