short story challenge

A story every week for two years. Easily the most consistent project I’ve ever embarked on, and it’s been incredibly valuable. I believe I’ve become a better writer, met a lot of new friends, and learned so much. I hope those of you out there who have watched these for the past couple of years have gotten something out of it too. Learned from my mistakes or enjoyed one of the stories.

But I think it’s time to put this project to bed for now. I can’t say I’ll never come back to it, but I think it’s time to move on.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Pavel Zayats

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

He didn’t know much about where he was, other than it was dry and hot and full of electrical poles tethered by sagging lines marching alongside an endless road. A highway, where he’d run out of gas and out of ideas, so he thought he’d just wait a while until something came for him or he for it.

He looked down that endless road with a head full of ghosts, because that’s all he’d left behind. People, places, tastes, smells. Not many sounds for some reason. The only sounds here were the stretch in his denim and the gravel hiss of his shoe soles when he shifted his feet on the blacktop when his legs got tired, or rummaged around his pocket for something. That something was usually a two-dollar Zippo, to ignite his dwindling collection of smokes, the last one of which was crimped between his fingers, smoldering.

His stance became tiresome once again, so he adjusted his feet once again, his backside leaning against the car he hadn’t bothered to learn the model of, though all he had to do was check around back where all cars proudly brandished their namesakes in bold silver. Sure, it could have come off in the chase through the town with the storybook gabled houses, where he’d fishtailed his way down Main Street as onlookers leaped to safety, losing their icecreams they’d just procured from the little shack with the vanilla swirl for a roof, and he all the while unable to see his pursuer in the rearview because the back window was webbed with a bullet hole for a bullseye that had been the passage for a bloodletting and brainletting projectile, which had ended a man who had tried to strangle him from the backseat and failed.

Sure. But he didn’t care much for cars, anyway. Not much for names, either. Hell, he only remembered his own due to the ghosts in his head screaming it all the time.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, got a whiff of the sweet tobacco, and couldn’t resist a drag. He held it in, wondering why any other kind of smoke would choke him up, set him to hacking his lungs out, but the kind stored in these little white paper sticks held him like a warm blanket. If he didn’t have to breathe, he would have held it in forever. Maybe that was a sign he was done with living. Or living was done with him.

No gas in the nameless car to keep the nameless man going compounded that portent.

He took another drag, found his cigarette had gone cold so fished for that Zippo again. He discovered something else. Metal, sure. Produced fire, sure. Fit snugly in the hand, sure. But not what he was looking for. Still, he took it out. Weighed it in his hand. Checked the cylinder. Held it up to his eye and peered through each and every chamber to see the sunset landscape of dirt and rock and shrub captured in circular glory. He didn’t look away. Trapped the horizon and everything above and below in an ecosystem of his choosing. One so small he could rest it on the tip of his finger if he could pluck it free. Too bad he couldn’t.

He channeled his boyhood dreams of one day pitching ball in the Majors and tossed the revolver into the weeds and the thoughts of turning it on himself along with it. He wasn’t a cliche. He wasn’t going to sit here and ponder bringing about his own demise that would conclude with a slideshow of melancholy faces weeping over the boy that could have been something.

His dad always said he was something. His mom, too. Both with a shake of their heads, eyes downcast because they coudln’t believe what they’d brought into this world.

“Something,” he said. The word tasted like blood from the inside of a cheek scored by wisdom teeth. Looked like the blood caught in the web of the nameless car’s back window, as it opened in front of his eyes like a grasping hand, then a closing hand, then nothing at all but the view of slumbering hills.

He flicked the Zippo open, sparked the tinder, placed what was left of his last smoke through the flame, and inhaled. Down the endless road something glimmered on the last ray of sun before it ducked behind the hills.

He didn’t know much about where he was, what he’d driven, or where he’d go, but he did know what a windshield looked like angled to the sky just right to catch its beauty, and what a beauty it was.

His tongue too dry to douse the cigarette, he snuffed it with a pinch and put it in his back pocket, maybe half an inch left to the filter. Teeth looking clean in the side mirror was no surprise on account of him not having had a single bite in days. His hair, though, groomed proper despite many nights sleeping against a cracked leather headrest twisted more ways than a pretzel was a surprise.

His smile looked genuine enough. The eyes were what made it so, corners trampled by crows. Shirt dusted but not stained. Pants weathered smooth.

He looked to where he’d thrown the revolver and his thoughts. Empty or not, it could do some convincing if his smile didn’t. His thoughts had even less utility, so he decided he could do without both and let them lie. A shed rattler skin tumbled by like it was autumn.

He turned his head to spit, but came up empty, just like the cylinder.

“Something,” he said, before heading down the endless road toward what was coming for him, ghosts skulking through his gray matter folds in the throes of conversation. They said his name. They said other things, too. But he didn’t listen, because listening had never got him nowhere, and he had somewhere to be. Something to do.

