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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Like this? There's more 250-word stories in this list here.
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7 comments:
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.
A different one, but WAY better. Divorce: Cretaceous Style. Who gets the big-screen TV and custody of the kids? WHOEVER CAN RUN FASTER.
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.
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.
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.
Rusty Carl: we need you.
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.
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