2006 Results
Dept. of English & Comparative Literature\
San Jose State University\
One Washington Square\
San Jose, CA 95192\
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2006 Results#
Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his
one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open
to reveal a woman whose body said you\'ve had your last burrito for a
while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could
make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.
Jim Guigli\
Carmichael, CA\
A retired mechanical designer for the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is
the winner of the 24th running of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. A
resident of the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, Guigli displayed
appalling powers of invention by submitting sixty entries to the 2006
Contest, including one that has been \"honored\" in the Historical
Fiction Category. \"My motivation for entering the contest,\" he
confesses, \"was to find a constructive outlet for my dementia.\"
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the
memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl
Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is the essence of
simplicity: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to
imaginary novels. Although best known for \"The Last Days of Pompeii\"
(1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the
expression \"the pen is mightier than the sword,\" and phrases like
\"the great unwashed\" and \"pursuit of the almighty dollar,\"
Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal
words that the \"Peanuts\" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, \"It was
a dark and stormy night.\"
The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only
three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic
standards, the contest went public the following year and ever since has
annually attracted thousands of entries from all over the world.
While the Winner parodies hard-boiled detective fiction, the runner-up
toys with perhaps the most famous piece of dialogue from Clint
Eastwood\'s \"Dirty Harry\" movie. In keeping with the bignitude and
high seriousness of the Contest, the Grand Prize winner will receive a
pittance. Other winners must content themselves with becoming household
names.
Runner-Up#
\"I know what you\'re thinking, punk,\" hissed Wordy Harry to his new
editor, \"you\'re thinking, \'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or
only five?\' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this
excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in
the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you\'ve
got to ask yourself one question: \'Do I feel loquacious?\' - well do
you, punk?\"
Stuart Vasepuru\
Edinburgh, Scotland\
\
Winner: Adventure#
Christy, lounging in the gondola which slipped smoothly through the
enveloping mist had her first inkling that something was afoot as she
heard pattering hooves below (for our story is not in Venice but
Switzerland with its Provolone and Toblerone) and craning her not
unlovely neck she narrowed her eyes at the dozen tiny reindeer, pelting
madly down the goat trail.
Irene Buttuls\
Lytton, B.C\
Runner-Up#
She looked at her hands and saw the desiccated skin hanging in Shar-Pei
wrinkles, confetti-like freckles, and those dry, dry cuticles--even her
\"Fatale Crimson\" nail color had faded in the relentless sun to the
color of old sirloin--and she vowed if she ever got out of the Sahara
alive, she\'d never buy polish on sale at Walgreen\'s again.
Christin Keck\
Kent, OH\
Dishonorable Mentions#
It was a day, like any other day, in that Linus got up, faced the
sunrise, used his inhaler, applied that special cream between his toes,
wrote a quick note and put it in a bottle, and wished he\'d been
stranded on the island with something other than 40 cases each of
inhalers, decorative bottles, and special toe cream.
Chris Harget\
Campbell, CA\
The cold, cynical wind molested the auburn tresses of the fair damsel
clinging to the steel of the rail trestle, from which vantage point she
could see that it was a long way down to where she would land if she
fell, which, given the velocity she would attain and the unfriendly
pavement leering up at her, added to soft tissue\'s low tolerance for
sudden impacts, would be a very bad thing.
Pat Hricko\
Nicholson, PA\
Gripping his six-shot Colt Python with 8-inch barrel and Royal Blue
finish, and tightening the straps on his Paratec Speed 2000 parachute,
Jake leaped from the left aft hatchway of the tumbling,
green-and-silver, twin-engined Embraer Lineage 1000, which had seating
for nineteen passengers.
Johnathan Munroe\
Halifax, NS\
Todd languished there, neck deep in the pumpkin-hued Amargosa Desert
sand like a long forgotten cupcake in an Easy Bake Oven gone hellishly
amok, and it finally made sense . . . \"ooohhhh, DEATH Valley.\"
Jeffrey Barnes\
Atlanta, Georgia\
Winner: Children\'s Literature#
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe who had so much equity
(because our story, dear children, is set in Miami\'s hot real estate
market) that she upgraded the exterior to blue suede siding as a tribute
to her idol, Elvis, moved her kids to a bootee out back, and then
reopened the place as the \"Are You Lonesome Tonight?\" motel (but
you\'ll have to wait until you\'re 18 to read any further).