Blade Runner to me is a flawed but special movie to me. To this artist as well, since he was inspired by it, which, of course, inspired this story. The special thing about Blade Runner, is it channels the old noir tales and injects it into a dystopian setting, maintaining all the things we love but also asking bigger questions. I hope this brief entry into that genre contributes a little.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Piotr Krynski

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Soon the room full of men would know Leon was a liar.

A voice beside him: “Down two levels.”

Another: “Won’t work. Too far gone.”

Yet another: “Bullshit, Adrian said–“

“Shut up, Bent.”

Soon the room full of men would want answers.

Meat locker curtains behind Leon brought the stink of plastic.

Apt.

The vital readouts composed of everchanging numerical values opposite the surgical table and Clara’s dead body mimicked the dawn of a dying sun as Leon’s tinted spectacles slid to the end of his nose. He had to open his mouth to breathe. He tasted plastic.

“What did I tell you?”

“It’s time.”

“Can’t be.”

A stretch of silence, then the digital clatter of numbers changing.

“Let me try.”

“Rem, just don’t, okay. Just don’t.”

“Another D-99, you think? Might jumpstart the–“

“No, no, no. She’s not gone. She’s not–“

Dead. Clara wasn’t. She stood across the dark ballroom in a gown the color of a neon evening behind a sheet of rain dyed the color of synthetic jazz. It’s what played now. What played him to her. Her to him.

Their bodies met on the vacant dance floor. Connected. Electric. He took her hand. She let him, then he let her lead. Sluicing through the dingy volumetric pillar radiating from the ceiling, capturing their breath, the smoke drifting in from outside, the smell of the rain that was the color of her dress.

She smelled real. Was real.

“When are you going to trim that silly thing?” she asked.

He was too close, too soon, so he erected his posture.

She looked into his eyes, and he into hers. They were striking. He looked for a flaw there, because she had to have flaws. Everyone did. He did.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Our time is running out here. We take a cab back to my place, and I clean that up for you?” She sustained her last word drawing her finger down his mustache, and he swore he saw sparks.

He smiled. The ends of his mustache were observers in the corners of his eyes.

The music stopped. The light above dimmed while others in the darkness around the room swelled to illuminate the downcast expressions of men at tables nursing amber drinks. All eyes on them. On her.

Blood filled Leon’s face. “We should go.”

She noticed the eyes, and gave them what they wanted, uncaring of the danger. She trilled a chord with parted lips and a tongue pressed behind her front teeth. They all leaned forward, as if one.

Leon dragged her to the exit, which was blocked by a man the size of a door, who spoke on a stream of cigar smoke. “ID, please.”

“You let me in,” Leon said. “We were supposed to be alone.”

The darkness moved where the man’s eyes should have been. “Just started my shift.”

Leon rolled up his sleeve. “Fine. Here.”

The man held a strobing purple light above the number on Leon’s forearm.

“The lady?”

Leon waited for the scan to register. So he could blink. So he could think. So his blood would continue pumping oxygen through his system. So he wouldn’t–

“Mr. Young,” the man said. “Forgive me, sir. I had no idea. Clearance five. Understood. Please, sir, I hope you–“

Leon pushed past him, Clara in tow. “You can’t do that,” he said to her.

“Do what?”

“What you did. Back there.”

“No harm.”

“You don’t understand.”

She wrapped herself around him. “I do.”

He held her at arm’s length. “No, you don’t.”

What her raincloak didn’t hide, his umbrella did, and what that didn’t, the night would.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “What it’s like.”

“If we’re caught, then what? Would that be better? Than what we have?”

“There is no we in this. There is me hidden away in an apartment, only able to come out at night like some freak. Do you think I’m a freak?”

A cab passed by in a spray of water. Leon turned his back to shield her. The water clung to his coat. “No.”

“Then why?” she asked. “They don’t know. They can’t know. You did everything perfectly.”

“Did I?”

She smiled and pushed back a clump of hair the rain had plastered to his forehead. “You do everything perfectly.”

The ends of his mustaches sagged down the sides of his face.

“Except that.”

He looked into her eyes again for the flaw he knew was there, because she was real. Then movement drew his gaze over her shoulder.

The crowd of men from the bar that shouldn’t have been there.

A voice behind her: “Hey!”

Another: “Didn’t you recognize us?”

Yet another: “Wanted it to be a surprise.”

The traffic, the rain, the buzz of neon turned their voices to static. He didn’t recognize any of them.

They had women on their arms as well, those perfect eyes reflecting the night like a pack of wolves. They showed their teeth.

Clara went to turn, but Leon held her face, held her eyes with his gaze. There it was.

“Let me buy you a drink. You and the lady. After all, it’s your–” The man tripped and fell into Clara, who pushed Leon to the ground, and she rolled over him onto the street, right into the high beams of an oncoming cab, her hand still in his.

