A potential submission to NPR's Fiction Writing Contest

This is quite possibly the worst entry I've ever written. In fact, this was actually a writing assignment given to a bunch of sixteen year-olds. They had to begin wtih "No one really believed the story at first" and end with "Like all good things, it came to an end." I was going to showcase their work, but decided to showcase my own instead. No, really. No need to thank me.

"By This Rulebook, I Rule"

A tale of danger, discipline and derring-do, straight from the bowels of a public school! Maybe even the one...your kids go to!

No one really believed the story at first. Least of all Dean of Students Hank Thumpkins. It was just too strange: a guy? And another guy? In the hallway? Fighting?

“Nobody fights in this here school!” Thumpkins declared. “My discipline is too stern! They’re too afraid to fight in this here school!”

Hall monitor Jesse Hueber thought to himself of palm trees and beach cabanas: where he would soon be taking his vacation and where he wouldn’t have to listen to the big, sweating, bull-necked idiot in front of him. But that was several hours in the future, and for now, he had the dean to persuade. Maybe this time, he could be persuaded with the facts.

“I saw the fight,” he said patiently. “I broke it up.”

“Stress, m’boy,” Thumpkins said, swiveling back in his office chair and blowing cigar smoke all over the room. “Nerves. Happens to the best of us. I remember when I was fighting in the war--“

“Sir, I broke the fight up, and I brought the two boys in here to get a referral.” Hueber gestured behind him, where the boys sat sulking, bleeding from their ears and spitting teeth into Thumpkins’ secretary’s coffee mug.

“They look like good young Christians to me,” declared Thumpkins. “Good-hearted, too. What do you want to go starting trouble for around in this here school?”

“This one,” Hueber said, gesturing to the taller boy with brass knuckles and a split lip, “wanted to beat up this one,” here gesturing at the shorter, muscled boy with the black belt in jujitsu and prison tattoos, “for taking his lunch money. He said if he didn’t give it up, he’d beat him up.”

“Uh huh. And then what happened?”

“Then he beat him up.”

“Well if he did give up the money, why would he want to go ahead and beat him up? It just doesn’t add up, Jenkins.”

“My name is Hueber.”

“Whatever.” Thumpkins waved a hand. “Now me, when I’m prosecutin’ a case, I like to make sure I have all the facts at hand.”

“I have all the facts, sir,” Hueber said grimly. “I was there. I saw it.”

“Doesn’t mean you have all the facts, does it, Jenkins?”

“Sir—“

“What’s that boy’s blood type?” Thumpkins asked abruptly.

Hueber blinked again. “Sir?”

“His astrological sign? Heritage? Opinions about the future of the gold market?”

Hueber stared, his jaw working soundlessly.

“You don’t know? Then how can you say you have all the facts?”

“I don’t…I…sir, he’s bleeding on me!”

“Pure speculation, my boy. Why, that blood could have come from anywhere before it started oozing out his veins. Now ain’t that so? Say that’s so, boy.”

“Sir…”

“Won’t have any of this nonsense in this here school, Jenkins. Go wash that boy’s blood off your face. You’re a disgrace to your uniform.”

Hueber started sweating. “I don’t wear a uniform, sir.”

“And you never will, not with that attitude. Shape up or ship out, that’s my motto.” Thumpkins looked at his watch. “Well, now, I think you boys have learned a valuable lesson, haven’t you?”

“Sure have, sir,” said the tall boy, cracking his knuckles and staring malevolently at the other.

“I have indeed,” responded the squat boy, drawing a line across his throat and flipping a pair of nunchuks across his chest expertly.

“Good.” The dean beamed triumphantly. “Now, Jenkins, I suggest you go start your vacation. Beginning right about now, isn’t it? You’ll feel better after you get some time away.”

And Jenkins—er, Hueber, did. He had a great vacation. But like all good things, it came to an end.