Barbara Bridges\
Sierra Madre, CA\
Winner: Detective Fiction#
It was a dreary Monday in September when Constable Lightspeed came
across the rotting corpse that resembled one of those zombies from
Michael Jackson\'s \"Thriller,\" except that it was lying down and not
performing the electric slide.
Derek Fisher\
Ottawa, ON\
Runner-Up#
The victim said her attacker was nondescript -- 5\' 10 and ¾\", 163
pounds, with Clairol #83N hair (a hint of #84N at his temples) -- and
last seen wearing Acuvue2 contacts, a white Hanes 65/35% poly-cotton
t-shirt with a 3mm round Grey Poupon stain on the neckband, Levi\'s 501s
missing the second button, and Nike Crosstrainers with muddy aglets.
Linda Fields\
Framingham, MA
Dishonorable Mentions#
Nick Stiletto, a three-inch ash hanging from his generic P&Q-brand;
cigarette, squinted through the wispy smoke across the nicked
linoleum-covered table at the man in the blue suit, wondering why he had
gone into private detection when he could have easily inherited his
father\'s cat-stretching business in Peoria.
Ed Buhrer\
Louisa, VA\
Dawkins leaned against the building to avoid both the November wind and
his prey and quietly congratulated himself for selecting his
calf-length, double-breasted trench coat in a 60 cotton/40 poly
left-hand twill weave with its wool felt collar, snug fitting belt with
gun-metal fittings, reinforced buttons and inverted back pleat for
repelling thugs and inclement weather.
Bill Raftery\
Glen Rock, NJ\
\"Christmas Eve fell upon the piazza, and the pealing, the
tintinnabulous pealing, (perhaps not a pealing but an incessant
tinkling, albeit an appealing incessant tinkling) of the street
performers reached my ears, masking the shot, which would have rung out
had not the tintinnabulations raised such an incessant tinkling that the
sound died as dead as the musician who fell like Christmas Eve at my
feet - his bell having been rung.\"
Ben Ross\
Lexington, NC\
Detective Otto Slugbert liked to compare himself to a legendary chess
master, but his arch-enemy Bert Boswell often sneered that at best he
resembled a merely average player of Mille Bornes ® or Tri-Ominoes
®.
Mary Hickey\
Kirkersville, OH\
Winner: Fantasy Fiction#
It was within the great stony nostril of a statue of Landrick the Elfin
Vicelord that Frodo\'s great uncle, Jasper Baggins, happened to stumble
upon the enchanted Bag of Holding, not to be confused with the Hag of
Bolding, who was quite fond of leeks, most especially in a savory Hobbit
knuckle stew.
Camille Barigar\
Twin Falls, ID\
Winner: Historical Fiction#
While Hector and the heroes of Troy trembled behind the ramparts as
cowboys below the walls raced up and down the beach, six-guns blazing
and cries of \"yee-hah!\" filling the air, other cowboys across the sea
were laboring gamely but in vain to throw a palisade around Wichita,
Kansas, thereby adding veracity to the old homily of history that it is
easier to cow a fortified city than to fortify a cow city.
Christopher Backeberg\
KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa\
Runner-Up#
The McCain boys strode off proudly to fight in the Civil War, one for
the Union and one for the Confederacy, neither of them giving a single
thought to who would play them in the television movie of their story,
which would be decided more than a hundred years later by 20-something
casting agents who kept getting the Civil War and World War II mixed up.
Carmen Fought\
Diamond Bar, CA\
Dishonorable Mentions#
When Debbie decided that Salt \'n\' Pepper Beard was the most attractive
pirate on the ship, she realized that choosing him was due to the advice
of Sylvia, her new Life Coach, to be realistic about her own age and to
open herself up to romance where it lay, unlike the troublesome past
where she would have wished that only the younger pirates take advantage
of her.
Jim Guigli\
Carmichael, CA\
If Gilbert had known then what he knew now, he would have seen that the
dilemma facing him--to do a good deed for the wrong reason or to do a
bad deed for the right reason--had long ago been shown to be two sides
of the same coin by the philosopher known as Theragora of Crete even
though he was not from Crete at all, but from Malta, which of course was
not called Malta when Theragora was there.
