In Memoriam

Sunday, you’ll have been dead a week. I sit at the kitchen table, laptop open in front of me, doing what I think you’d be doing in my place, writing something. You were a poet, a real one, a soldier with a flower in his helmet. I’m hunting and pecking when I suddenly hear the tinkling of Tibetan prayer bells. Five seconds – 10 max – pass before I realize it’s the new ringtone on my phone. A prim female voice announces, “Unknown caller.” I always just assumed Death would have the surly demeanor of the lunch ladies in a school cafeteria.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie's newest poetry collection, Frowny Face, a mix of his prose poems and collages, is now available from Redhawk Publications He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

Sofa Of Cycles

The sagging couch cushions are a trophy–evidence attesting to her self-discipline to stay situated.

She’s a chameleon in her contradictory custom office. An extension cord slithers around wooden legs, dressed with a black and blocky laptop vitalizer. The coffee table has been repurposed into a feet-book-pen desk, crowded with sacred guides to creation and the honing of creative crafts. No clocks tick, as time gives no counsel. Silence rears its head to the ears of the beholder, mouth perpetually packed by scribbles and click-clacks.

She forges life and death. A prolific puppet master.

Stay at home God of worlds.

From Guest Contributor Madeline van Batum

Madeline lives in Colorado with her cat and hopes that one day she can go back to her home country of the Netherlands to finally meet the Flying Dutchman.

Mr. Robot

Robots Contest Entry:

I wanted a new laptop for my seventeenth birthday, but my parents bought me a robot instead.

It’s not that bad, I call it Mr. Robot. I know, it’s not that creative, but the name is fitting for a machine, and it’s become a friend. I programmed Mr. Robot to speak and follow commands. Its square eyes and grey metal body are scary to look at, but hey, it does what I need it to do.

In fact, my parents didn’t consider that it is a computer and can give me the answers to my homework.

A win all around.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

Bruno Schulz On The Street Of Crocodiles

The pills I take at night to get to sleep leave me feeling dazed all morning. I stare stupidly at the white screen of my laptop while rubbing my head in a forlorn attempt to stimulate the language center of the brain. I think once again of Bruno Schulz. Only the first sentence of the novel he was writing when he was murdered survives: Mother awakened me in the morning, saying, “Joseph, the Messiah is near...” A Gestapo officer shot him down in the street in broad daylight. It was a kind of hobby, to be honest.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of the poetry collections Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press).

Music Lesson

I can’t say for certain which music I’m enjoying more – Susumu Yokota’s Asian ambience on the laptop or the garden’s new water fountain concert.

Mr. Chipmunk, the gaudy flutterby, and the fledgling redwings all clearly prefer the fountain. And why wouldn’t they? What do they know about synthesizers, electronic percussion, or the meditative properties of fluid melody transformation? For them, the fountain’s water, singing its spontaneous aria, is life itself; is the music without which their lives—all lives—would cease to exist.

I reach out and tap the laptop’s mute.

Some creatures—most creatures—know far more than I.

From Guest Contributor Ron. Lavalette

Ron’s many published works, including his debut chapbook, Fallen Away, can be found HERE.

The New Normal

Three minutes before the meeting, I don my favorite blouse. It won’t pass the waft test, but I’m out of clean clothes. My flannel pants are ripped; it’ll have to do. My hair is in a bun because styling takes too long.

Apple sauce pools on the high chair; fruity pebbles litter on the floor.

I rush to open the laptop and enter the meeting. Twelve baggy pairs of eyes stare back at me. I then remember that no one can smell my shirt or see my pants. But I wonder if anyone would mind if I went to pee.

From Guest Contributor Jennifer Lai

Shipping Container

“A single nuclear device, including laptop computer, can fit inside a standard 20-foot shipping container. There are 1,250 shipping containers on a regular container ship. Now if you look at this photo what do you see?”

“In profile, a container ship, fully loaded.”

“Notice anything unusual? Take my magnifying glass. Let me help you. There are wires connecting every container.”

“Every container’s armed?”

“Triggered at the same time, and the ship can be anywhere in the world, we can blow the planet asunder.”

“What is it?’

“One of ours.”

“Yes, I understand but what is it?”

“Our doomsday machine.”

Barry O'Farrell is an actor living in Brisbane, Australia.

Barry's other stories appear in Cyclamens & Swords, 101 Words, 50-Word Stories, and of course here at A Story in 100 Words.