Clara lay on a surgical table, far from the drenched street. Tubes coming out of her chest. Tubes Leon had feigned to attach to not alert the room full of men, who were his friends, who would turn him in, if they knew.

Her vitals would soon be meaningless and give him away. Her smell. But for now the air was heavy with the scent of plastic and condolences, as the room full of men treated this like any other android repair job. They argued about parts and procedures that would not save the last woman on Earth while Leon held her cold hand.

For the 100th episode, I thought it would be fun to document the entire process live, plus write along with anyone else who wanted to join in. Two writers did, in fact, so I included their stories as well. It was fun seeing the different interpretations of the same artwork. Thanks again to MagicThistle and Mats Evensson for contributing!

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Ken Currie

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Stories

MagicThistle

It’s cold on the terrace this evening. I assumed it would be this time of year, but it’s bitting a little harder than my mind conceived. Speaking of conception. Jesus, it’s all I can think of. I tug on the snug silk of my party dress and lean against the railing. Looking out at the black water It somehow seems more inviting than the soiree behind me. It seems to be getting fairly ruckus in there. The sounds of a good time echo through the coastal mist and crash into the breaking waves. My mind drifts and I begin to imagine dozens of party-goers toppling into the sea. It provides a momentary reprieve from the weight of the thousands of thoughts I’ve carried since I found out. 

Despite the cold, the fresh air feels good. Almost numbing. But not quite. A slight shriek escapes me at the feeling of a hand on my puffed sleeve. I shoot my head around to see him. An involuntary smile paints my face and a warm comfort washes over me at the sight of his kind eyes. Then the dread creeps in and its pesky little claws pull the corners of my mouth back down.

“James.” I hear myself say, as though his name is a statement. Wishing it was all I had to say. 

“Alice,” he says playfully in the same tone and with a slight smirk.

“You came”. 

“You did ask me to, did you not?” Still playful. Like a boy. 

“I did.” I wished I hadn’t. 

I eke out a pained smile. 

“You look nice,” he says, plucking a tendril from my shoulder and gently pulling it taught. He catches my eyes and serves me his signature. A painfully beautiful smile that he knew is a weapon. He lets the ringlet go and It springs back into place.

I didn’t say anything. Just looked at him. 

“So…” 

Grasping at straws, I pick up one of the several lanterns lighting the terrace and bound down the steps. 

“Let’s go to the sea!” 

“You’re an odd one, but ok,” he says, grabbing a lantern of his own and following me to the sand. 

I know it’s even colder now, but I no longer feel it. The adrenaline has kicked in. I’m manic. But trying to play it off. I could just run into the ocean and never return. I could. 

I don’t. Instead, I leap onto the wet sand and do a spin on the shore. The lantern lighting the folds of my white dress a deep orange. The sea breeze catches the fabric, animating it like a ghost. 

James watches from dry sand, sitting and handling some seaweed. He hates getting his feet wet. He shakes his head and raises his eyebrows at me.  

I do a few more twirls as the water begins to tickle my toes. I turn back to look at James and see him now staring deeply into his hands.

I walk toward him, dry sand sticking to me. I sit next to him. He has a little black pouch in his hand, barnacled and slick with seawater. His face is now stern. The moment of frivolity and coltish evasion has passed. 

“You know they call these mermaid purses,” James says.

“I’ve also heard them called the devil’s pocketbook” I retort.

I think my tone was too snarky.

“So I take it, you’ve made your decision.” 

I inhale slow and long, holding the air in my lungs until it burns. 

“I have” words floating on an exhale. “I just…I can’t…I don’t know how else to put it, it’s a feeling…I just can’t.” These words fall out in a heap and just sit there.  

No one says anything for a while. The waves crash, the cool fog grows thicker and colder, and don’t feel any of it.  “Ok,” He says. Another pause. “Ok,” Once more to convince himself. He looks away from me and nods silently to the dark beach. Nothing but a small pale moon in the distance. “Well, I guess it’s just a stranger now”.

He places a hand on my lap. Catches my eyes again and forces a smile. No longer painfully beautiful, just painful. “I support you”. 

He stands. I stand to meet him. The tide has risen, but James doesn’t seem to care. The little black pouch falls from his hand into the water, and with the current, slips back to where it came. 

“I need to take a walk,” he says. And he does. And I watch him go, one hand on my belly and one holding the lantern. It’s cold again. 

Mats Evensson

Grace would die tonight, August 14, 1825. Everyone knew it. It was all the maids and footmen
had whispered about for weeks when they thought she wasn’t near. Her poor mother had
prepared by locking herself in her room and refusing to come out, while her father had drunk
himself into a stupor. She imagined he would wake tomorrow with a searing pain behind his
eyes. Grace would not wake at all.

She scooped up the two shilling coins the butler had polished and left on the dresser for her.
Charon’s fee for taking her across the Styx. They were cold to the touch.