Hubert Kennedy\
Concord, CA\
The king\'s men breathed heavily under their thick black hoods as they
secured the wrists and ankles of prisoner William Tumey of Kent and as
the rack\'s handle began to turn the ropes tightened and William\'s
limbs were slowly stretched in opposite directions until his spine began
to pop much like a bag of Redenbachers in a microwave and for something
like the time it takes a hummingbird\'s wings to complete one cycle
William smiled and euphorically languished in perfect lumbar alignment.
Daniel Kern\
Boise, ID\
Winner: Purple Prose#
A single sparkling tear fell from Little Mary\'s cheek onto the
sidewalk, then slid into the storm drain, there to join in its course
the mighty waters of the Los Angeles River and, eventually, Long Beach
Harbor, with its state-of-the-art container-freight processing
facilities.
Bill Mac Iver\
Berkeley, CA\
Runner-Up#
Her angry accusations burned Clyde like that first bite of a double
cheese pizza, when the toppings slide off and sear that small elevation
of the oral mucosa, just behind the front teeth, known as the incisive
papilla, which is linked to the discriminatory function of the taste
buds except, where Clyde was concerned, when it came to women.
Pamela Patchet Hamilton\
Beaconsfield, Quebec\
Dishonorable Mentions#
It had been a dark and stormy night, but as dawn began to light up the
eastern sky, to the west the heavens suddenly cleared, unveiling a pale
harvest moon that reposed gently atop the distant mesa like a pumpkin on
a toilet with the lid down.
Gerald R. Johnson\
Vancouver, WA\
Lisa moved like a cat, not the kind of cat that moves with a slinky
grace but more like the kind that always falls off the book shelf when
he\'s washing himself and then gets all mad at you like it\'s your fault
(which it wasn\'t although it probably was kind of mean to laugh at him
like that), although on the bright side, she hardly ever attacked
Ricky\'s toes in his sleep.
Debra Allen\
Wichita Falls, TX\
Words cannot describe the exquisite loveliness of the brilliant azure
sky with its cerulean striations of periwinkle, cornflower, and cyan.
Mary Barberio\
Northville, MI\
As he saw his master approach, his tail wagged severely like an elderly
lady fanning herself with a cardboard fan with a Bible verse on one side
and a picture of Jesus on the other while singing hymn 567 from the
Common Book of Hymns on an August afternoon revival in southern Indiana.
He rose quickly when she entered, not like the flag being raised at the
American Legion in a jerky fashion, but more like the light red Creme
Soda in the straw of a teenage girl or boy on the back porch of his
mobile home late in the evening.
Ron Bird\
Lakehills, TX\
As I watched the sun rise through the wisps of smog like an angry
Scandinavian sumo wrestler clad in a gold lam� muumuu, riding an
arthritically slow escalator through the smoke of his own cheap panatela
to the linens and beddings floor at J C Penneys, I realized that upon
the orb\'s overtopping the horizon, simple geophysics would deal that
metaphor a quick and far less painful death than it deserved.
Dennis Grace\
Austin, Texas\
The nervous and untried exotic dancer seemed to cling protectively to
her brass pole like the edge of a roll of plastic wrap when you are
looking for the beginning of the roll and it seems like it\'s healed up
or melted into the rest of the wrap until finally you just give up and
use foil or wax paper instead.
Dwight Jenkins\
Sun City, CA\
The steam rose off his sweaty red flannel shirt like cotton candy on a
cardboard cone, if cotton candy were transparent in a misty sort of way
and didn\'t actually stick to its cone, but instead rose upwards
something like steam rising off a sweaty flannel shirt in the twilight
of an early winter Vermont afternoon.
T. Edward Lavoie\
Essex Junction VT\
David loved Marisela\'s voice, which was like fresh honeydew melon
wrapped in fine prosciutto, and pierced with a round, teal gourmet
toothpick, set on a Lenox Fruits of Life serving plate upon a mahogany
table in a brilliantly sunlit (albeit in need of redecorating) dining
room, but he wasn\'t very fond of anything she said.
Stephen V. Masse\
Medford, MA\
The sun, which much resembled the yolk of a sunny-side up egg, set over
the slight hill like a cheerio falling off the back of a spoon when a
spoon is upside-down on a table and a cheerio is set on top of it.
Katrina Medoff\
Wilmington, DE\
When he heard the woman upstairs scream, the Maytag man\'s heart thumped
in his chest like an off-balance washer full of heavy bath towels.
Linda Shakespeare\
Elk Grove, CA\
Gray hung over the morning like a gauze bandage, the kind you wrap
loosely over an oozing wound to keep it covered but still let air in,
but the eastern sky reddened slowly, like the first signs of blood
poisoning moving up an arm.
