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By ThursdayBY THURSDAY!By Thursday4 years ago in Scripts & Screenplays More Like This
A Dark and Absurd Comedy of the Office World in One Act
Characters
Joseph M. Conrad……………………………high-strung new employee
Sir……………………………………………………CEO of GloboStaple
Bill from Accounting…………………………………Conrad’s coworker
Jane from Advertising……………………………………………ice queen
Setting
A typical office building in NYC; specifically, an
VerdigrisThe sun was red the day Slicker died. She watched him fall a hundred levels, to shatter against a fat, reinforced gas pipe, shards of him breaking across archways and supports and cables, plummeting into the foggy void below. His blud drenched a cluster of backup valves. It dripped from the nozzles, thick and syrupy.Verdigris3 years ago in Short Stories More Like This
Slicker was unsticking the gears on the Bigtime, with such focus that he paid no attention to the approach of the Quickhand, making its minute-long journey around the Bigtime's face. He had clamped safety cables to the supports, but was careless. The Quickhand caught a support line, and dragged him off the gears, sending him plu
Wild Hunt :: LongmaLike any good story, this one does not begin where it began. It does, however, begin where it ends—at a funeral.Wild Hunt :: Longma2 years ago in Short Stories More Like This
The village was not particularly big. Rather, it was frightfully small, and just as frightfully remote. That said, it was little surprise that every denizen turned out for something so important as the funeral of a good man.
—and it truly was each and every one: every man, woman, and child; every son, brother, and father; every maiden, mother, and crone. It was said even the dogs followed at the heels of their masters, even the songbirds gathered in the trees, and the livestock unable to free themselves from their pens
The Beckett ColcannonCIAN, bowler hat, medium gray trench coat, old-fashioned sunglasses, a cane.The Beckett Colcannon3 years ago in Comedy More Like This
BEAG, bowler hat, light grey trench coat.
SET: Front center, a rectangular table, around 8 feet long. To its right, as seen by the audience, an oven/stove. On the stove, a pot with steam coming from it, and on the floor to its right, a small garbage bin. To the table's left, a simple armless chair, facing the audience. On the table, one pound of ham, in one piece. The set is lit in medium light, and the remainder of the stage is left in darkness.
Curtains rise. CIAN sits at the chair. He stares directly forward. Five seconds.
CIAN: Ready, yes, they must be ready.
And Here Is JohnHere is John, beside me again. Sometimes when we meet he gives me a small, courtly bow, other times he's tired and he can only muster up a smile as the words "Bonjour, ma belle," fall out of his mouth. Sometimes his eyes burn feverishly, sometimes they're dull, sometimes he's drunk. It depends on where he's been that day. There are only two things constant about my John; he always manages to smile, and I can always see the fear deep in every line on his face.And Here Is John9 months ago in Short Stories More Like This
Paris is grim, and John spends his time here waiting. His whole life now is waiting and fearing what could happen. No one knows what will happen, now. The front is moving closer to the
Working ClassSmoking is a working class diseaseWorking Class1 year ago in Free Verse More Like This
They said; he smiled at this.
Lean in body and broad of mind
With shirtsleeves rolled,
A modern man's philosopher
Who stuttered over the words
Like his fingers did over her chassis
Detroit rolling iron beneath his palms
Grease and lubricant under the nails.
The cigarette cherry glows in the dark
Giving him a hard edge aura
The gloaming settling into the lines
Of his work-worn face
The Fat Buddha Smiles At MeThe fat Buddha smiles at meThe Fat Buddha Smiles At Me2 years ago in Free Verse More Like This
As I sit in the Vietnamese nail salon,
I wonder if he realizes that
The incense in front of him is electric?
And I, paying money to sit
And have my feet bathed by a lady,
Am bowed to far more often, with
Sacrificial poses, and softly spoken words.
I wonder what it must be like
To be so enlightened that
I could be satisfied with plastic.
While the lady asks if I prefer
The blue or purple polish?
Night Chaser02:37am 22nd July - depart from London by commercial jet, business class.Night Chaser10 months ago in Short Stories More Like This
00:53am 22nd July - arrive in New York an acceptable 7 minutes behind schedule.
