Hi, I’m Jared. I’m the new guy.
By this point, I’m sure you all have gotten a taste of what I’m planning to do over the next year or so with The News From Poughkeepsie. For those who are a little confused with what exactly NFP is, there’s always Mur’s explanation from the very first NFP post. The short version is that’s an idea a day, with a weekly theme. It is, essentially, a jumpstart for your head.
Just as last week had “Lesser known superheroes” as a theme, and the week before had “time travel works like this,” so too does this week have a central conceit that it revolves around. This week’s theme is “A woman gets on a bus…” This is snagged from Lorrie Moore’s excellent story How To Become A Writer, which you can read here. Like Moore’s protagonist, it is a phrase fraught with potential but lacking in direction. Luckily, direction is exactly what we’re going to provide over the next few days.
I say “we,” because I want to read your variations on the theme, your NFP articles. Just leave ‘em in the comments. Nothing too long, just enough to inspire someone. My personal favorites will be posted on a special News From Poughkeepsie Sunday edition. C’mon, show me what you got!
A woman gets on a bus…
… And it’s the wrong bus
Angie had gotten on the wrong bus before—one time she had ended up on the West Side, completely by mistake, and had to hike three miles to get to where she knew the bus lines well enough to get home. But this wasn’t just an incorrect line. This bus was, well, wrong.
For starters, when the driver took her fare, he smiled with rows of rows of sharpened teeth, one set closing over another behind rictus lips. Her fellow passengers didn’t seem to be human at all, as the seats were full of six-foot tall cockroaches. They were arguing amongst themselves in a strange clicking language that Angie was shocked to discover she halfway understood. As the bus lurched forward, a thick pool of blood washed over her new shoes, before lapping back. Seemed the floor it was covered in it.
Angie moved for the door, but the driver shook his head slowly. It was far too late for that…
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ISBW Endorsed Programs
New from the Murverse- ISBW Special #46 – Stonecoast Writer’s Residency January 31, 2012
- ISBW #230 – Feedback January 30, 2012
- Short Story Alert- Gimme Shelter January 27, 2012
A woman gets on a bus …
and wearily drops into a seat. She had just begun to doze off when the wizard sat down next to her. It wasn’t clear how she knew he was a wizard, if it was the long white beard, ridiculously bushy eyebrows, or blackened, rune-inscribed staff, but she just knew it.
When he got off the bus three stops later, she noticed that he left a pendant, jewel-encrusted and made of gold and silver, sitting on the seat behind him. Out of curiosity she picked it up and the veil of the real peeled away around her.
Erin got on the bus, but, in typical Erin fashion, she didn’t use the door. In point of fact, when Erin got on the bus, she did so by dropping from a very long flagpole, caught the slick roof of the vehicle at an odd angle that nearly cost her balance and her life, and rolled until she managed to flatten herself, arms and legs in a leather and fishnet sprawl.
The bus accelerated. Erin looked back, just once, to see a shadowy figure watching from the rooftops at her back, then lowered her face to the bus and waited for the next stop, praying it would be far enough away, and that there would be no need to hit the freeway to reach it.
A woman gets on a bus…
…only to find it doesn’t have near enough bandwidth to transfer her whole persona. Hurriedly, she forks off whole chunks of her memory, encrypting them and hiding them deep inside low-level maintenance processes in nearby RAMspace.
It’s not enough. Even stripped down to bare-bones identity memory and reasoning functions, she’s still too large to fit within the bus’s data transfer limit. The ICE will be on her any nanosecond, and she faces a difficult decision: dump the last of her memory and forget who she is, or strip down her core code and leave herself crippled, retarded, or worse…
[...] Honorable mentions also go to Jason (Anthraxus) and to David Niall Wilson, whose entries were top notch and deserve to be read. [...]
[...] Honorable mentions also go to Jason (Anthraxus) and to David Niall Wilson, whose entries were top notch and deserve to be read. [...]