Russ Winter\
Janesville, MN\
Winner: Romance#
Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious
upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the
most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor
Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in
the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the
wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.
Dennis Barry\
Dothan, AL\
Runner-Up#
Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place
team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer
the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all
the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that
irritating barking.
Dan Winters\
Los Altos Hills, CA\
Dishonorable Mentions#
Our story begins with Raul, gently stroking Priscilla\'s raven hair,
gazing into her coal-dark eyes, eyes that reminded him of the blackness
of the inside of a size 11 ½ D shoebox, which in turn reminded him he
needed to get his Bass Weejuns re-soled before that job interview next
week with the owner of the janitorial service.
Gordon Bassham\
Andover, KS\
Ramon kissed Juanita hard and fast, his tongue probing her mouth like an
urologist\'s finger searching for a lone polyp on an engorged prostate
gland, which reminded Ramon that he needed to get a colonic irrigation
to make next week\'s annual physical more pleasant for both him and his
doctor.
Ted Begley\
Lexington KY\
Sylvia leaned seductively back in her chair and downed the shot of cheap
gin that Brad had poured for her, and speculated once again that, even
if it did taste like something you\'d rub on a horse, it had the
pleasant side effect of softening Brad\'s facial symmetry which had
always reminded her of the collapsed, pocked surface of a cheese quiche
that\'s been cooked at too high a temperature.
Janna Harris\
Littlerock, CA\
He loved her like no other, their romance developing quickly, like the
rapid growth of farm swine which grow from 2 to 4 pounds daily until
they\'re fully grown and put to market for slaughter, or like the
rapidly growing cells that produce moose antlers until they fall off in
early spring, and suddenly Bill sensed the imminent doom of his romance
lying in wait.
Jeremy Perreaux\
Sarnia, Ontario\
Like a baleen whale inhaling krill--a collection of small marine
crustaceans of the order Euphausiacea--or an anteater sucking up
Formicidae-- characteristically having wings only in the males and
fertile females and living in colonies that have a complex social
organization--her lips sought out mine in a passionate kiss.
Michael J. Sheehan\
Cedar, MI\
Winner: Science Fiction#
\"Send a message back to Command Central on Earth and ask for their
advice, which we will be able receive immediately even at this great
distance, thanks to the ingenious manipulation of coherent radiation
through a Bose-Einstein condensate and the bizarre influence of the
Aspect effect, which enables us to impart identical properties to
remotely separated photons,\" Captain Buzz told the feathered Vjorkog at
the comms desk, \"and tell them our life-pod is going to explode in
eight seconds.\"
Christopher Backeberg\
KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa\
Runner-Up#
It was just another day at the office aboard \"StarCruise\" until David
spotted a tiny speck in his passenger window, approaching from the
direction of the Masai Nebula and making a right angle with bisector of
the isosceles formed if you joined Bendy\'s Star, Planet Anet, and White
Hole 14437-5A, but sighed peacefully as it turned out to be the
reflection of the fluorescent light swinging loose above Captain
Mudlove\'s head.
Talha bin Hamid\
Karachi, Pakistan\
Dishonorable Mention#
Scarcely three months after he had promised Purity that he would stand
by her no matter what, and a bare two hours after he had witnessed he
unorthodox birth of her pointy-eared alien child, George somewhat
dazedly approached the information desk at the public library and sent
the matronly attendant into paroxysms of mirth by asking for a baby care
book by Mr. Spock.
Lionel Monash Hurst\
Winner: Vile Puns#
As Johann looked out across the verdant Iowa River valley, and beyond to
the low hills capped by the massive refrigerator manufacturing plant, he
reminisced on the history of the great enterprise from its early days,
when he and three other young men, all of differing backgrounds, had
only their dream of bringing refrigeration to America\'s heartland to
sustain them, to the present day, where they had become the Midwest\'s
foremost group of refrigerator magnates.
Dick Davis\
Circle Pines, MN\
Runner-Up#
Herr Professor Doktor Weiss\' reputation was made when he conclusively
proved the fraudulency of the Mayan codex that claimed to show that that
ancient people knew the ratio of a circle\'s circumference to its
diameter to an exactitude unknown until modern times, in his article,
\"Bye, Bye, Mesoamerican Pi.\"
John L. Drost\
Barboursville, WV.\
Dishonorable Mentions#
Cheralynn posed before the unblinking mirror, panting weakly, as her
private surgeon hovered around her, tightening the straps on her
custom-made girdle, and it dawned on her for the first time in her
pampered, overindulged 49 years, that it was only a matter of time
before she would succumb to Furniture Disease, and her chest would fall
into her drawers.
