Time for something fun: a story contest. The people below are not anyone I know. They are standing in front of a fairly popular roadside stop in the Midwest.
Your job is to come up with a creative and frightening story to explain this photo, while adhering to the following five rules.
Rule #1: It doesn't have to have anything to do with the actual real-life subject of the photo.
Rule #2: It has to use the name "Jimmy."
Rule #3: Don't ask why I chose "Jimmy." I'm the boss, that's why, and I wanted to insert a random guideline into the contest. Also, Jimmy is a funny name.
Rule #4: Your story must contain five sentences. No more. No less.
Rule #5: Your story must be frightening, moody, mysterious, or otherwise scary in tone.
The winner gets a free signed copy of Pocket Guide to the Bible. Of course, at only $6.99 a piece, we're all winners. Am I right, people?
The contest will last until 9 am central time tomorrow, at which point I'll choose my favorite five-sentence story. To get things started, my submission is below. (It is prohibited from winning, however, as I already have plenty of copies of Pocket Guide to the Bible.)
A highway rest stop became a place of terror when Jimmy's dog Scuppers suddenly disappeared. They found him a quarter mile away, licking an enormous hairball. Just as they began wondering what sort of beast had produced this monstrosity, a man shouted "Smile!" and took their stunned photo. The man disappeared before the flash had faded from their eyes. Seven years later, Jimmy died.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Five-Sentence Scary Story Contest!
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"How long do we have to stand here?" Jimmy whispered to his dad.
The man they'd asked to take their picture had waited til they'd taken their place before calmly dropping their camera, pulling a gun from his black overcoat, and ordering them to keep their pose.
"He said to keep smiling; just keep smiling," Jimmy's dad said.
Sarah looked down to see blood seeping out from beneath the World's Largest Haystack and pooling around their sandals, and she wondered, "How long has this guy been doing this?"
Scout barked and there was a loud bang and the world changed.
She knew she had accomplished her mission - total fashion annihilation. Only the ugly rat dog Jimmy suspected she was an alien posing as a suburban housewife in "mom shorts." As she prepared to board the spaceship, billed as a large ball of twine to lure unsuspecting fashion victims, she chortled sinisterly. Are there shoulder pads inside my T-shirt? Horrors!
Jimmy crouched and picked up the polaroid off the dirt floor of the cabin. In it, the family always smiled, always restrained the cat, always locked their knees, always waited.
Their sedan had been found emptied the next morning, ransacked and stripped of parts, and Jimmy had gotten the call. Another visiting family, always locking their knees, always smiling, whose ethereal trail had led thirty miles north to a cabin outside Muskogee.
Easing forward through the cabin, Jimmy slowly drew his gun and waited for anything--the slow unlocking of knees, a breathless meow.
A long plaintive wail emanated from the giant ball of twine. “Just ignore it”, Jimmy thought. “Obviously no one else hears it, so it’s all in your head.” That was his last thought before he felt the merciless grip of the hand pulling him in.
Moments later, a long plaintive wail emanated from the giant ball of twine.
Sadly, this is the last time the Kazmirack’s would smile as a family. Soon after the camera snapped this picture, Precious, the Kazmirack’s dog of 12 years reached out and bit little jimmy on the ear. He screamed so loud that it awoke the giant ball of yarn, which actually was not so much yarn as it was the hundreds of people who had gone missing throughout the Midwest over a period of thirty years with only a slight covering of yarn. Until now it was just assumed that all of these people were a part of the mass exodus of Indiana, also known as ‘the smart ones’.
We can only tell this story now because little Jimmy was able to get away, all thanks to that yappy little dog that he never liked anyway.
Most children were making paper-mache volcanoes or scale model solar-systems for the science fair, however Derrick's brother Jimmy was not like most children.
If it wasn't embarrassing enough that Jimmy was building the world's largest coconut bra, Derrick was being forced to assist in this ridiculous abomination. You see, Jimmy did not always relate well or even like his family, and their parents thought it a good bonding time to work on the project together.
"I still don't understand why we need to wait for a family photo to be taken before you tell us why the bra has only one cup," Derrick muttered within Jimmy's earshot. "Just say cheese," Jimmy replied and with the camera shaped remote control he revealed his real science fair project- their new coco prison.
Jimmy anxiously opened the packet of photographs from his recent visit to Florence. He barely noticed that the statue of David had been covered in a twine-like cocoon, as in the picture was his family. They had been missing for a year and presumed dead somewhere in the deep jungle of Brazil while going up the Amazon. The only thing left was a tattered box sent just before their disappearance, which he always kept nearby. Just as Jimmy recovered from the shock of seeing his family, the box moved and a black hairy leg emerged.
Jimmy had a secret.
He was well-acquainted with the legends surrounding the mysterious doorless tribal hut, had read all about it in the latest issue of National Geographic Kids. The stories of those who had merely brushed up against its fibrous exterior, all doomed to spiral into a mind-twisting dementia and an eventual and inglorious death.
He thought of his father, who had asked him (for the last time) to stop asking if we were there yet; of his mother, whose penchant for country music had grown wearisome; of his sister, who kept touching his leg in the car; of his brother, who never, ever let him hold scraps, their pet dog.
And all this left Jimmy giddy in anticipation, for Jimmy had a secret.
I am just realizing I didn't look closely enough at the family pet.
Let's change "Scout barked" to "Sheba meowed." :-)
I don't know, Jared. I'm pretty sure it's a dog. Looks like a little yappy dog -- maybe a pekingese? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Szusza_pekingese.jpg)
There are no rules about the species of animal, though. If you want it to be an overly fluffy weasel, then go right ahead.
Jimmy had always wanted a family, and though the halfway house of his adulthood and the orphanage of his youth-hood provided sufficient prosthetic families, the residents of both houses never did the types of things Jimmy wanted in a family – namely, taking pictures. The nuns at the orphanage on West Kaiser Street forbade the freezing of souls (photography) and the halfway house the same. When Jimmy was able to live on his own he traveled far, far away to the Midwest where he spent most of his days pleading with the gods for a family, and after some time, after much wandering and panting, the gods granted young Jimmy’s request in the form of a cheap roadside attraction.
So Jimmy stood there, day and night, like a statue – a manikin, even – in front of the haystack, waiting for families of whom he wished he belonged, to take photographs of him with strangers. And there his soul froze, just as the nuns had warned.
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