NPR's Fiction Contest, Take 7--A Western

This month, some author I never heard of gave the marching orders: "You want to enter the contest? Get your little story published? Oh, how cute! Of course you can give it a shot! And maybe you'll win! And maybe I'll quit writing and go back to busing tables! Anyway, send your putrid attempt at creativity to NPR before the end of September. The rules: Your 600-word story has to begin with someone coming into town, and end with someone leaving town. Got it? Good. Don't screw it up."

To me, this seemed like the perfect opportunity for a Western. So...

----------------------------------------------------------

"He Came for a Drink...of Death!"
a pulp Western by professional pulp Western writer Tripton Duncan (Western writer of pulps)

“I’m looking for a killer.”

Christian encyclopedia salesman Skinny Muler spurted rancid beer out of his mouth and turned to gape at the tall, weather-beaten stranger who’d just sauntered into the Drunken Horse Saloon. His face was grizzled, his eyes a perpetual squint and his expression was that of a man who killed as easy as some men breathed. Good. Maybe he’d be in the market for a new set of encyclopedias.

“Mister,” he began, reaching for his satchel, “if it’s global warming you’re looking to disprove, I’ve got just the—"

"He was riding a horse," the stranger continued. "He's wearing a cowboy hat."



Larry Diddlesman, town barber and closet horse molester, sputtered a mouthful of whiskey onto his table. "Horse?" he stammered. "Hat? Why that sounds like Bellybutton Lint Leroy Baines!"



The stranger nodded. "That's him. Where is he?"



Pigtrough McWithers, one of Larry’s necrophilic drinking companions, sputtered the mouthful of turpentine he’d been drinking and bolted out the door. Larry shot a glance desperately to the side. "Bellybutton? Never heard of him."

"How come they call him Bellybutton Lint?" Skinny wondered. "Because he's got lint in his bellybutton?"

"No." The stranger rolled a homemade manure cigarette and lit it. "Because he's really tall. Now where is he?"



"I told you I ain't seen him," said Larry. Meanwhile, Johnson Nopenis at the other end of the saloon sputtered ranch dressing out of his mouth and ran out the door. 



"Then how did you know he was in town?" the stranger asked casually. "And how did you know he's going to the train station, to catch the 4:10 to Columbus?"

"I never said that," stammered Larry, sputtering whiskey and outhouse water. "Besides, he's going to El Paso!"

"Uh huh," the stranger drawled, plucking a piece of cowshit from his lip. "On the 4:10."

"He's getting on the 6:30!" spat Larry. He stood up, noticing an attractive foal mare outside (which sputtered its drinking water all over the porch in terror) and began running towards the door. "At the station by the post office. And I don’t even know him!"

“Go hump your horse,” the stranger said mildly. Outside, a terrified whinney erupted. Meanwhile, to the rest of the bar, the stranger announced, “If Baines comes back, tell him Bart Johnson’s in town, and he's coming to kill him for--"

"Say!" Skinny gaped, drool running down his chin. “Bart Johnson! Why you’re that poet from San Francisco!”

“What?” The stranger paused, then grabbed a drink of whiskey off the bar so he could sputter it out of his mouth. “Er, no. No, I’m the psycho killer from out Wichita Way, the one who shot—"

“You’re the one who wrote ‘Love is Like a Limp-Wristed Flower?’” Bartender Skunk Cassidy, busy cleaning up all the sputtered whiskey, beamed. “Why, that poem makes me sob like an Englishman!”

“I tell you, mister,” Skinny proclaimed, “your sonnets about how small testicles are a sign of a loyal heart are what gave me the guts to start beating my wife.”

“That ain’t me,” the stranger protested, careful to enunciate his bad grammar. “I, uh, I be Bart Johnson, meanest sonofabitch in the west.”

“The Bart Johnson who wrote an ode to President Garfield in otto rima?” Skunk wondered. “And the Bart Johnson who was caught having sexual relations with a maple tree? Say, did you know there’s one of those by the train station?”