Tracey MacDonald\
Antigonish Nova Scotia\
Winner: Western#
His mistake, Shut-eye McBlamaway reflected, was not in standing up to a
gang of desperadoes and rustlers on the high country, but in standing up
to a gang of desperadoes and rustlers who had just left the set of a
Sergio Leone shoot, and were thus equipped with those guns that never
run out of ammunition.
Samuel Goldstein\
Los Angeles, CA\
Runner-Up#
Butch glared balefully across the saloon at Tex, who had been stone dead
since the scorpion he had unwittingly sat on had bitten him on the butt
some half an hour or so ago, little suspecting that this was going to be
his toughest staring contest since the one against old Glass-eyed Juan,
during the great sand-storm of \'42, at the height of the Arizona
conjunctivitis epidemic.
Geoff Blackwell\
Bundaberg QLD Australia\
Special Salute to Breasts Category#
As she sashayed out of the police station, her high heels clicking a
staccato rhythm on the hard tile floor, like a one-armed castanet player
in a very bad mariachi band, her ample bosom held in check only by a
diaphanous blouse, and bouncing at each step like a 1959 tricked out
Low-rider Chevy with very good hydraulics---she smiled to herself as
she thought of the titillating interrogation from Detective Tipple about
the Twin Peaks Melon Heist.
Wayne Spivey, Major, USAF Retired\
Huntsville, Texas\
When she sashayed across the room, her breasts swayed like two house
trailers passing on a windy bridge.
Stan Higley\
Fairport, NY\
Although Brandi had been named Valedictorian and the outfit for her
speech carefully chosen to prove that beauty and brains could indeed
mix, she suddenly regretted her choice of attire, her rain-soaked
T-shirt now valiantly engaging in the titanic struggle between the
tensile strength of cotton and Newton\'s first law of motion.
Mark Schweizer\
Hopkinsville, KY\
The widow Hasha Brown, whose agrarian husband had died from an
unfortunate accident involving a hoe, leaned on the filigree railing of
her balcony, overlooking her lavish, ornate Idaho estate, her dewy
breasts protruding from her Pucci-print dressing gown like subterranean
tubers saturated and distended from the vernal rains.
Jennifer G. Liggett\
Stow, OH\
Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mentions#
Getting the performance rating of highly successful, although clearly
nothing to be ashamed of, left Blevins somewhat oddly dissatisfied, like
when you realize, upon having the triage nurses greet your ambulance,
that your underwear, as far as you can determine, is in pretty decent
condition, but you\'ll, nonetheless, never pull through the surgery.
Jim Lubell\
Mechanicsville, Maryland\
The goose waddled slowly, heavily, across the road, exactly the way my
mother-in-law would if she were a goose.
Mary Montiel\
Wichita, KS\
Kathy, who had bound her breasts and cropped her hair, and lied about
her gender to join a monastery of Jesuits in northern Kentucky, until
she was discovered one night in the shower, winced as the dentist pulled
her tooth.
Terry Johnson\
Tularosa, NM\
A Lodgepole Pine grew straight and tall in front of his cabin, sort of
like a lodgepole, only with branches.
Stephen E. Moore\
Edmonds, WA\
As diaphanous curlicues of tobacco smoke tumbled gracefully in the
honky-tonk air--like double-jointed gymnasts from the spirit
world--Buck was reminded of his lifelong dream of becoming a brilliant
veterinary surgeon, a dream he\'d vacuum-packed to his heart since
watching a crime show about a rash of unsolved tail dockings on the Isle
of Man.
Leslie Muir\
Atlanta, GA\
Withdrawing his hand from her knee, the English professor stormed,
\"Ending a sentence with a preposition is the sort of nonsense up with
which I will not put,\" although she had merely looked at his hand and
asked, \"What are you doing that for?\" in a sentence intended to end
the proposition.