The grandfather clock in the grand hall struck once, and the sound reverberated down
empty hallways, up the stairs, and into Grace’s room. She slipped the coins into a pocket and
smoothed down her gown. Then she hurried to light the lantern and strode through empty
hallways, past mirrors covered with black linen. Even at fifteen she knew that a proper lady
never kept a guest waiting.

Her guide stood by the door, a deeper shadow in the dark. Had she not expected him, she
would never have seen him.

“I am ready,” she said, proud that her voice did not crack.

Come.

He turned and held the door open for her. As she passed and walked down the stone steps
to the gravel path, she caught the faint scent of damp mulch. And something else, something
sweet. Rot.

Sheets of mist passed in front of the pale moon. Her skin prickled even though she knew it
would be cold this time of year. Perhaps she should have brought a shawl. Too late now.
Her guide lit a lantern of his own and walked ahead, leading her away from the house. Grace
knew exactly where they were going, had paced the route too many times to count, ever since
she was old enough to walk of her own accord. Her whole life had been in preparation for this
night.

When the sound of waves crashing against the shore reached her, she suddenly felt a shiver
run from the small of her back to her neck. The world shifted under her, and she stumbled,
sidestepped, righted herself. Her father had warned her that this might happen. “You mustn’t
waiver, Dove.” She repeated the words in her head. Mustn’t waiver. This is your fate, you’ve
have always known this day would come, even longed for it to come sooner.

The path sloped down now. Soon the house would disappear behind the cliffs. She thought
of casting a glance over her shoulder to see if they were watching from the windows but
thought better of it, for she would surely waiver if she caught sight of them.

Faster.

She quickened her pace, letting her bare feet slide through the cold, wet sand until the path
levelled out. They had reached the beach. It would all be over soon.

Come.

Her guide moved along the shoreline, so she followed, her gown dragging in the mud. On
any other day it would have been a shame to ruin such a pretty dress. The cresting waves
gleamed in the moonlight before breaking against her feet.

Grace reached up and undid the knot that had kept her hair up. She wanted to feel the wind
in her hair one last time. How many times had she stood on this beach, looking out over the
endless ocean, thinking about this very moment? A thousand? Five thousand? None of those
times had it felt real. She swallowed hard, tasted the salt in the air.

Stop.

Grace obeyed immediately, heart pounding in her chest so hard she thought it might
explode. Mustn’t waiver. She sucked in a breath of frigid air, exhaled, and turned to the black
horizon.

Her guide drew near.

Ready thyself.

“I am ready.” This time her voice did crack, and she felt her cheeks turn red.

Behold.

She stared out over the water, eyes burning with tears she dared not wipe away as the waves
suddenly disappeared. For a breathless moment the ocean was as blank and clear as a frozen
pond.

Then, some ways out, how far she couldn’t tell, the surface rose—and rose and rose—until it
broke, sending waves crashing out in every direction. Through the tears, Grace caught
glimpses of water cascading down the sides of a herculean mass rising impossibly high and
blotting out the moon.

Her resolve drained. “I am not ready,” she whispered, feeling the dread fill her gorge. “I
want to go back.” She turned to her guide. “Take me back, I want to go home. Please.”

He did not move.

“Please?”

No reaction.

She drew herself up and glared at him, then said, in a tone she had heard her mother use so
many times before, “I am Lady Grace Feathersby, eldest daughter of the duke of Otterlea. I
demand you return me to him immediately.”

He slowly turned his head to look at her, then back to the sea, his face as expressionless as a
rock.

“I don’t want this, I never wanted this. Please, take me back, find someone else,” she
rambled, feeling her knees buckle.

His arm shot out and caught her before she hit the sand. Behold.

Too afraid not to, she turned again to the sea. The hideous mass, writhing as if still finding
its shape, came towards them, glittering insectoid wings dragging along after it.

The first waves reached the shore and rolled over her feet, bringing with them a foul, rotten
stench. “Please, I beg you, release me. Give me another year and I will come willingly next
time you call, I swear it!”

He shook his head.

No bargain.

Panic coursing through her, she dug her feet into the squelching sand, tried to wriggle and
punch her way out of his grip—but she might as well have tried to move a mountain. It is no
use. This is my fate.

He is here.

Jason Fuhrman

Eliza woke with a chill on her birthday’s eve. Her vision foggy, she reached for her blanket. It had somehow managed to gather beneath her, as if she had fallen asleep that way. Maybe she had. It had been a long day with all the preparations, but her mind, as clouded as well, didn’t divulge answers.

Her leaden arms and legs were unwilling to free the blanket, so she rolled onto her side to find her human fireplace, the man who always kept her warm: her George.

But he was gone, nothing but a depression in the mattress and rumpled blanket indicating anyone had been there at all. She touched the spot. Cold.

Why hadn’t he tucked her in? She slapped the mattress where he should have been. Selfish man.

She sat up, her frustration invigorating her limbs. Curtains billowed across the room, wreathed in silver. No wonder she was cold. Completely exposed and the window left open. Selfish man, indeed.