Everyone waited. The stranger appeared to be doing some figuring.



“By the post office, right?” he asked Skunk, heading for the door.

Outside, the maple tree sputtered its whiskey.

From NPR's Contest Story Site: Three-Minute Fiction is back, and it's time for Round Five!

Our contest has a simple premise: Listeners send in original short stories that can be read in three minutes or less. We're looking for original work no longer than 600 words.

Each round, our judges throw out a challenge. This time, your story must begin with the line, "Some people swore that the house was haunted." It must end with, "Nothing was ever the same again after that."

Those lines were written by the judge for this round, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham....because he's a huge fan of ghost stories.

“Those Deadbeat Dead”

A short story

Some people swore the house was haunted. Most just swore.

It wasn’t so much the two-story brownstone’s foreboding façade, or its squeaky hinges or vampire, cannibal rats. It wasn’t even that it was built on top of an ancient Native American sacrificial site, and it wasn’t the regular parade of headless apparitions that got people boiling mad.

No, the deal-breaker for everyone, and what got Neighborhood Watch Patrolmen Rory and Buck knocking on doors up and down the block to raise awareness, was whether or not the ghosts were legal.

“Because we’re not just taking this country back for America,” Rory would tell people up and down Pleasant Street. “We’re taking it back from the undocumented undead too.”

Buck honestly didn’t give a shit whether the house had one ghost or two hundred, or whether the ghosts had all just taken the night shift at the local Wal Mart. He was only following Rory because he really wanted to get into Rory’s sister’s pants, and the afternoon before, he and Rory’s sister, a fox of an activist named Jessica, had gotten plastered on a cheap bottle of wine, during the course of which he’d been granted immediate access to her boobs while she’d speculated about what might be in the house, “people all dead and on welfare? That would leave this nation vulnerable!” Yet now, at three in the afternoon, with a pounding headache and a dry mouth, he was wondering if maybe he hadn’t overestimated the allure his investigations would have in Jessica’s mind when he returned to her later that afternoon.

Rory, however, was a man on a mission, unlikely to back down.

“It’s the principle of the thing,” he told Buck for the twentieth time. “The Constitution doesn’t say anything about whether or not the occupants have to be alive.”

“Activist judges, man,” said Buck, wishing Rory would shut up so he could go back to daydreaming about his pleasant afternoon with Jessica.

“Just wait until some activist judge manages to tack a bunch of bloodsucking, brain-eating, chain rattling Mexicans into the Fourteenth Amendment. Then what? They’re in our schools, our factories, our abandoned asylums...”

“Exactly,” said Buck. “Illegal. Also breasts.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Buck said. He ignored his friend’s stare and squinted up at the house. They were in front of it, and he could faintly hear the sound of the walls moaning and bleeding.

“Let me handle this,” Rory said, pushing past him and rapping against the dark mahogany in front of him. “Damned illegals. Probably socialist ghosts, too.”

Buck scowled, and thought of breasts some more.

The two waited a minute. Eventually, a transparent, cadaverous white man appeared with a blood-smeared mouth and sharp fangs, dressed in black, sporting a cape. “Visitors,” he intoned in a smooth, Eastern European accent. “Welcome to my home. I bid you enter! Mwa-hah-hah!”

“Good evening, sir,” Rory began in his best official voice. “My name is Rory Calhoun, and this is my friend Buck Mulligan. We’re canvassing the neighborhood, and we’re wondering if we could inquire as to the residency status of this house, specifically pertaining to number of people, both alive and dead, currently living in this fine establishment.”

“What?” The apparition, startled, drew back from the door. “Uh, sorry, no habla espanol. I, er, love Americanos. Go local sports team!” The door slammed in their faces.

Rory beamed triumphantly at Buck. “What did I tell you? That guy’s never seen the inside of INS, I tell you.”

“Oh yeah?” Buck retorted. “Well I’m seeing the inside of your sister tonight.”

Nothing was ever the same again after that.

Finis