Slaying an archangel is hard work. It takes a great deal of study, picking your mark, separating fact from legend, learning your target's tells and vulnerabilities. Even if you succeed, and when I tore Gabriel's crystal heart from his open chest I became one of the precious few who have, there is still the matter of retribution. Angels never forget the death of one of their own, and a legion of these creatures now wait to descend and deliver their vengeance. My only sanctuary is the night.
The Dalzell KnockoutThe Banana Bar wasn’t Conner Dalzell’s sort of place. I was behind it slicing lemons, wincing at acid burns, when he walked in alone in a buff duffel coat. The guy was at least fifty, maybe older, his hair turning white.The Dalzell Knockout1 year ago in Short Stories More Like This
Tonight was student night, all the cocktails were half price, and fresher girls were getting fresh with lecherous finalists in the faux-leather booths. Conner Dalzell stood in the doorway for half a minute and I thought he would leave. But he took off his coat and searched for a peg to hang it on. To his evident surprise, he didn't find one, so he flung it over his elbow and waddled to the bar.
“What would you recommend then?” he asked. My hands were sticky with lemon juice. I hastily wiped them on my apron.
“Our featured cocktail today is the Blue Lagoon Special: vodka, blue curacao, and white wine.”
“Sounds awful,” he said, slipping from the barstool he’d tried to mount. “What’s blue
comfort, crawfish boils, and port vincentand you and me, we got the whole ofcomfort, crawfish boils, and port vincent1 year ago in Free Verse More Like This
Saturday, you and me, we got car grease
streaked straight up to our grins and
let's high five when you triumph over
mom's sneaky nose, her teasing and coy and
i wanna be that kind of wife to a man
like you. i wanna be the kind of woman worth
changing with, sacrificing for, going crazy
over as the years collect in bank rolls of nickels.
i've been called a menagerie of names by
the older, the wiser, the wrinkled; they
call me pretty girl, sweetheart, dollface,
sugarplum as i stir splenda into their
brewed coffees, but they ain't got nothin'
on your horse master hands, the ones that could
They Say I'm Guilty Of the nearly eighty female prisoners that had answered my request, I had narrowed my choices down to two of them. The first was a voluptuous, porcelain-skinned brunette that would make my brother drool in seconds. The second was a golden-haired, frail little piece of work, and normally I would have dismissed her during the first round of eliminations, but something kept her there. Maybe it was the way she stared at me with her venomous green eyes, but I couldn't be sure. In any case, I had my two choices set before me, each isolated in separate cells on opposite ends of the jail so that I might obThey Say I'm Guilty9 months ago in Short Stories More Like This
Joel is Having a Bad Day(And He Really Needs A Smoke)Joel is Having a Bad Day3 years ago in Drama More Like This
CHARACTERS:
JOEL, male, mid-twenties
BILLY, female, late teens to early twenties
Lights up on JOEL and BILLY, who are sitting outside on the back porch. The three or four chairs are mismatched and seem to have been salvaged from the reject pile of a Salvation Army store. A wooden coffee table hails from an indiscernible decade and holds a glass ashtray with dozens of cigarette butts sticking out of it. JOEL is smoking, trying to ignore BILLY.BILLY
You know, you really shouldn't; I heard somewhere that those things can make your teeth turn to mush and your fingers grow all bendy and twis
The CartI always got my best book recommendations from my old library cart. Well, the library cart wasn't really mine. I was a shelver at my town's library, before I started college, and I would use their carts to do my job.The Cart2 years ago in Flash Fiction & Vignettes More Like This
I first noticed something was up with the cart when I was shelving juvenile paperbacks. These were the lightest books we owned (and kept in the worst shape - kids are brats). But when I was rolling the cart, it was heavy. It groaned when I pushed it, and steering it was a mini-workout. It wasn't this hard to move a double-stack of adult non-fiction.
What was really odd, though, was as I removed more books, it barely got lighter
TeatimeIn January, Elsa got new neighbors. She greeted them with apple cinnamon tea.Teatime1 year ago in Flash Fiction & Vignettes More Like This
It gets so cold, here, they told her, shivering in overstuffed parkas. Snow had turned to mud in their front hall—an unavoidable side-effect of moving in winter. Elsa nodded along to their complaints and observations, silently brewing the tea in their kitchen. They were young; they had big plans. Allison and Steve, newlyweds, just starting out. They sat on the cold floor together, sipping with chapped lips. The house filled with cinnamon.