The scent of seaweed permeated the air, and strangely, the scent of lantern oil. No blanket could stave off this frigid air, her anger unable to warm her, she dipped her toes into the bedside darkness, awaiting plush slippers. None came. Just the wooden floor.

She stormed to the window, hoping when she slammed it closed George would hear it wherever he was, and know that he had ruined her birthday.

The source of the silver light caught her eye, but more than that, something else bobbed below it. Not silver but gold.

She thought it was a trick of the light, the moon reflecting on the water, somehow transformed, perhaps by the mist or oil riding the water’s surface. Either was unlikely, considering their remote location. No docks for miles. And why would someone venture to an island with nothing but a couple and their humble acreage.

Then the light moved across the water.

“George?” she called.

A wave crashed in answer.

It must be him. What was he doing out at such an hour? He’d catch cold, or worse.

She called his name again and was answered by waves again. Curse that sea, so cold and boundless. She much preferred the countryside far from the shore, where the evenings didn’t bring such a ruckus, such a chill. Such lonliness.

She rubbed her arms and found a grittiness there. Smudges of sand she saw in the moonlight. She huffed through her nose. Such a careless man, bringing the day’s work to the bed.

Sleep no longer and option, she went to the door to find this foolish man. The coathanger was absent of her coat, the boards beside the door absent of her boots. What kind of joke was this?

For a moment she considered going out into the dark without a light to catch George unaware and scare the life from him. But the thought of no light, no beacon, no grounded sense of home with her out there alone, in the dark and cold, well . . . that was a more frightening prospect than any fright she could bring upon her neglectful husband.

Lantern at her side, she steaded her breath before opening the door, focusing on the dim warmth that pushed through the glass.

She stepped outside. The air was no colder than inside the cottage, and no wonder. That gave her some comfort, feeling the acclimation. She held her head high and strode down the path to the shore, toward the light that must be George.

The ocean air keeping her eyes moist, she didn’t need to blink. The ground unyielding to her weight, she didn’t stumble. Immune to the cold, she glided.

She felt a smile as she thought of George seeing her out here, in her nightclothes, shoeless, with nothing but a lantern and a stern gaze.

The man who must be George slowed, knelt in the sand, the waves colliding with each other and his stooped form before retreating back to the sea. She wouldn’t even have to sneak up on him, the frequent waves cacaphonous.

A handful of paces away, George stood, hefted something into his arms she hadn’t noticed from afar, and continued. He rounded a stand of rocks, where they’d explored tidepools countless times, beyond which lay a secluded beach, where they’d made love countless times.

Eliza forgot her anger, the cold, the bedful of sand, the open window.

A surprise this must be. Stowing hidden gifts, for their cottage had nowhere to hide. Whe she caught him, he would yelp with fright, and they would roll in the sand, and he would protest and explain, and she would hush him with a kiss. Then more.

She snuffed the lantern, the moonlight enough. There he was, where they had lay many times, though farther near the cliffs, his shadow thrown on the walls.

Eliza approached. She climbed the rocks. So many rocks, slick and sharp. Her excitement chased away any fear of the ascent. A clever hiding place, indeed.

She confirmed it was George now, the bearded silhouette as he turned to catch his breath. The square of his shoulders. The slight nose. The silly newsboy hat.

So close now, any misstep would alert him of her presence.

He held something to the light. A blanket? Then tossed it down. Shoes? Then tossed them down.

A gust drove Eliza to her stomach and overturned George’s lantern. She stifled a cry. Tasted sand. She was done with games. All she wanted was George to carry her back to bed, to make her warm.

George dropped his burden, then moved rocks piled at his side. Finished, he stood and turned to Eliza.

“Happy birthday, Eliza,” he said, approaching her, his warmth approaching her.

She reached up to him, anticipating his arms, but instead receiving the unbearable weight of his crushing boots.

She couldn’t breathe. She lay on her back, her view occluded but for a sliver of moon.

“George,” she said beneath the weight of sea-carved stones.

A wave crashed in answer.

Another request, which I’m always happy to receive. It allows me to explore something I wouldn’t have chosen on my own. Although, I have to say, I would have chosen this art if I’d known. Totally my style. So, I asked myself, what if Haruki Murakami’s After Dark bred with the mind of David Lynch. I imagine the conversation might look something like this.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Ken Currie

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Her name is Henrietta, and she wears black, because it is the true color of the night sky. She is always at the gallery. She is always in the same spot. That spot is down a hallway lit by few lights in a room lit by even fewer, so only the most adventurous art lovers dare go.

But there is nothing to fear. It is an art gallery, with paintings, sculptures, and installations like all the others. The object Henrietta is so infatuated with, the object she stares at incessantly is a framed piece of flesh. The frame is perhaps seven or eight feet tall without a canvas. Within the frame is a large piece of flesh, a carcass. It is stripped of skin and offal, a clean job. No blood, yet it glistens as if fresh. It hangs from the top of the frame past the bottom, a sinuous specimen carved by expert hands. From what animal it came from, she doesn’t know, but she doesn’t ask. Others ask.

