User avatar kailhofer Editor Emeritus Posts: 3245 Joined: December 31, 1969, 08:00:00 PM Location: Kaukauna, Wisconsin (USA) Contact: Contact kailhofer The "It Just Keeps Getting Meta!" Challenge Post by kailhofer » April 30, 2016, 08:50:42 PM This challenge was run by Eddie Sullivan. The challenge was to write a speculative flash fiction story where the author is the protagonist and there are at least 2 elements which are true to his or her life right now recently. Example story: They Call It Puppy Love By: Eddie Sullivan “Dogs don’t talk.” The little golden mutt glanced up at me lovingly and wrinkled her nose. “You mean they never talk to you.” I was still very much attributing everything going on to the fever which kept me home from work. In a string of unlikely events my wife who normally works third shift had switched with a friend and was out of the house. That left me, the new puppy, and the two cats alone for the day. “Well then why now, Valentine?” “Why not now, Ed? Is one time really better than another for this kind of thing?” I adjusted my head on the pillow, the sinus pressure was killing me. “Well now certainly isn’t the most opportune time by far. Is there something you need, like a tummy rub or a treat?” “Funny. Truly. I can get those things quite well without speaking to you. There are much more important matters at hand. Do you think we just talk to anyone for any silly reason?” A good barometer of just how ill I was could have been the level of apathy I still held for this particular situation. The decision to turn over on the couch and ignore the talking puppy was much less difficult that you would have thought. So I bunched the blanket under my chin, fluffed the pillow a bit with my head and turned over. I would just close my eyes and whatever the hell was going on would stop happening. I felt at the time it was an entirely rational decision. Valentine the puppy felt differently. The little bitch started barking relentlessly. Little did I know the noise of the bark wasn’t the solution to my ignorance in and of itself. She was issuing orders to the cats. They promptly obeyed and pounced on me relentlessly. I relented and turned back toward her, casting the cats off me in the process. “So now cats can speak dog?” She nodded her little golden head. “And they take orders from them?” “Think of it more as an exchange of professional courtesy.” She gave a cute little bark, which I assumed was thanks, and the feline co-conspirators went somewhere to lick themselves. “Fine what is it that is so important that not only do you have to talk to an human, but also enlist the help of cats?” “First tell me I’m a good girl.” “What?” “You heard what I said. Tell me I’m a good girl. While you are at it stretch your lazy ass over here and rub my tummy.” I spent several seconds looking at her in disbelief, until I realized disbelief over this request was made moot by the fact that it was in English, out loud, from a puppy. All bets were pretty much off at this point in our exchange. I relented just to get on with it and conclude whatever the hell was going on here. I reached over and rubbed her tummy. “ Good girl. Good Girl. Who is a good girl?” After a moment or two she flipped over, ran at me and hopped up onto the couch. She stood on my chest and looked me right in the face. “I am and don’t you ever forget it.” “That’s it?” “No, dope. You have cancer.” “Wha…” “Cancer. I can smell it. Not bad, it just started. You should go to the doctor and be looked at. They will treat it and you will live.” I spent a minute or two just looking into her puppy dog eyes. “ Ok I will bite. Why are you telling me this? I am sure other dogs have smelled it and not told other humans.” “I like you and want to keep you. I have grown fond of watching you write your stories in your office at night after work. You really are quite good, consider doing it full time once we get this health business cleared up.” I cocked my head at her, she cocked hers back. I think she was teasing me. “You like my work…wait you read?” “Yes. You really are quite good. Also yes I read, but you also dictate a lot of stuff remember. I like that better, then I can just sit there while you tell me stories. So just go to the doctor and get fixed so nothing changes, ok?” “Ok. But…Don’t you think that maybe now that I know dogs talk it might come up in my stories?” “Nope. I am never going to say a word again after today. That coupled with the fact that no one will ever believe a fiction writer will keep my secret safe. Also what are you going to do write about this exact exchange? We both know it is too meta. Who do you think you are Charlie Kaufman? Pfft.” Have you ever seen a puppy go Pfft? It is terminally cute. “We will see, Valentine. “ She barked at me rather than speak again. As for me I turned over and fell asleep. I didn’t wake up till I heard walking in the living room. My wife was looking down at me. “Hey sleepy head. How you feel?” “Better, but I think I might go see the doctor anyway.” “Why?” “I just have a feeling it is time to get checked out.” That damn, cute little bitch, I saw her wink. The End Top User avatar kailhofer Editor Emeritus Posts: 3245 Joined: December 31, 1969, 08:00:00 PM Location: Kaukauna, Wisconsin (USA) Contact: Contact kailhofer The "It Just Keeps Getting Meta!" Challenge Post by kailhofer » April 30, 2016, 08:52:09 PM Dayton Ohio By: Michele Dutcher I