In April, Allison knocked on Elsa's door.
avalanche.The Ogre rises up among its brother and sister peaks, the Monk and the Virgin, a craggy limestone buttress looming above most of the north-eastern part of the Bernese Alps.avalanche.1 year ago in Stories & Vignettes More Like This
The Eiger: 13,042 feet of sheer rock, cracks and treacherous ice-fields.
Many attempts to scale this uncompromising weather-battered mountain have been made over the years, but successful attempts didn't begin until 1938, with the brave perseverance of a team of four German climbers. As a twenty-year-old eager climber myself, I knew all the facts. The windswept North Face (Nordwand) was the height of all climbing careers when I'd been growing up. 1952 - the great year of
Transdimensional Super TeamNotice: The full length version of this tale, which is far more palatable, is available right here.Transdimensional Super Team2 years ago in Short Stories More Like This
The magical computer pool glowed. We stood around it like gods.
"Place your palms upon the unimetriscope," said the man in the top hat. "Validate your identities to Her Majesty, the Queen of the Multiverse."
It all seemed a bit hoity-toity to me, but there's a lot to be said for peer pressure when some extra-dimensional fancypants tells you your "peers" are a lady with wings, a James Bond looking guy, a giant robot, and a little girl and her psychic-bondmate, a white pony.
The guy in the top hat called hims
The Silo Complex"You won't believe what I just saw in the field."The Silo Complex2 years ago in Short Stories More Like This
I sighed at Eloise in the doorway. "Another dead raccoon? How big was it this time? You know it's just maggots, right?"
"No, that wasn't it. I saw a man."
"Was it John?"
"No."
"Fox?"
"It was a man, but it wasn't really a man. Almost a man."
"Almost a man?" She had recently taken to wandering in the fields under gray skies, thinking that she'd find her answers among the abandoned farm equipment and rows of dried corn husks. She never did. Just raccoons. I never heard anything about men who
Billy's PterodactylsBilly was in what his mother called 'his dinosaur phase'. He'd been firmly ensconced in this phase for the past six months, ever since his Dad had taken him to see the Natural History Museum in Oxford. The first thing he'd seen on entering was the huge bones of the Tyrannosaurus Rex glaring down at him, and that was it; he'd been hooked ever since.Billy's Pterodactyls1 year ago in Short Stories More Like This
In the time since then his entire room had been re-decorated with a Jurassic theme. Dinosaurs were on the bedsheets, the curtains, the posters on the walls, and little plastic ones covered his floor to the point where it was dangerous to walk across it. Unless you were Billy, of course. No dinosau
Pilgrim of the Year to BeThe night was crisp, and Doctor Jazz was making his rounds again.Pilgrim of the Year to Be2 years ago in Short Stories More Like This
His first visit was to Mrs Madrigal at the far end of the valley. Her triplets were feverish, so he calmed and soothed them with the medicines in his little black bag until they fell into a rhythmic sleep. He left their worried mother with a chill pill and instructions to bring them to the surgery in the morning.
Back on the path, feet pumping, heart thumping, cane tapping, he scaled the ascent to Beggar's Farm, where Mr Williams was feeling crotchety. The problem was minor so his work was minimal and the visit brief.
He paused at the farm gates to enjoy the cooler breeze of
Senryu, and How It Differs from HaikuCompared to other styles of poetry under the category of Haiku and Eastern, there is comparatively little published about the more aggressive senryu.Senryu, and How It Differs from Haiku2 months ago in Reviews & Guides More Like This
Senryu, whose name means river willow, uses humor and satire to examine human society. Senryu takes on the form of haiku, but makes greater use of punctuation techniques (ellipses, exclamations, etc.) to convey its point. Senryu can use seasonal kigo, but do not rely on them. In senryu, the seasonal reference should be second in importance to the human portrayal. Contrary to popular belief, not all senryu is humorous. Many express misfortune, eroticism, political views (very important), religio
Sta.sh