“Disgusting, huh?” A man says whose presence Henrietta doesn’t entertain. He holds a plastic cup, brimming with punch from the reception area. He takes a sip. Pulp sticks to his lips.

Not like you, he thinks. He tests those words in his mind, because Henrietta is a beautiful woman, her fair locks bound into a high ponytail that clings to the back of her head like a trail of candle wax. Her dress exposes her slender neck and arms to the shoulder. She holds her folded hands below her breasts. Her face is only visible in profile, because she stands so close to the framed carcass.

The man tries a different approach, and says, “You think it’s real? If it was real, don’t you think flies would be in here by now?” He sniffs the air. “I don’t smell a thing. Doesn’t look like a cow or a horse.” He sniggers. “For some reason, it reminds me of a big chicken. It’s head, anyway.” He motions to what might be the carcass’s “head” with his cup of punch. A little sloshes out onto the carpet. He kneels to pat it dry with a small paper napkin, but he’s really doing it to get a better look at Henrietta.

Her entire lower body, including her feet, are covered by her black dress, and it fits loosely there, so he gets an even worse indication of her figure. Unsatisfied, he stands.

“Cetus,” Henrietta says.

“Excuse me?” the man asks.

“Cetus.”

He looks around. There is no one there. There is no other art on the walls. “I would, but there aren’t any tables around. I suppose I could go back to the reception area and grab some food. They have these little sandwiches with bread that looks more like cake, kind of like when you were a kid and all the crust is cut off and so white. So artificial. They also have these cookies with–”

“He is no longer with the seas,” Henrietta says, “but still swims in blackness.”

The man steps closer to her. Closer still. He is testing what she will give. “I love poetry. Who is that by?”

She smiles and says, “Why don’t you get us some of those sandwiches? What kind of meat?”

The man closes his mouth, not realizing it hangs open. He drinks the rest of his punch to avoid her gaze, even though she is still in profile, still looking at the hanging carcass. More pulp dashes his upper lip. “Uh, I’m not sure. Ham maybe? Bruschetta?”

“Sounds nice,” Henrietta says. She is no longer smiling. In fact, she has stepped even closer to the hanging carcass.

“Uh-huh,” the man says and scampers out of the room and down the hall.

Henrietta hears jazz music play over the speakers in the ceiling. It fades to an industrial sound, as if a swarm of crickets are caught in a machine, trying to escape but unable, slowly ground into mush until they are all dead. Then the jazz music plays again. Dogs bark, and she thinks she must be near the exit that leads to the alley behind the building, and those dogs are fighting over scraps, their ribs pushing against their skin exposed by mange. Silence returns.

The man returns. He struggles with two cups of punch, two sandwiches, and two cookies balanced on paper napkins because they didn’t have plates.

“I was wrong,” he says. “Roast beef. I hope that’s okay.”

“That’s fine,” Henrietta says. She lowers her hands to her belly, which is full beneath her gown, though concealed from the man.

“I guess we can sit on the floor,” he says.

Henrietta doesn’t respond.

“Or stand,” he says.

He hands her a sandwich, but she doesn’t take it. He tests his proximity again. “What’s your name?”

“Mary,” Henrietta says.

“Simple,” he says. “I like it.”

“A mother’s name,” Henrietta says.

He chuckles. “Sure.”

“The mother of a god.”

“Jesus, you mean.”

“No.”

He chuckles again. “All right.”

“It is,” she says.

“I’m glad,” he says.

“I am, too,” she says.

“Aren’t you going to ask my name?”

“No.”

He shifts his feet. “Okay, okay. Games. I get it.”

She still gazes at the carcass. “Would you like to be a father?”

“Uh . . . someday? I think?”

“You think?”

She looks at him then, and he is stunned, overwhelmed by what he sees. It’s beyond how imagined her, like gazing into the birth of the universe itself, the cosmos exploding in her eyes, nebulae webbing the space between the stars, breeding waves for a great serpent, and his body tingles, seizes, releases. He drops the sandwiches, the punch, and the cookies.

He wants to answer, but he can’t speak, so he nods.

“Good,” she says. “Are you ready?”

He nods.

She doesn’t take his hand. She doesn’t move aside. He knows exactly where to go, and that way is out.

Henrietta gazes at the carcass. She is alone. The man does not return.

As beautiful as this artwork is, I discovered quickly that I didn’t want to tell a literal story about two kids finding this strange tree on the beach. The composition took me someplace else, and allowed me to tell a deeper story about two kids with a problem scarier than a dragon.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Sergey Grechanyuk

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Max whispered words to Emily she couldn’t hear. Her closed eyes were squeezed tight, lids trembling like his hands pressed over her ears.

“It’s far away,” Max said. “I’m here.”

