short story challenge

A difficult subject to write about, but the striking artwork pulled me in. Despite the subject matter, I don’t feel like I went too far, got too dark, for better or worse.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Hetian Duan

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XB00mD

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

Rain hit the windshield like bullets. Ben spun the stereo’s volume knob to drown it out. When that didn’t work, he punched the gas pedal. The engine revved, and for a mile or two, it worked. Fuzzy guitars and an overzealous ’94 Ford Taurus engine were bliss. White noise as white as his thoughts.

He tore open a cigarette pack with his teeth, ran it under his nose before fishing one out with dry lips. The paper and filter tasted like a factory floor, and he knew what that tasted like, so he turned it around and chewed the other end. Most of the tobacco was on his tongue before he realized what the fuck he was doing, and he spit it out, holding the wheel with a knee while he scraped the crumbs off.

He pulled to the side of the road and rolled down his window, opened his mouth to the rain. It didn’t wash away the taste, and the freezing air brought a shiver. He patted the passenger seat for his jacket, the backseat, tried the dome light to get a better view, but it was dead. The vanity light, however, worked like brand new. The mirror was covered by a photo. He slammed it closed and kneaded his eye sockets, feeling the orbs that were so squishy and vulnerable, he wondered how he had managed to keep both of them his entire life.

He pushed harder. Embers strobed. Fingers probed a little further, unearthing a well of tears. He put the car into drive and blinked his way back onto the highway.

Snow hit the windshield like ash. He wished he knew where the fire was, because he was still cold, but rolled up his sleeves to the elbow out of habit, because he hated anything touching his wrists. Goosebumps rose on them despite their hairlessness.

He noticed the trees for the first time on the drive, the moon breaking through the sky enough to reveal a road that was straighter than he would have liked. The trees looked at him when he looked away, brandishing their trunks of unbreakable steel.

The headlights caught the eyes of a fox, and he slammed on the breaks, waterplaned nearly a full three-sixty, facing him back the way he had come. No cars. Still. Why no fucking cars? Because it wasn’t their job, that’s why.

He stepped out into the cold to look for the fox. Of course it was gone. The road was black. The white wouldn’t win. It was a pile of slush, a failure, given one goddamn job, just one, and it couldn’t do that right, even with the entire sky in its service.

Ben turned the car off and stood on the road with his arms stretched wide. He didn’t have eyes like a fox, and even if he did, he could have closed them when the time was right.

The damp air made his sleeve sag to his wrist. He rolled it up again, and when he put his hands in his pockets, the other one came down. He kicked a speedbump because it was the only thing around. It tumbled across the road, flashed.

Ben’s heart drummed. His scalp tingled. His mouth went dry. He looked down the road both ways. Nothing. He jumped on the hood of the car, looked again. An empty road. He climbed to the roof, slipped until the rack fastened there caught his ankle, thought of where he might be if it wasn’t there. It wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t wanted one. Bikes, kayaks, IKEA runs. She had the whole fucking thing planned out, until–

Hail hit Ben like river rocks. He slid down the windshield on his ass and rolled down the hood to land on all fours facing the Taurus’s grille. He curled into a ball, tucking his head in and covering it with his hands. He exhaled, spit out a pathetic sound that was half-sob, half-whimper.

He was inside the car, both hands on the wheel to keep his sleeves around his elbows, interior lights blazing. He looked up to see himself. The visor must have opened when his clumsy ass was dancing on the roof. The left turn signal light spotlit his lap, where the photo lay, its back up. The words were upside down, but he knew what they said, and that was enough for him. He slipped it back behind the visor, where it was probably at least a little warmer, and turned the ignition.

The car idled there for some time. The gas gauge twitched just above the E. He pulled back onto the highway, keeping the car at a fuel-efficient speed, as if he knew what the hell that was. Lightning flashed. Wait. That wasn’t it. Electricity zipped down a sagging, horizontal line.

Ben’s headlights found two more eyes. In the middle of the road, lying down, where he should be. The doe craned her neck, mewled a plea for him to finish what someone else started, but he didn’t, couldn’t. Instead, he turned clear of it, so wide his left wheels went off the road, spinning in mud.

He beat the steering wheel, beat his head, his thighs, which made his sleeves fall. Outside, he pushed, fell face first into the mud, tried to breath it, was too much of a coward for that, and stumbled back into the car.

Ben wanted to sleep, but the lights wouldn’t let him, nor the dried mud in his eyes. Wide open was how they had to be. They showed him a full tank and a speedometer that went to 180.

He eased the gas pedal down. The car jerked onto the road. Once he got a handle on it, he sped up, no longer caring about straight roads. Faster.

The reflection of two eyes hit Ben like lightning.

Faster.

As white as his thoughts. He floored it, and smiled when he saw a rolled up shirtsleeve, exposing a hairless wrist.

Big feet. Yep. That is the subject of this week’s episode. I loved the style of the art, the comedic implications, so here we are.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Oliver Ryan

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Vg4Zmb

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

Martin had never punched someone, let alone knocked them out. Well, the edge of the wash basin had technically knocked him out.

