Short Story Contest April 2010

Loyalty always pays off, and despite the fact it was conjured up in a mere 40 minutes Jiku Neon's story, entitled Pi, was a real treasure. Sadly it was the only entry last month (slow section = </3), but the author's usual genius would surely have outclassed most other efforts anyway. The story broke out of its monotony in a simple but sweet fashion, and I'm not sure if the rhyming couplets were intended but they were just right.

This month's theme follows the style of February's contest. Your story must begin with the sentence "It was not a normal day in the life of Terry."

Take it as you will. xD

Go guys. <3

 

I apologize for the previous inactivity. I will attempt to enter a story this month if my god damned science project does not get in the way. Temporary reserve post.

EDIT: Since I cannot sleep at all I will be working on a story all night; hopefully a contest entry shall appear later on. You may expect it to consist of other nonsense with no coherent plot as I have not thought up an absolute thing.

EDIT THE SECOND: The ending was rather rushed so the pacing may be a bit strange. Parts of the message of this story may also be muddled up due to myself being horribly tired at the time of its creation so you may take it as what you will.

Spoiler

TEASHADES

xxxIt was not a normal day in the life of Terry, but what certainly was in such an age?
xxxTerry was a man of rather refined simplicity; a blunt, hard-working man that cared not of such bountiful aristocracy that pervaded the modern life of his time. Every day he found his rather dull self in the midst of fanciful gentlemen and polite ladies, hedonistic figures that passed by him without a care but their own narcissistic needs. They invited poor Terry to parties and dances and even a few funerals; they treated poor Terry like an old acquaintance, or, may one daresay, “friend”, perhaps. But Terry? Terry considered all of these complications sorts of abnormalities in his own right; he was aware that these men and women loved him only for his possessive wealth, not his actual personality. Never in poor Terry's life did he have a “normal” day.
xxxBut it was, indeed, up to Terry as to what he considered “normal”. Terry would search for days and nights looking for something beyond the generic kitsch of the city; the copy-pasted fanciful aristocratic lifestyle that manufactured itself in the great assembly lines of the country's own industry and its lack of noticing its own dwindling resources. Terry would spend days in boutiques and stores, nights in bars and dance clubs, still rambling on with beat poetry and the sultry sound of the sousaphone. Terry found all of this as a great useless illusion as to cover up such inconsistencies the country had with such common public topics. He would walk with his head down, dance with his back arched and stare with a nihilistic mask of a face as he watched the gallant, doll-like men and women pass him by in their surrealistic Edwardian-era wear. For nights and days, for months and years, this abnormality would appear as a dream to poor Terry; a nightmare, even – one that Terry held in such lifelike quality that he could not escape it out of his own will.
xxxAnd thus was it indeed not a normal day in the life of Terry, but whatever would such a man as Terry do in a circumstance?