Here was a small bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment. A bed in the center. Glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Some on the floor. Some stuck to the wood-paneled wall behind Emily. She looked so small, wedged in the corner of the room farthest from the door, which bowed with every punch.

Max didn’t know if they were punches for sure, but he couldn’t imagine anything else making a sound like that, making the door shake like that. His sister as calm as she’d been since all this started, Max glanced over his shoulder to face what they couldn’t escape.

All was still. Silent. Max’s heart filled his throat. He couldn’t breathe. How long could he hold his breath? He watched the door through the stillness that didn’t seem real, and imagined himself deep underwater, like out at Meade River, where he and his little sister used to dive for river rocks, and they’d let those rocks soak up the sun on the bank, and then when they were good and hot they’d lay on them and pretend they were smoldering coals like Max had seen a man walk over barefoot. He’d tell Emily he would one day be a famous fire sleeper, because fire walking was too easy, and she’d say:

“Max.”

Max inhaled. His heart fluttered as their room and his sister came back into focus. “Y-yeah?” He wished he could start over, take that stutter back.

Emily’s eyes were still closed tight. “Your hands hurt.”

Max threw his hands down, foreign and heavy as bricks. He put them behind his back before they became fists. “I’m sorry.”

Emily opened her eyes. Tears budded in their corners. They looked like pearls. “Is it gone?”

Max tested his voice at the back of his throat, considering another look over his shoulder to check the door, so he wouldn’t be a liar. Either way. But his throat betrayed him, and he said, “I don’t know.”

Emily frowned, and her tears no longer looked like pearls. “Can we go out the window?”

“We’re on the second floor.”

“Hide under the bed?”

“Emily? You know that’s for kids.”

Her eyes were like deep river rocks. “But we are kids.”

That pained Max’s heart before burrowing down into his stomach. He almost said he would be thirteen in twenty-six days, and that a teenager wasn’t a kid. But Emily knew his birthday, and she knew that when you were thirteen you were still a kid. Just like he did.

Emily darted under the bed.

“Hey!” Max whisper-yelled.

Her shoes stayed out as she dug around, and Max thought of her little brass baby shoes she’d put in the fire, because she didn’t believe there were real shoes underneath. She’d really got it then. Max hated himself more now than then for not doing anything. That guilt was a hole in his chest he could never fill. If only they both could crawl through it right now.

Emily scooted out with a stick in her hands. She was at the riverbank again, ponytail and cutoffs dripping, kneeling in the mud. “Look at this.”

“It’s just an old piece of wood,” he said.

“Driftwood.”

“That’s only at the ocean.”

“Nuh-uh. Rivers, too.”

“Someone brought it from the ocean and tossed it in.”

Emily stabbed the mud and stood. “Look at it.”

Max shrugged.

Emily lifted it high by one end. “A sword.”

“It’s just a dumb stick.”

“Can I bring it home?”

“Naw. Bugs and who knows what else.”

“I looked.”

“No you didn’t.”

“I did.”

She’d been right. No bugs, and Max had checked, even tried to tease any out with food.

She looked at him now how she’d looked at him that day.

“That dumb old stick,” Max said.

“Glad I brought it back, huh?”

Thunder pounded on the door. Lighting flashed in the cracks as it bulged from the force. Emily leaped into the corner again, dropping the stick, which rolled across the floor to Max’s balled hands that were still heavy as bricks.

He didn’t look away as the storm raged on. He couldn’t believe those were words.

“Take it,” Emily said in a moment of quiet.

“You take it.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not a big brother.”

Max felt that hole in his chest grow so big he thought it might swallow all of Earth. Take him and Emily with it.

Then another hole formed. In the door, with sharp teeth, and through it fire shone.

Max’s hands had somehow picked up the stick, and his feet had somehow stood him up.

“See?” Emily said, by his side, her tears cut like diamonds.

He didn’t see anything much through his own tears that muddied his vision. “Driftwood is only at the ocean,” he said.

All manner of sounds roared through that hole in the door.

“Okay,” Emily said.

“Okay,” Max said.

Max tensed his muscles so they’d stop shaking, the stick stabbed to the floor at his side.

“You’re holding it wrong,” Emily said. She mimed the pose she’d had that day at the river. “Sword, remember?”

This was stupid. He was stupid. She was–

“To fight the monster in the cave.”

Yeah, she was stupid, too. “It’s not a cave,” he said. “It’s an old giant tree on the ocean shore with a dragon inside. This sword is the only thing that can kill it, because it was part of that tree at one time, washed up on the shore, and no one thought it was powerful. They thought it was just a dumb stick.” He looked at her. “Except a brave little girl.”

The hole in the door widened. Splinters fell. Fire flared. The dragon roared.

Max held the driftwood that was a sword high, like the brave little girl had showed him, and he faced the dragon.