Carl C. Partlow\
Rancho Cucamonga,\
Frank took one look at Tina\'s moderately shapely legs, her adequate
waist, her decent bosom, and her not-unattractive face, and said to
himself \"Well, hello Miss
You\'ll-Do-Until-Something-Better-Comes-Along!\"
Lawrence Person\
Austin, TX\
Yet again Imelda was exacerbated, or at least she assumed she was, as
she was never sure exactly what the term meant though when she felt
bloated and crampy as she was now, she was pretty sure she was,
exacerbated that is.
Matt Fidiam\
Soquel, CA\
Twas brillig, and the toves were not just slithy, they were stinking
drunk.
Richard A. Polunsky\
Houston TX\
\"Please, Jeffrey, don\'t tell him this time\" a beautiful woman, with
eyes like cobalt fire, implored of me as she staggered obviously a bit
tipsy, if not completely obliterated, out of the Wagon Wheel Tavern and
onto West Fourth Street and blinking twice from the afternoon sun
managed to slink past me and into the arms of a fellow who I\'m guessing
was Jeffrey.
Robert Salsbury\
Spokane Valley, WA\
Ah, yes, it was a beautiful face with skin smoother than pumice and
breath fresher than a twenty-five-day-old tuna sandwich stored for safe
keeping in a Wichita schoolgirl\'s lunchbox, and I found myself beset,
nay, overcome, with twin urges: to ravish her there and then on the cash
register, or to slough off the skin of my calloused feet on the stubble
of her chin.
Cathy Bannister\
Kaleen, Canberra, Australia\
Houses dotted the landscape in the small village where Hans lived . . .
somewhat resembling a Monet painting . . . although he wasn\'t really
the father of pointillism . . . but since it did directly offshoot FROM
impressionism, it would still be appropriate; plus, the fact his name
was Hans, made it seem all the more in keeping with the overall theme.
Mariann Simms\
Wetumpka, AL\
The day was like any other, except that this was a Wednesday so it was
really only like 1/7th of the other days.
Randy Wilson\
New Albany, IN\
Her romance ended, not a quick separation but like the gradually fading
white dot on one of those old black-and-white vacuum tube TVs when it\'s
turned off; and she was glad, because she felt uneasy in his arms and
required as many adjustments to the \"horizontal hold\" and \"vertical
hold\" as when she would stay up late watching scary shows like
\"Twilight Zone\" and \"Outer Limits\" long ago.
Charles Wells\
Albuquereque, NM\
Her moans and sighs stoked the fire of his libido more, engineers to the
red-hot locomotive of his lust.
Caedman Oakley\
Auckland, New Zealand\
Maybe it was because he was feeling dizzy after the four litres of cr�me
de menthe he\'d drunk, or perhaps it was because the day had started
with his slippers exploding completely unexpectedly as he ate his
cornflakes, but, as Anthony looked behind him for the fortieth time,
walking home from the bar, he could have sworn he was being followed by
a large silver-backed gorilla.
Terr� Yuki\
London\
Gripping the handle of the knife carefully, Vanessa made a nervous
incision in the body on the table, wondering vaguely if she was anywhere
near the heart as the surgeon, her work-experience supervisor, flicked
vaguely through the latest \"Who magazine\" that was placed over the
head of the patient, and in taking a deep drag of her filtered
16-milligram noticed that, if the Oscars were anything to go by, orange
was back in again.
Beth Worrall\
Australia\
I saw her from across the room and knew I had to meet her, not because
of her ample bosom, or her full lips, or her beautiful creamy skin, or
the way her hair was twisted into a nice tight bun, or the buttoned-up
blouse that begged to be torn off her body, or the skirt that was
perhaps a size too small, but because she was my kid\'s teacher and I
was here for the parent-teacher conference.
Lori Yates\
Kezier, OR\
Her eyelashes fluttered like the windshield wipers of an
eighteen-wheeler on the Ohio Turnpike when the weary-eyed driver is
trying to have at least some vision in a heavy August rainstorm that is
like an Appaloosa urinating on solid asphalt.
Paul Bailie\
Chicago, IL\
Hardly a day passed without poor Matilda looking back on her life and
ruing that fateful day she decided that to cut her toenails with her
father\'s scythe to make up that extra four minutes she had wasted
listening to \"Muskrat Love\" by the Captain & Tennille.
Stephen Farnsworth\
Manchester, England\
\"Grasshopper, the three secrets of life are as follows: first, keep
your eyes and ears open; second: don\'t tell everything you know.\"
Andy Otes\
Frenchs Forest NSW, Australia