xxxIt was certainly one day, however, before the War, as Terry remembered it, that his rather abnormal life – and his negative views on such a life – changed quite dramatically. It may be quite amusing how a single event in a man's life may completely deconstruct his mind and re-arrange itself to better fit the needs of his new thought process, rather like some sort of absurdist form-fitting wear that was prone to excessive tearing. Terry had just recently entered his current investigatory bar: a small, corner-side midnight pub that held all sorts of lovely folk. And as he sat on his usual side of the rather long counter, he counted their dwindling numbers – broken men, saddened fools, sleeping alcoholics that were soon to be forced out of the cramped building, and the general drunk buffoons that enjoyed their last collaborative drinking session before their eventual drafting into the army. Terry pitied all of these sad folk; he was certainly not surprised that such pleasure and hedonism could exist in even the most vile, rat-infested corners of the city fringes.
xxxIt was perhaps the exhilarating rush that was associated with a midnight alcohol stand or simply an uncontrollable parapraxis, but with the passing of time Terry began to duly notice and notice a very specific man standing out among the generic crowd of lifeless drinkers. The man, in all of his cigar-smoking, teashades-wearing splendour, sat quietly on the other end of the counter, respective and – in a surprise to Terry – quite happy with himself. This was a man, Terry would think, that held such joy with him despite clearly being a denizen of the bottom rungs of society.
xxxTerry decided to sit next to the interesting man in an attempt to hold some sort of conversation that would save him another dire night. The man's first reaction, however, completely surprised Terry:
xxx“Want a drink?” The man asked.
xxx“Wh-what? Oh, uh, no. I just had a bunch or somesuch.”
xxx“I don't know, sir,” Continued the man, shifting around his old cigar, now shockingly appearing to Terry as rather old and overused. “You just look like the type of guy who has a lot of problems here or there?”
xxxTerry felt a genuine offence towards this. What was this drunken man's place to completely conclude on Terry's psychological values? But in truth, poor Terry felt more threatened and defensive than angry; how did such a man understand?
xxx“What problems? You think I have problems?” Terry yelled at the man, rather vocally.
xxx“No, no,” Quickly coerced the man. “I was just assuming. You know, assumptions aren't always that accurate, are they? So,” - the man shifted around his cigar yet again and shifted his glasses - “What brings you here, anyway?”
xxx“Why would you care? I would not think it is any of your business.”
xxx“Just curious, y'know.”
xxx“My motives would disgust you anyway. I am going to go move back to where I was before; I thought holding a conversation with you would be interesting but all you seem to be interested in is asking a bunch of questions that are horribly idiotic.” And with such a blunt statement, Terry picked himself up and began to move back to his previous seat, but with a lurch of the old tails of his coat he was forcibly and quite literally turned around, peering directly into the blank – almost deathly – black teashades of the man.
xxx“No, stay. I love hearing problems.”
xxx“Let go of me you crazy alcoholic!” Terry yelled, yanking himself away. But yet, Terry could not help turning back to the face of the man, the man and his teashades that were essential voids of an absent nothingness. Yet, it was this absent nothingness that was staring directly into him; coercing and coaxing poor Terry into revealing all of his secrets to the man. He was, however, able to notice the cigar-choked smile of the man, which sent him reeling into an unforgiving chastisement.
xxx“It's folk like you that make me hate this god-damned aristocracy – what, smiling for no reason? Are you taking some sort of sick, sadistic pleasure out of my suffering? Do you think my suffering is funny?”
xxx“Ah,” The man calmly began, “So I see. You hate smiling, is that it?”
xxx“I hate all forms of such hedonistic pleasure. All they care about is themselves!” Terry spat out.
xxx“I don't know, smiling seems to be quite lovely, sir. Have you actually tried it?”
xxx“I would love to, but it is this society and its narcissistic love for such general and overused richness; its horrible aptitude, that allows me not to do so.”
xxx“So you're a hypocrite.” The man pointed out.
xxx“What?” Terry asked in a relevant fury. “How the hell am I a hypocrite?”
xxx“I never like to judge good, kind-hearted folk when they are their most tipsy, but this is a treasure trove of information.” The man shifted around his old cigar yet again, puffs of dusty grey smoke angelically floating past his shocking eyeglasses.
xxx“So you use me and you don't even answer my question? What kind of man are you?”
xxx“I don't know. Perhaps I would get a better answer if I asked you that question.”
xxxTerry turned slightly confused. “What?”
xxxThe man sent a stalwart push towards his teashades, bringing them further back before the bridge of his nose, before stating such solemn words: “You seem to be a man who is mixed up with everything. You look rather aristocratic yourself and yet you claim to hate what you were built upon. Now, that's quite understandable, but why do you keep blaming, or rather associating, happiness with hedonism?”
xxx“Because happiness and joy are products of pleasure! Pleasure is hedonism!”
xxxThe man let forth a sauntering chuckle, surprising Terry.
xxx“You're taking things to extremes. Look at those men over there,” - The man pointed to the previous drunk friends at the far end of the room - “You think they're hedonistic because they are having fun? You're a pretentious and nihilistic fool. Happiness is not always associated with hedonism, you know. Happiness can flourish in even the dark times – not out of pleasure itself but out of the goodness of mankind as a whole. Hedonism is not happiness, hedonism is a stark pleasure for the boring, wretched qualities of human life that are already present everywhere. Happiness is different.”
xxxTerry turned rather enraged. “What sort of horrid pride do you have insulting a drunk man in his later years?”
xxx“Oh, no, why would I?” The man replied. “I would never do such a thing. I'm simply trying to talk some sense into you; you people are the reason we're going to have that damned war soon.”
xxx“Nonsense! It is this idiotic happiness that runs itself throughout our country that causes this war! This ignorance!”
xxx“Oh yes, I must agree. I hate ignorance too, you know. Never a good thing. But think of those leaders; hypocrites like yourself, always considering their own opinions and themselves over the good of the public. They don't care about happiness or death, the death of the young men and women that are sent out on to the field. Happiness finds death on the battlefield, and this is precisely the plan of these people. They hate happiness. They love such petty conflicts – removal of happiness? A bright-eyed youth finds his way into the vanguard of an advancing army. And then what? Bang. Out goes his kindling life, his happiness. They profit from the unhappiness, all of them.” The man had thrust his pale fist up in a radical gesture. “I'm certainly with you against their disgusting hedonism, but that's just my opinion as an educated prole of a man. You'd really think they'd listen to me, a rambling idiot-savant who is a wise man among drunks? It's the hypocrites I hate, oh yes. And you're one of them, sir. Why hate happiness? Why hate what makes us human?”
xxxTerry's beleaguered and cloudy mind was absolutely silent and devoid of raucous thought. He sat in a rather deathly frozen pose, peering straight into the murky depths of his empty glass. He was horribly dizzy and tired, almost narcoleptic with the recent events that had made such a man think beyond his normal maxims.“You're crazy, you're just rambling on and distributing terrible thoughts to innocent drunk men who never wished for your preaching on a Friday night.” Were the only words poor, poor Terry and his swampy mind could whimper out before his subsequent retrieval of himself and departure from the dilapidated structure.

