Remember that wacky, zany, rip roarin’, mind blowin’ fun you had in your 5th grade English class when you passed around a story and each person contributed a paragraph.
OH BOY OH BOY! Well, we’re gonna do it here too. No, you don’t have a choice, you must contribute.
OK, so here’s how it works. I’ll start off with paragraph 1. The next person in line quotes the last sentence of the paragraph above his or hers. Then, he or she writes the next paragraph in the story. Write whatever you want to, be as creative as you can…as long as it relates to the story.
What if two people post at the same time? Won’t there be two stories? That’s where your super story writing powers come in. The next person in line encorporates BOTH new paragraphs into one of his or her own. No muss, no fuss.
Ready?
It was a dark and stormy night (all good stories start out with this line). The windows were rattling, the baby’s toys were rattling, and the snakes were rattling. Damp and dreary, John and Susan bundled up by the fireplace to keep warm. Outside, though, something was amiss.
Outside though, something was amiss. The wind and rain had picked up considerably, more so than was to be expected during this late fall season. The rain damp fingertips of the maple tree branches scraped along the old house’s scarred siding, evidence of many a storm. The house was well lit, keeping the stygian darkness at bay but beyond its ring of light, the night pressed in. At that edge, the edge between light and darkness, the edge between the seen and the unseen, something waited.
It was the Domino’s delivery guy. And he was getting mighty pissed standing in the rain like that.
“Open the goddamned door or I’m eating this piece of tomato sauce covered card-board myself, you yuppie scum.”
“Did you hear something, Pookums?” John asked.
“Pookums? Did you really say Pookums?” Sheila said “I told you before that if you ever called me that again I would kill you and I swear by all that’s holy I meant it”
With a murderous gleam in her eyes, Sheila reaches under the firewood and pulls out…
With a murderous gleam in her eyes, Sheila reaches under the firewood and pulls out…
A chia pet. The original kind that was shaped like a sheep. “DO YOU SEE THIS?!” she screamed, her heart racing, her breathe coming in huge gasps, “THIS IS THE ONLY POOKUMS IN MY LIFE! NO ONE ELSE WILL EVER BE CALLED POOKUMS IN MY PRESENCE”. Susan collapsed to the floor, sobbing as she did, and in her descent she had knocked over…
Susan collapsed to the floor, sobbing as she did, and in her descent she had knocked over…
…an urn of her pet kitty’s ashes. “NOW you’ve done it!” she screeched, scrambling to her feet to answer the door. The Dominos man walked in as John lumbered about the house looking for something to clean up the ashes. Besides, he wanted to avoid Susan now that she was in such a bad mood.
He opened the closet and pulled out…
He opened the closet and pulled out a small stuffed lemur. Using this clever little puppet, he swept the ashes into the hearth, wondering why the kitty couldn’t just smoke outside, and dusted the mantle being careful to avoid the urns holding the ashes of Susans former pet boa, chicken, toad, goldfish and slugs.
Just for fun, because the mood had turned so sour, he…
Just for fun, because the mood had turned so sour, he…
decided to pull out his worn copy of the Necromonicon, the terrifying book by the mad arab something-or-other, and look up a spell to turn Domino’s pizza delivery boys into creatures from another dimension with a wild, unearthly geometry. He quickly found the page he searched, and was about to utter the unpronounceable syllables of the spell, when a guttural cry made him look up, and he saw…
Susan and the Domoinos guy in flagrante delicto utilizing some type of sex chair which she had previously acquired from somebody mysteriously named Sue Duhnym.
“Well that’s not something you see every day,” he said out loud to nobody in particular.
Much to his surprise he was overheard by …
…a spell which turned him into a newt. But he soon got better.
Conscious of the piercing presence of another, he was dumbstruck when he turned around to find the long lost eyes of his first wife gazing upon him. “You’re alive!” he exclaimed. “How can that be?”
“How can that be?”, she spat. “It’s only your assumption that I was dead in the first place!” “I go into the restroom at the bus station, and because I take a wee bit longer then normal, you assume that I had died in there, you idiot!” In spite of her scathing words, her visage appeared almost serene. “But thanks to your idiocy, I’m happier then I’ve ever been before. You see, your leaving me stranded was just the motivation I needed to become a -”…
You see, your leaving me stranded was just the motivation I needed to become a -"…
…clown. I’ve always wanted to be a clown. There is so much emotion, so much tragedy, so much PASSION in being a clown!" she said this with a wide flourish of her arms. She then began to prance around the room and laugh hysterically. John began to wonder why he had married such odd women.
“So where have you been hiding, Margot?” he asked her.
“The clown convent, of course,” she replied, smiling broadly. Or maybe it was just the red paint making it seem so. “I’ve taken a vow of celibacy. Or maybe it’s abstinence, but I’m not very sure which one. Whichever, I’m perfectly content in my new life as a clownish nun.”
“damn I’m hungry! Where’s that pizza?” Well, it turns out that the pizza guy had left the pizza in the car. So John opened the door, pulled his coat hood up over his head to shelter him from the rain, and ran out to the car. The door was locked. “Figures,” John said as he punched out the car window. He didn’t bleed from this, as he had learned all about glass breaking in the CIA. Unlocking the door, he reached inside to grab the pizza. As he was pulling it out, he glanced towards the backseat. Laying atop the rear passenger seat was an item which would change his life forever.
“What does he want with naked pictures of Zsa Zsa Gabor?”
“I knew he was twisted with that swing…but this?”
John suddenly had no appetite for pizza and wondered aloud if he would ever be able to eat anything again after seeing these images. As he contemplated the possibility of scrubbing his eyes, he noticed a small blob of viscous goo, oozing from behind the pictures. It began to glow eerily, like…
an earily glowing viscous goo. “What the hell is that?”, he asked. Putting a dab on his finger and pressing it to his tongue, he noted that it tasted almost, but not entirely, completely unlike…
It tasted almost but not entirely, completely unlike melted mozzarella cheese. Which is what you would expect in a pizza delivery boy’s back seat. But if it was not unlike cheese, then it was something with nearly the same color and consistancy. With horror he noticed the ad for a 12 step program that read
“How to stop masturbating on pizzas you are delivering in 30 minutes or less.”
…he had truned into a newt again. “Damn,” he said, after scampering under the car into the street, “I’ve turned into a newt again and it seems I’ve eaten idiot-adultering-pizza-boy spunk!” Making his way across the yard, slithering on the wet grass, as newts are wont to do, he heard the sound of a craking branch and looked up in time to see…