can never remember a time in my life when I didn’t want things to be tidy. So it peeved me a little when a webzine editor set up a meeting of authors and editors in Dayton Ohio, and then bowed out at the last minute. I had already bought my tickets and made reservations weeks in advance, even going so far as to Google and print out the city bus routes I would be taking. The hard feelings were ironed out however, when the rest of us decided to meet up in Dayton anyway. Events didn’t truly veer off course until I was on the 17 bus heading downtown and a mechanical female voice came over the intercom on the bus. “Remember, people need your blood. Your blood will be happily accepted at locations easily accessed from most bus routes.” I thought it was unseemly for advertisers to assume that all people who rode the bus needed money bad enough to sell their blood. I looked around at the other riders, and none of them seemed to have been bothered by the announcement – even when it was repeated every three minutes. I looked around the bus again, closer this time. There was something missing…but what? Fat people. There were no fat people, there were no skinny people, and no one appeared to be homeless. Each of the 45 passengers appeared to be height and weight proportional, with their ages between 25 and 50 years old. As the ride progressed no one moved, no one shifted, and no one said anything. I briefly caught the eye of one lady who immediately looked down and pulled the brim of her hat over her eyes. I was disappointed when I got to the ‘Grand Dayton Hotel’ and saw that the words ‘Grand Dayton’ had been covered with white paint, leaving only the word Hotel. There was a small arrow pointing around back where the main entrance normally was, so I entered the hotel through the parking garage. The word ‘Hilton’ had been scratched out on several metal name plates. There were sheets of plastic hanging in the lobby. The group wasn’t scheduled to meet up for a few hours, so after checking-in (noticing a 4-foot-wide brown stain on the hall carpet outside my room) I decided to walk about downtown to find someplace nice where our small, friendly group could eat supper. I walked through blocks of buildings that were boarded up, sheets of brown paper covering many of the windows. After not even finding a fast-food joint, I noticed an 8x11 inch sign saying the name of my bank and went inside the building. I went up the escalator. At the top I saw a row of six teller windows but no people. I checked my cell phone for the time: 1:47 in the afternoon. A man in a suit suddenly burst out from behind the row of cages. “Hello,” I said cordially. “I’m not from here and was looking for someplace downtown to eat.” He was flustered. “I just eat healthy food in my apartment…but I believe there is an Uno Pizza around.” “I’ll check, thanks,” I told him. Then my eye fell upon six toy robots arranged in a circle on a nearby desk. They were black and white and looked like small dogs. “These are cute. Are they for sell?” The teller threw himself between me and the circle of toys. “They don’t like to be touched!” he whispered frantically. “THEY don’t like to be touch?” I laughed. “I meant: please don’t touch them!” Seeing that I wasn’t welcome I went down the escalator, but not before noticing that the dogs must have been turned on somehow, because their eyes were glowing. As I was halfway to the first floor I thought I heard a mechanical female voice huff out: ‘Cute indeed!’ ***** Our small group of cyber-friends ate and drank for hours inside the Uno Chicago Style Pizza Place. The company and conversation were great and group-selfies were taken. As we were paying for our checks, the editor of Alien Eyes saw a toy beside the cash register. “I’ve only seen a few of these,” said Lawrence. “It’s an Aibo robot.” “Aibo? I thought these quit being made in 2005,” answered Sterling, bending down to look at it. “Careful!” I blurted out. “These toys don’t like to be touched!” “You’re joking with us!” Lawrence said before we all broke into laughter. Sterling looked at the cashier. “Would you mind turning it on? Years ago they begged and made a delightful peeing sound.” “It’s just for display,” said the man flatly. He nodded towards the door. As we left, I nudged Sterling to follow my lead. We both looked through the front window to see the robot dog’s eyes glowing as the cashier bent over, appearing to listen to whatever it was saying. **** I was unnerved by the next morning. My dreams had been fitful and the lack of diversity of people I met was disturbing. Now I could see clearly that children had the toy dogs in their backpacks; women on the city buses carried them in their purses. As I waited in the station for my bus, I noticed that none of the twenty people inside talked or got up to go to the bathroom or ate a snack. Fifty minutes passed and I finally had to get up to stretch my legs. “Why did you stand up?” asked a woman nearby with blank eyes. “Is the bus here already?” As I sat in the bus, anxiously waiting to leave the station, I noticed a man’s suitcase accidently crash open as it was being loaded under the bus. I was sure I saw a white hard-plastic toy hit the ground before it was hurriedly closed back up and shoved into the cargo hold. The End TThe "It Just Keeps Getting Meta!" Challenge Post by kailhofer » April 30, 2016, 08:53:44 PM - Winner - Distorted Reflections By: Sergio