xxxAnd as the war continued in its few years Terry's mind would always recall the night of himself meeting the man and his unorthodox, contradictory ideas. He would retain this thought through such tough endeavours that associated itself with the war; the eventual economic downfall of his previously immense wealth; his terrifying and excruciatingly painful life in the bunkers below the city as it was devastatingly annihilated in a series of firebombing runs; the death of whatever such family he had; his eventual emigration into the quiet boondocks, the edges of the state. And in the waning days of the war he would sit in the lone farmhouse of his rather rustic relative – usually always out of the area on errands and such – pondering to himself such ideas.
xxxHe had noticed that aristocracy in the nation had come to a crashing end. The hedonism of such figures had, as Terry would always assume, been the complete downfall of such contemptuous men and women. He had heard news stories and reports over such dismissal and destruction of wealth, property, and the economy, and Terry, after many a few years, finally held an itching to once again see the public nation in its current state.
xxxWhat Terry found in the big city, however, astounded him. Not only the current state of the city – a ruin of coagulated cement, distorted towers of rubble and steel, and the dark street corners with their littered trash – but the people of the city. The people were horribly impoverished and depressed; circles of dust in the melancholic crevices of their faces, bone-like, hunger-derived phalanges that extended far beyond reach for any sort of nourishment applicable to them, and their silent, stalking postures. Terry would gasp wretched gasps as he even began to spot a few of the previous aristocrats that he had observed in such lavish parties scuttling around, rat-like, in a desperate attempt to find something, get somewhere, do something at all. This was a world where such people had lost everything and were finally united under banners not of aristocracy or proletarianism but of a stagnant, raw nature that would associate itself with the perils of war. What he found, however, was that none of these men or women were happy.
xxxTerry began to reach the edges of the city as he arrived at an old cemetery. He trekked among the great amounts of marks that were casualties of both war and society – new and simple crosses of rotten wood that were decent enough markings for poor victims of a horrible war; simple tombstones that marked previous deaths before this wretched conflict, and lavish graves of great sizes that were, rather ironically, some of the most destroyed. He walked onwards with sodden weights on his feet, dragging them as he dared to fight such subconscious curiosity. But it could not be staunched any longer as poor Terry finally stopped at the sad and wailing grave of a man he once remembered.
xxx“Death by his own ideals, what a metaphor for man.” Terry concluded quite bitterly, as he picked up the broken teashades from upon the simple plank that stood as a simplistic memento for the memories of such dead men.

xxxTerry, once again, began his abnormal days. He would wander around the city, spirit-like, in search of a normal day; those days of the past that had reflected such hedonism. But it was not hedonism that the poor man was searching for, no, he still detested such an idea. He was searching for traces of what the man had once mentioned to him as “happiness”, and attempted to observe if such a quality could truly bloom even in the remnants of a war that had torn the nation apart.
xxxTerry would search for days and nights looking for something beyond the generic kitsch of the city; the copy-pasted fanciful depressive lifestyle that manufactured itself in the great assembly lines of the country's own implosion and its lack of noticing its own dwindling resources. Terry would spend days in boutiques and stores, nights in bars and dance clubs, still rambling on with beat poetry and the sultry sound of the sousaphone. And it was as here that such a man as Terry noticed the revival of the city; among such beat poetry and jazz sounds, among its dance clubs, stores, and bars, sat a simple happiness that was rekindling itself among the townsfolk. A sort of more human-like, almost general anthropomorphic figure and ideal developed itself through the town and people; philanthropy was awarded and excessive pleasure was chastised. People began looking towards the future and what it held for the survivors of such horrible calamities – Terry indeed included. Liberalism and anti-war began to resurge for the first time in a century, Terry had observed. And as Terry walked among the now-refurbished streets, sparkling with traces of dust as old, individual memoirs and the lovely chatter of children, he indeed discovered that the man from so many years before was correct with his ideals – or at least Terry believed so. As he watched the youthful laughter of children playing on the streets, he was indeed not surprised in the least to sense any sort of fearful sentiments among them. The past was behind them, and yet it still lingered among the air. Terry himself could never forget such a past – not simply for the war, but for the time that his mind absolutely changed.
xxxIn the years that had gone by between the war and its post-conclusion, Terry never had a day which he considered “normal” by his own stringent definition. But perhaps this was a good thing.

