ScottyDM Registered User
Joined: 12 Feb 2005 Posts: 1142 Location: Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA
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Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 4:00 am Post subject: Short Story Contest for Spring 2010 |
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The entry period is closed and the judging period open.
Behold, the eight stories in this quarter’s contest. As always, you need to be logged in to view the stories.
So read, enjoy, score, and comment.
Quote: | Phantom and the Flowers
They call me “Phantom.” And that is what I call myself. My real name I forgot a long time ago, but I know it was in the Language of the Wolves. My age is unknown, even to me. All I know is my power is great and that I am the leader of an unusual band of heroes. That, and we all get our powers from a special specie of wildflower. Known to us as the “Alien Flower”, this special plant gives unlimited power and immortality to a certain number of animals. … |
Quote: | The Parhelion Boy
He’d come home with bruises again. Cuts and grazes on that muzzle that his parents would question and worry after. Poor Blyth had had another rough day at school. It wasn’t as if he didn’t try. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t normal. A young and vulnerable teenager, Blyth was sensitive and sweet, tortured endlessly after classes and during lunch break for his effete affectation. And the one other thing that would make the punches and the kicks hurt all the more? … |
Quote: | Wisdom
How do you get the flowers to grow, Doug?
Doug approached the lady, who was leaning over to smell one of the bluebells. “Conversation,” he said.
She turned her face to him, face shaded halfway by a straw hat with a blue ribbon tied around the crown. “Beg pardon?”
“How’s I get the flowers to grow so nice,” he replied. “I talk to ‘em. If you was curious.” He removed his own hat, a red and white baseball cap, and rubbed his nearly bare scalp with crooked fingers before replacing it. … |
Quote: | Dogstone Tea
It had been years now since they’d disappeared. But their family had moved on, or at least tried.
The Summer was consolingly hot that year, as was this one, sash windows opened, allowing cool breezes to brush through curtains and across stuffy and tired tails and fur. Dyfri had taken to wearing shorts, those smart below knee-length cargo style ones that had more pockets than one could ever really put to use. And yet he cut a solemn form as he wandered across the landing, his tail drooped and still, his deep yellow-ochre eyes wide and concentrating. … |
Quote: | Garden Gangland
Hetty Weatherwax was a retired and widowed old lady, living in a comfortable little house on Markson Park Avenue 45, Aldia Falls. After her career in a shoe factory and her husband’s death, and as her children and grand children lived out of town, she had only one real purpose in her life; Gardening.
Behind Hetty’s house there was a small but cozy little garden. It was her pride and joy. Each spring she planned what flowers she would plant, how she would arrange the beds, … |
Quote: | Daisy and Dandelion
Mae was a daisy who was different from most of the other flowers, but didn’t feel very special. She lived in a hamlet called Fiore, and it was filled with roses, orchids, irises, lilies, and chrysanthemums, and other flowers who prided themselves on their beauty; Mae thought that was about the dumbest thing in the world.
She didn’t care about outer beauty one whit, well, she mostly didn’t care. Instead of burning daylight fussing over herself, mirror gazing, or even pruning, she would explore around outside her small village. … |
Quote: | Hellflower
Once upon a time, a wildflower sprang up in Hell somewhere on the border of The Gray Wastes of Destituteness and The Screaming Sands of Anguish. Nobody knows how it got there, and that is a power all wildflowers have.
Cthaniel, a tallish demon that was the color of neon pond scum, and his friend Prunk, who was a squat demon very close to that shade of brown you can only get when you mix all your modeling clay together, were both walking home from working long hours as lower middle managers in the Sexual Deviant Division. … |
Quote: | Fortinbras Gets His Say
The first of the flowers had thrust itself bravely up through the snow where the wind had blown it thin. The green of it had a startling quality against the white of the world.
Fortinbras saw it first and stopped to look at it. It took Sasha some time to even notice that they were no longer moving. He hadn’t really been able to feel his legs for a while.
“Oh,” he said, when he finally saw the tiny delicate snowdrop. He pried his fingers out from under the edge of Fortinbras’s saddle. … |
S~ _________________
Kantaro wrote: | Almost real enough to be considered non-fiction, if it weren't made up. |
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