Martin’s hands tremored, looking down at Dr. Forsythe, the man he was to become. He carefully undressed him, the dead weight of the doctor making him sweat and his heart flutter every time footsteps sounded down the corridor behind the thinnest of doors. Mere inches from discovery between him and–

“Pshhhh.” The doctor’s breath expelling from stuck-together lips.

Martin reclined on the floor, having fallen. His tailbone throbbed to the beat of blacksmith’s hammer. He scrambled to undress the doctor, then dress himself. The button on the trousers was a battle won by his ample belly. The sucking-in reinforcements called showed a pathetic assault, so he hoped his belt would do.

Donning the coat was the last of his duties, and he was grateful it concealed the unfitting mess beneath. After pushing the doctor under a gurney he checked himself in the mirror. Face full of white highlights from the sweat, hair an untamable mess of curls and grease, but the mustache, it was perfect. The one detail he hadn’t looked over. Dr. Forsythe had a prominent one, and to his luck, they were fruit grown from neighboring genetic branches.

Martin scuttled into the cooridor, head down, using the floorboords as a guide.

“Doctor?” The soft voice of a woman hit like a brick.

Caught. All this planning for nothing. He rubbed his wrists, preparing them for shackles, clenched his buttocks preparing them for prison.

“Your shoes,” the woman said.

His feet, pale, knobby, and bare, flattened on the oiled wood. He curled his toes. Disgusting.

“My mistake,” he said. “Inexcusable presentation. Forgive me.”

He looked up to a blushing nurse. She turned away when their eyes met. He tasted something foul.

“Let me fetch them for you,” she said.

Forsythe unconsious, maybe dead, is what she would find.

“No,” he said.

She withered.

“You have much to do,” he said. “Much more important business.”

She blinked back her composure, nodded like a simple dog, and swayed child-bearing hips in the opposite direction. Martin returned to the room and retrieved Forsythe’s shoes, having left his outside in order to quietly sneak into the hospital. They fit better than the trousers. He left Forsythe’s socks on him, the contour of his feet indication enough they would be as hideous as the man’s face.

Clacking down the cooridor, Martin held his head high, shoulders back, smoothing his mustache every step of the way to the door of the surgical theater.

A cyclical, layered beauty it was. Any view would suffice. He was late, purposefully, hoping the others would be glued in anticipation to the discovery, for he knew he’d have been.

He opened the door with brazen conviction. It was hard as hell. But it worked. The theater viewers, though less numerous that he had imagined, were hypnotized, most on the upper levels as if what lay below might be an explosive, or something worse.

Martin entered the first level, joined by only one other, who slouched on the rail, disinterested. Two surgeons joined the body at the center, on the same side of the gurney, one with rolled sleeves, ready to dig in. Dig. What an unfathomably unworthy man. Martin bristled, then calmed himself by grooming his mustache. Must. Fit. In.

The sheet was draped over the body like fresh snow. Two massive, majestic, magical peaks standing at symmetrical attention at the foot of the gurney. Martin giggled. The fellow near him cleared his throat but did not bother turning.

A hushed conversation between the two surgeons on the floor commenced, their hands placed firmly at the sheet’s edge. It must be as soft as the skin of a babe’s, the thread count impossible to distinguish, even that close. Martin was sure of it. He caressed his own coat, imagining. It was coarse and thick and nothing at all what those two men had the honor of placing their hands on.

Seconds felt like hours, like years, like eons. When, when, when would they do what needed to be done? Unleash the glory of what all knew was underneath yet eager to finally see.

Do it, do it, do it. His lips slid over teeth, mouthing his thoughts, tongue and gums secreting far too much. He slurped it down to another throat clearning of the man next to him, who finally did give him a half turn and an disgusted stare.

The surgeon closest to the spectacle finally moved after a nod from the other. He flexed his fingers. Knuckles popped, reverberating throughout the theater, throughout Martin’s guts, to his mind that was fit to burst.

Slowly, so painfully slow, the surgeon pulled the sheet away. It went taut, and Martin’s breath held. What a tease this was. His entire epidermis excreted a cold dampness.

The surgeon released the snag, and like wet, white paint, the sheet slid down the five-toed peaks, clung to the fuller between the tendons as if forged, flowed past ankles, and a sock line of frizzed down.

Martin forced his hands to his sides, the claws they had become splitting a nail on the polished wood before him. No words, no thoughts, only feelings consumed Martin, reborn into a mere observer of the twin monoliths that could not be of this world.

The surgeon with the rolled sleeves turned to the audience of one that was Martin.

“Dr. Forsythe,” he said. “Tell me, what would the esteemed intellect of one as yourself diagnose this poor soul with?”

Martin waddled to the side on stiff legs, the surgeon blocking his view. An elbow from the disinteresed man made him recoil, so he stretched his neck, vertebrae snapping. The tip of one toe is what he saw, a flesh-colored ripe apple.

“Doctor?” The surgeon again.

Saliva broke the dam of his teeth, pouring in a gush of fluid mixed with words that simply said, “Big . . . feet.”