 

Gonna have trouble making the deadline given my schedule, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna miss another month of this without my consent. I'll at least rub my face against the keyboard for half an hour and post that if all else fails.

Edit: Eh. It's a failed experiment in surrealistic writing or whatever the hell this actually constitutes. I guess I shouldn't consciously try to write things in that 40 minute benchmark time.

Spoiler

International Worker's Day

It was not a normal day in the life of Terry. No, indeed, it was not. And as she stood there with the hatchet-like blade of the industrial sized meat cleaver in her hands, poised to make the final cut, she realized this and shuddered. Esther Terry was a short order cook in her thirties and lying on her fine establishment’s meat locker floor was a corpse. Rather, it used to be a corpse. Now it was sausage fixings. Rather, it was about to be sausage fixings, once Terry got up the stomach to finish the job. To the casual observer this scene would prompt gasps of revulsion, fear, and probably some form of surprise. Terry had to take this into account when she heard a casual observer enter the meat locker. In a flash of the blood drenched blade the observer was scared to silence. It was her supplier. Terry thought quickly and crafted a lie so beautiful that no one could do anything but believe it. It’d exonerate her and make everything right. If not, then she’d just have more sausages to turn a profit on later. Then she forthrightly told him the truth of the matter.

The almost sausage fixings that were up until quite recently a corpse came from an entrepreneur whom Terry had met that afternoon, six or seven hours prior to this happy occasion. He had died earlier that week when he took a few too many sips from the vodka bottle on the ski slopes. When he was first reported missing Terry didn’t care very much for it. Outsiders were always getting lost and occasionally getting dead. It was the natural order of things and it was far from her mind to interfere with the natural order as she had with a very large knife not many moments ago. But in the given situation it was there not here.

The supplier, supplied meat among other things, but primarily meat. In the mountains people liked to eat meat. Maybe it was the flavor, maybe it was the ease of conversion from cow or pig to human. The supplier stood just out of blade’s reach from Terry. He’d always wondered about her. Her sanity that was. She was all alone running a restaurant up in the far north and serving meat. Lot of skiers died on the slopes. Lots more had never been found. People are meat too. The supplier would have said that this was a normal day in the life of Terry if he’d forgotten his job. But he hadn’t for the time being forgotten his job.

The almost sausage fixings that had just moments ago been rendered into its current state wobbled and jiggled with every step and shout between the two above it. This disturbed the two stamping and shouting above it. The supplier wanted to go home and pretend this was all a dream. Factually, he hadn’t decided this wasn’t a dream yet. Terry wanted to finish making the almost sausage fixings into sausage fixings and pretend this was all a dream. Truthfully, she had discarded all hopes of that happening. So the two continued shouting and stamping as their stomachs quivered in inadvertent disgust.

The entrepreneur was originally at the ski lodge near Terry’s fine establishment on a business venture. The venture was a failed one and a spectacularly failed one at that. On his way back to his hotel room where he’d planned on contemplating his suicide after a day’s skiing and businessing the entrepreneur met with an unfortunate accident. Whatever it was it left his body in one piece, perfectly in order to be buried. But it wasn’t buried. Terry came upon it by a miraculous series of happenstances and ended up dragging it back to her fine establishment under the impression that it was a person not a corpse.

The supplier had grown more wary of Terry with the recount of her story but also less frightened of the blade wielding short order cook. He could take her if she came at him. There were places to hide and weapons to find. But for now it was best to just leave and stop yelling because the almost sausage fixings kept jiggling. So the supplier announced his departure but Terry would have none of it. She demanded his complicity and threatened his compliance. The supplier was by that time thinking of how to escape. All the routes that had seemed open when she wasn’t telling him to stay closed abruptly to him.

Terry had decided to freeze the almost sausage fixings and throw them down the garbage disposal by the time her supplier insisted on leaving but that wouldn’t do at all. She had to find a way to keep him there to ensure his secrecy. But how to achieve it was less clear than the goal itself. So she hopped over the almost sausage fixings and grasped the man by his bony wrist and demanded that he stay and help her hide the evidence. The evidence of what exactly she did not know, but if a human sausage wasn’t suspicious then she’d have no problems.
The almost sausage fixings were scraped up off the floor and put back together with the rest of the parts that were once an entrepreneur and thrown into a bag which due to vague concerns was thrown into a another bag and bother were sealed tightly, not in that order precisely. The bags were put into a box and thrown, whilst in said box, into the freezer.

The supplier, having done his part, really wanted to leave and keep on thinking that this was all a dream. Terry frowned and allowed him to leave this time.

Terry was alone again. Alone, except for the almost sausage fixings that were evidence of something that sat boxed in her freezer. This most certainly was not a normal day in the life of Terry.