So my little bit of flash flush, "Apartment 14B," is in the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Flush Fiction anthology, a collection of 87 flash fiction stories from all over (available now from Amazon and other fine retailers), and the nice folks at Uncle John's have offered to do a giveaway via the blogs of the authors who appear in the book. (As a note, the faintly scatological title has nothing to do with the content of the stories; it's just an Uncle John's thing.)
So here's the rules:
Below, I'm going to write the first line of a story. If you want to be entered to win a free copy of Flush Fiction, post a comment below. In your comment, you must continue the story. You can do as little as one or two words (if you're not feeling very creative) or as much as a sentence. (Don't do a super-long sentence, please. Spirit of cooperation and all.) You can post more than once, but you'll only get one entry in the drawing no matter how many times you do, and I'd ask that you wait for at least one other person to post before jumping back in. (Not that y'all are prone to that sort of behavior, of course, but just to establish the expectations.)
After, oh, say, a week (so midnight on April 11), I'll wrap it up. I'll use one of the myriad of random number generators available to me to pick one lucky entrant to receive the free book, and then I'll clean up the story text (adding an ending if need be) and post it in the Pages section (up at the upper right), so that we can all bask in our co-author status together.
Now, I'm not shipping the book, so I'll need a name and address to give to the publisher so you can receive your prize. If you don't want to post that kind of thing in a public comments section (and I wouldn't recommend it), then please at least post an e-mail or something where I can contact you to gather that information in the event it becomes necessary.
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In honor of the anthology, the opening phrase of the story is:
Of all the things I'd expected to encounter in the guest bathroom, I hadn't been prepared for this.
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14 comments:
Yes, it's a swirling vortex. I get that. Normally, however, the vortex is much more water and much less eldritch.
Despite the dizzying display swirling colorfully in the bowl, I really had to go, so I unzipped and began to relieve my bladder.
How many times had I unwittingly done so already, I mused as that particular state of relaxation stole over me that only men at the commode experience.
Then I started to feel a strange sensation.
... Crawling from my toes to the top of my hairs ...
What I then screamed was sufficient cause for my wife to come running, the lunatic asylum already on speed-dial.
But by then I had already disappeared.
My hat, floating in the bowl, the only evidence I was ever there.
The vortex spun around me as I traveled to some far, unknown place.
I suddenly wished I hadn't left my wallet in the car.
But hey, I'm wearing my Lucky Shorts, my St. Christopher's Medal, that rabbit's foot keychain from great-aunt Petulia (though considering what happened to her perhaps I shouldn't put too much faith in that particular doodad) and a paperback copy of Kafka's Metamorphoses tucked into my back pocket. What more could a guy need?
"Hey are you the one who pissed on my head?" I turned to see a short man with a rough beard, wet hair, and the lower body of a skunk.
That alone would've been enough to worry me normally, but then I saw the knife.
I turned as though looking at the big sign in a foreign language, furtively zipping up. "No idea what you're talking about," I mumbled, keeping a close eye on that big fluffy tail of his.
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