With the serialisation of You’ll Never Believe A Man Can Fly complete, and the next big writing project* set for mid-March, I wasn’t sure what to put up here. I could put some slice of life pieced, in fact I might. Possibly some commentary on what’s going on in the world, in the UK, in politics or in comics. That’s all still a possibility.
But it seemed sensible to still put up some fiction as well.
*More information about this when I can…
Just by virtue of the Internet being what it is, this being a relatively new blog, and Twitter especially being what it is, odds are that most of the people visiting or reading this blog have never seen many of what I consider to have been my favourite stories written in answer to challenges.
Time to address that.
So, for the next couple of weeks, through until the end of February/beginning of March, you get to read them. There’ll be some funny ones, some scary ones, and some that are just plain weird. But they’re all personal favourites.
Here’s one I wrote for Warren Ellis.
Title: Doctor Silence’s Last Romance
Word: rectal
Challenger: Warren Ellis
Length: 200 words exactly
The surgeon looked at what was left of the patient and winced. There wasn’t much, but he was jealous of the dead man’s enormous tongue, having lost his in circumstances beyond discussion in polite company.
The collision between the man’s car and the ambulance had destroyed both vehicles, and left not much more of their drivers than various sized lumps of meat that appeared to be only loosely connected.
He started forward then paused, lifting his hands to his face. He gestured and the nurse stripped the blood and gore spattered latex gloves from his hands, replacing them with new ones, and stored those she’d removed for the doctor’s later personal use.
With a raised eyebrow and a glint in his eye, the surgeon leaned forward and plucked from the crevices of what was left of the man’s heart a long thin object. He held it up, gaining a sigh of relief from the watching hospital administrator, who then ticked a form. The rectal thermometers were expensive and could not just be written off merely because of delicacy.
The surgeon smiled at her. And she smiled back, that knowing smile between two people both suffering the same sexually transmitted disease.
© Lee Barnett, 2005
“There are two hundred stories collected in this volume. They are funny, they are thoughtful, they are romantic, they are frightening. To me, though, they are more than entertaining. They are inspiring.” – Wil Wheaton, from his introduction to volume 2 of The Fast Fiction Challenge
Two volumes of The Fast Fiction Challenge, containing 180 stories in Volume 1 and a further 200 stories in Volume 2, are available from lulu.com, and in some countries on Amazon. ebooks available from the author; email for details.
Buy the ebook of You’ll Never Believe A Man Can Fly for £4.99 – click here
budgie's perch 