Monday, April 14, 2014

Meat (250=1)

QUICK ANNOUNCEMENTS:

1.  There are TWO A To Z posts, as always: this 250-word short story (down below the picture) and the longer one below about the alphabet becoming gods to humans. YAY DOUBLE POSTS.

2. FREE BOOK! Every day in April, get one of my books free.  Right now it's the short story collection "Just Exactly How Life Looks," and I'd tell you what's in it but it's FREE so you could click here to download it, see if you like it, and if you don't, delete it and you are out NOTHING. EVERYBODY WINS. Wait, how does everybody win if... never mind. Just download it!

And now, your 250-word short story, which only ostensibly is about time and is much much more about AWESOMENESS:
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Meat

Why…” he panted “Would a dinosaur need a gun?

“Just keep running,” she whispered back over her shoulder “And quit talking.”

A crack! A whiizzzz and they both ducked instinctively even though ducking after you hear the rifle is useless.

She zigged.

He zagged.

They were separated by ten feet and he could see her, slightly ahead of him still.  She looked over at him.

Was that reproach in her eyes?

Or excitement?

There was crashing behind them.

We can go to any era of history, find out anything you’d want to know!” he’d told her. “You can see what dinosaurs were really like!”

He slowed now to get behind her again. She was falling behind. If anyone was not making it back to the machine, it was him, not her.

EMERGENCY PLAN: the folder read and it told how to set the machine to go back to ten minutes before they left and stop them from going, and while he could do that it was not foolproof enough for him to want to risk her life.  And anyway, he couldn’t live with himself knowing that she’d been turned into a burger at some dinosaur’s tailgate party.

They heard the roaring, gnashing sound of one dinosaur calling to the other. Their tracks had been spotted.  More bullets whizzed through the trees. Fierce predators, indeed, but lousy shots, he thought, and tried to stop laughing so he could keep running.

Crack! Another shot.


This was one anniversary they’d remember. Hopefully.

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7 comments:

Robin said...

Meat. That is really just an ick word. In German, the word for meat is fleish (I have no idea how you spell it, but it sounds like flysh). And that is too close to Flesh so it makes my skin crawl.

I like time travel stories. I can't say that I would have chosen the era of the dinosaur, especially to celebrate my anniversary, but that is just me. Check that... my ex is/was an asshat. Maybe I would have chosen that era, but I'd be running like hell. A different story entirely.

Briane said...

A different one, but WAY better. Divorce: Cretaceous Style. Who gets the big-screen TV and custody of the kids? WHOEVER CAN RUN FASTER.

A Beer for the Shower said...

Robin - the spelling is Fleisch. Yeah, 4 years of German in high school totally well spent!

I feel like if I was going to do this with my wife, I'd bring my own gun. And then we'd celebrate by eating dino-burgers, as an epic display of man conquering nature yet again.

Briane said...

Beer:

Beware of changing history! Which apparently can happen if you shoot a dinosaur or even step on a bug, but not if those (obviously sentient) dinosaurs shoot YOU with their guns.

Also probably Sleestaks are bulletproof.

Andrew Leon said...

I don't want to know why a dinosaur would need a gun; I think that is obvious.

What I want to know is
1. Where does a dinosaur get a gun?
2. How does a dinosaur use a gun?

Man, I wish I could draw, because I would totally draw a picture of a T-Rex with a gun belt up under its arms and little six-shooters it could draw.

Unknown said...

Rusty Carl: we need you.

Liz A. said...

Great last line. I would not, under any circumstances, want to travel back in time to see dinosaurs. It always goes so badly in the time travel stories.