A tale about two guys who take their work very seriously. Too seriously? You be the judge.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by SiChen Wang

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Jones leaned against the subway doors, mopping the sweat from his upper lip with the last dry corner of a paper napkin.

“Hey!” Marlo said, slamming his palm on the polished steel wall. “Don’t you ruin this.”

The napkin dropped from Jones’s hand with the weight of all that sweat.

THWUP was the sound it made as it hit the floor, and Jones could do nothing but hold his hands up as if fending off an attack as Marlo’s mustached upper lip went damp.

No attack came, just a heavy silence that only an empty subway car could make at 11:39 PM on the Saturday night before Inspection.

Marlo’s squeezed fist sounded like an eggshell cracking, and the excema wounds around his knuckles wept. “Now look at what you did. Gonna have to wear gloves to salvage this mess you’ve made, and you know they slow me down.”

The door at Jones’s back was no longer refreshing.

“And get off the fucking door,” Marlo said. “You even put up the goddamn sign.”

Jones couldn’t move. Marlo’s hulking frame blocked the space between the two benches. He used it to his advantage and staked a gloved finger to the center of Jones’s chest, right on the zipper of his coveralls and pressed hard enough for it to catch on Jones’s chest hair on the other side of his cotton shirt, a 6-ounce heavyweight he’d purchased just for this job.

“Feel that?” Marlo asked. “That’s a fraction of what it’ll be like if Inspection goes bad. You don’t know what they do to guys like us. We’re expendable. The dregs.” Marlo’s face scrunched at that last word, and his staked finger retracted. “But we’re better than that. I know we’re better. I chose you just for this job because I know you’re better.”

“S-sorry,” Jones said.

Marlo nodded and put a hand on Jones’s shoulder. “I know you are. I am, too. But we have–” he checked his watch”–exactly fifteen minutes now to get this job done. Get things to Berfection.”

“Berfection?”

“Better than perfection,” Marlo said with glassy eyes, ready to be broken by the slightest touch. “Been working on that one for a while. I’m what you call a creative type. Better than this work, but I’m good at it, and–” he tapped his temple “–I can do the creative work in here, while I do the physical work out here.” His smile trembled, and one of his longer mustache hairs quivered like a tuning fork. “Hear that?”

Jones did, like a hornet in his ear.

“Tunnel C,” Marlo said looking over his shoulder down the subway car. “The most difficult stretch before Inspection.”

Jones looked too.

LEDs along the ceiling bowed to the turbulence, and the triangular straps hanging just below them swung like Newton’s cradle. The floor shook and kept shaking. The whole car. Jones grabbed a pole to steady himself.

“This is where you prove to me I was right,” Marlo said. “That you have what it takes. That all the backbreaking work down at the loading dock was the cakewalk that did nothing but prepare you for this moment. I chose you, Jones. I chose you.”

“No way can we finish off this car while it shakes like this,” Jones said. “I can barely stand up.”

A drop of sweat dangled off Marlo’s long mustache hair. “You’ll do it. You won’t let me down.”

Teeth chattering, spine rattling, all Jones could do was nod.

Marlo nodded back, his deep smile squeezing his face into a stack of pancakes, and went to work.

Jones found his footing with a wide stance, fingertips the only thing touching the subway pole, and he watched Marlo’s virtuosic performance. The man used the chaos of the car’s motion to his advantage, going against it when he needed to tighten a bench screw or straighten a poster or affix a warning sticker, then going with it when he needed to close the seam from a bad bolt job on a bench or reseat a subway pole. Marlo’s grace was infectious, a viral spray that infused everything. Jones couldn’t escape it.

He mirrored Marlo the best he could, garnering the highest form of approval from the man, which was autonomy.

Jones tripped up a few times as the car hit new rhythms, until he envisioned them like tracks on an album, anticipating the change before the final fade out or drum hit. He saw the breadcrumbs Marlo left for him, little things off just enough to alert the discerning eyes of Inspection, at least what he’d been told.

Jones had never been an artistic man, but he imagined these to be his final brushstrokes, the coda to his symphony.

Then the subway car fell into a stasis, almost as if it had no weight at all, and the two men stared at each other from opposite sides of the car. Marlo where Jones had begun, where he went to clean what must have been the smudge from Jones’s head when he’d rested against the door, where the large man’s foot found the discarded napkin.

Marlo left the ground in a backward somersault to meet the ground again with the sound of a coffin lid closing.

Jones rushed to him.

Marlo pointed. “The bench. False wall. We can . . .”

Marlo was out. Jones was alone. He did what Marlo asked after getting the napkin. They both lay as lovers behind the grated wall beneath the bench when the subway eased to a stop and a door opened.

In walked a man wearing a suit with a newspaper under his arm. He paid no attention to the state of things. The glass, the metal, the plastic. He merely sat on a bench and shook his newspaper open. He scanned the words there. He licked a finger. He turned a page.

He left.

Jones let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. So did Marlo, through broken teeth and blood, and he said, “Berfection.”