Palumbo I have rarely – if ever – rearranged the contents of the cabinets inside my mother’s house, nevertheless all the furniture in her home, but when I had to do this, well, everything turned out to be really exhausting and it took many long days to make neat and get it all done. It was something that she couldn’t do anymore because she was very old - so I took over the duty. Actually, I would never have thought about moving that stylish mirror near her front door, but there was no other space available to put the bookshelves, so I chose to hang it on another wall. I really didn’t pay a lot of attention to it at first: it was nothing more than a mirror, and not in perfect condition by any means, though it was very pricey and a person might notice it at first sight. I also tried to clean it while moving it, but there was a small black stain – not much bigger than a large dot- on its surface that simply wouldn’t go away, so I gave up and left the spot where it was. It seemed to be something inside the mirror anyway, instead of a stain on its reflective surface. After a while what amazed me were the new images that were reflected in the mirror, once I had put it in a new corner of the foyer. In fact if you looked at it from exactly the right angle, you might think you saw something inside the mirror itself. And there were also strange distortions all around that black stain, which didn’t make any sense at all! Great was my surprise when I decided to have a closer look at the dark spot and discovered that you could actually see through it… A completely different world seemed to lie past that stain, a sort of alternate history setting, maybe! Over the course of the following days, I got used to watching it for hours, using an old magnifying glass, attentively staring at those mountaintops and valleys I could clearly see now. I was amazed at how wooden wagons appeared to go through the pass, stunned by all the colorful people who came and went, some new strange animals, and so on. Incredible views! Eventually those distortions made me ponder over the whole thing and think about other possibilities… Given my knowledge of physics, could it be a sort of quantum black hole? Or a mini-wormhole leading to another place? Why not? The problem was of course: how could this be possible? And why had this strangeness occurred inside that mirror? Many strange questions were running through my mind, which were no more incredible than the things you could watch by carefully using the magnifying glass. Maybe I should have called some scientist, or perhaps I should have informed some newspaper about it - but I doubted that anyone would have ever believed me, and reasonably of course. Then, one evening, my sister came to visit my mother - something she almost never did, as a matter of fact. She didn’t care too much about her parent, especially now that mother was really feeble and old. Once she was inside the house, she threw her fur coat over the mirror itself, saying that there was no other space available on the coat rack - which wasn’t true, of course, as she just liked to do as she pleased, without any regard for anything else. That was why the mirror fell down, breaking with a crash, because of the excessive weight. This was something disastrous, as a matter of fact! Not that she would have behaved differently if I had told her to pay attention, of course. Alas - I knew her all too well… “What’s done is done, accept it…” was all she said. I stared at her as you might look at a selfish person with no respect for her mother’s things, or someone who had never accepted that she should be held accountable for anything that went wrong over the course of her life. But I knew that she never cared about anything except herself, truth to be told. What was even worse was that the magical characteristic that strange mirror once did possess had disappeared, as I ascertained as soon as my sister left the house - taking the newspaper and a big book of mother’s for herself while quickly exiting the home, without saying good-bye! Now there was no way to see that alien - or alternate - world again by means of the magnifying glass, given the break that had split the surface of the mirror into several parts – including the small stain. Now it was gone, forever…and no one else had ever seen it except me! I was certain that no one else would ever believe in such an extraordinary find if there was no evidence left, certainly… I decided to collect all the glass pieces and put them in a box, for the future. Maybe one day I would find that something was still in there, that it was possible to look at that strange world another time through part of the remaining black stain, or maybe not…Who knows? The fact is that I simply didn’t want to throw all those scraps away as if nothing had ever really happened. Because it had happened, though strange it might be! While moving the box, a quote by that ancient French writer, Nicolas Chamfort, came to mind. ‘There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men.’ Or of your deplorable sister, anyway, I told myself, before closing the box with those unusual contents when that evening ended. That was going to be a different world nobody would see again, and all the discoveries that might came from it -one day- were lost forever. Nevermind the researchers of the truth, or of some alien planets/ alternate realities, anyway... The End