by B Mitsoda
Tar Baby
Susie and I spent months debating having kids or traveling more often, but we finally compromised and settled on adopting a highway.
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Keepin’ Cool
“Hey, wouldn’t it be weird if my parents had named me ‘Troy’?” asked Roy, who had the only pool on the block.
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Science (You Gotta Want It Badly Enough)
Dr. Vangelis wondered how he would be able to sleep with himself at night, which led to many of his breakthroughs in cloning.
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Taste Bud
“Ugh, you have to taste this, it’s awful,” stated Officer Bankins, before I once again cautioned him to use his lab kit when analyzing foreign liquids.
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Mah Bucket
My favorite sand pail and I were reunited quite unexpectedly twenty years later on a bus; it was hard not to notice that it was filled with the finest white beachgoer’s delight, and instead of bringing up why it left, I let it go, realizing I should just be happy for it - life was too short to hold a grudge.
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How the West was Lost
“I kind of miss the Old West,” said Red with a faraway look in his eye, “still can’t believe only that side of the country was beamed aboard the alien’s mothership.”
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4 – 3 = 1
“Winning isn’t everything,” explained Gage, “now, will someone please explain to me the rules of Deathsport?”
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From the Heart
“Yeti babysitter!” yeah, it was crazy, but it came from the heart, like wedding vows were supposed to.
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Hopping, Mad
The bullfrogs had overtaken Miller’s Pond seemingly overnight, eating any unfortunate creature they could fit in their mouths; of course, Rachael just couldn’t let it go about what a bad idea it was to break into Professor Minute’s nearby lab and mess around with his shrink ray.
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Name Boy
Every kid in my class had a different name for me, which my counselor blames on my problem with the truth.
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Silly Old Goats
“And you know what really gets my goat-” my aunt paused, biting her lip; the rest of the ladies of the Tilly City Tea Factory Brunch Bunch adjusted their bonnets and blushed, trying their best not to make eye contact with their newest member, the chupacabra.
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Party Pooper
They say music soothes the savage beast, but in my case it was pizza; when the Rottweiler finished the last of the six meatzas with extra feta and wobbled through the dog door into the house, all I could think was that someone in that party was about to get a wonderful new story to tell.
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No Breaks for Amateur Sleuths
The ad read, “Butlers without murderous intent for hire” – Hawthorne thought about giving them some business, but decided that it took a little of the edge off.
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Never Ever Ren Faire
Denise loved wearing corsets and boots for a look that accentuated the fact that she was a Sasquatch.
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No Need to Panic
“Everybody outside just sounds like they’re having more fun than you, but it isn’t true, because if you look around, there’s some silly string back there in my trunk.”
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Home is Where You Make It and Right Now Mine is in Your Leftovers
We knew we had the virus when we started coughing up milky fluid, but a free magic show is a free magic show, and the hospital could wait.
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Out of Print
No one used ink anymore, not since the digital age and the space squids.
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Planted
“I have reflexes like a Venus Flytrap,” bragged ol’ Mister Tullivan, who lived on insects in our garden.
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Ample Parking
“Oh, man, I know I parked it around here somewhere,” Cobb repeated to his fellow lunar astronauts.
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Context
When Gina whispered, “bear with me,” on the phone I thought she was addressing the current turbulence in our relationship, but in retrospect, I should have realized the context, seeing how she was a park ranger and all.
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Playing CDs in the Bedroom of Ms. Jenny Pearson at 3 O’Clock in the Morning
She hit repeat.
Bonus Track
“Okay, we’re recording, here we go… these are the final words of the exploratory team of the United Space Federation Ship Heracles, and while we have reached Betelgeuse Prime, we… Marples, did you just plug a Panini machine into our emergency battery, what the…”
Afterword
-This is Where the Secret of the… “Magic”… is revealed-
The Evolution of One Sentence Stories
First I start by chaining thoughts that have been dominating my head all day into the form of stream of consciousness sentence:
The robots and the dinosaurs struggled over titties.
Then I try to pad it out a little more, play with the subjects contained within the sentence:
Shaking claws, the dinosaurs and robots signed their peace accord, realizing there were enough luscious titties for all.
Now, that really sucked, but the next stage is where I then look at an idea formed within the sentence and write something based on the absurdity or poignancy of the idea.
Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock....his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
Then I run this by legal and realize I’m plagiarizing and infringing on several copyrights, so I give it another go, probably having been distracted by multiple colorful plastic objects by this point:
“Oh no, that’s great – I’m seeing someone new too, and, um, yeah, she’s cute and she’s got money and a mansion and… magical powers… and a dinosaur...”
Okay, so that’s better, but it needs a title – so begins the all-important title process:
New Story
That’s a little dry, so what I’ll probably do next, given the nature of the story is poke fun of my own relationship ineptitudes:
No Really, She Does
Then I put it all together, adding the all-too pretentious credits:
No Really, She Does
by
b mitsoda
“Oh no, that’s great – I’m seeing someone new too, and, um, yeah, she’s cute and she’s got money and a mansion and… magical powers… and a dinosaur...”
And that’s how a One Sentence Story is created, at least the ones not written next to a sulfur vent.
Really, that’s all there is to it. Also sustained tweaking and self-doubt after the fact. And a lot of them deleted, thrown out, scribbled over, and banished from this realm with the help of forbidden curses.
Um… well, you’re at the end. You have to admit, the book really had a really great beginning and – well, to be honest, it was a lot of filler from halfway on, huh? I mean, there were a few good ones, but they started getting really raunchy. So many non-technical terms for body parts and stories about bears.
(Hey, at least I didn’t pad it with pictures of my cat – not that my cat isn’t adorable, but who needs that, really?)
Anyhow, on behalf of the amnesiac astronauts, rampaging fauna, secret humans, myriad Frankensteins, dream giraffes, Grandleburg enthusiasts, wise fathers, personified objects, dick jokes, time travelers, impossible scientists, and port-soaked prose, I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading!
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