So here we go again. The results don’t come out for quite a while, but it’s probably just as well to bury the evidence now.

This time it’s the 250 word challenge …. why did I enter? I don’t know. Who can possibly fit a story into 250 words? Well, ….quite a few people actually, but I’m not one of them. It’s worth having a look at previous winners, though, to see the amazing stuff that some can squeeze out of it.

But back to the losers ….

My challenge was to write a Romance which involved the action of ‘dampening a cloth’, and the word ‘typical’.

I wrote one bad story and a friend (who shall remain nameless) told me it was bad, so I wrote another bad one. Contestants are only allowed to enter one story and it was hard for me to decide which was worse, so I present both here without nominating which one was actually entered. I can always delude myself with the notion that the other one would have done much better.

*******

The Smell of Polished Wood

 

They met as happy children at the bus stop, one innocent morning, and married a decade later when he returned from the war, heroic and solemn. He cut timber at the local mill until the world was plunged into another battle with itself and unemployment spread like a virus, and then he grew vegetables and raised chickens while she sewed clothing for the children and cleaned houses for the fortunate.

 

She spoke openly to me, while he communicated mostly in nods and awkward half-smiles. They held hands whenever possible, walking in the garden or sitting on the bench beneath the jacaranda, where the purple flowers fell and gathered in the rim of his hat.

 

The house smelled perpetually of polished wood and naphthalene, every item within treated as treasure. Even with the depression behind them and in the relative comfort of a soldier’s pension they remained ‘careful’, as was typical of their generation.

 

I think of my grandparents now, as I stand in the kitchen, a dampened cloth in hand as she had showed me, polishing the glassware of three generations. “People love and care for only that upon which they place value,” she told me once, “yet it is love and care that bestow the value in the first place.”

 

It was I who found them one morning, laying side by side on the bed, he in his only suit, and she in her wedding dress, their hands locked together for eternity.

 

The smell of polished wood and naphthalene was in the air.

***

and ….

Cyberpunk Love Match.

 

It was a typical July evening with nothing to do and little inclination to do anything else.

 

We met on an ordinary street corner when the rain had eased for a while, and where the reflected headlights of passing vehicles released ghostly shadows to climb the sides of the cold, dark, and deserted city buildings.

 

She was, perhaps, only twenty-five or twenty-six years old but her eyes subtly betrayed the reality of a life already balanced precariously on the edge. I was older, but no less bitter, having failed consistently to meet my own lowly expectations, much less the vicarious aspirations of family.

 

She and I had met at a crossroads, of sorts, but with no foolish expectations that the lights might suddenly change in any direction.

 

Her hair was thick and shining with the moisture of the breeze, and her skin was as pure and emotionless as alabaster in the fading light. I was dead yet still breathing, and she sensed within me the hunger of the condemned. We navigated the mysterious pathways of human interaction almost silently, our exchange mercifully lacking in any meaningless pleasantries.

 

She removed a white cloth from her purse and knelt to moisten it in a rivulet of rainwater winding its way toward the gutter.

 

“One-fifty,” she said, casually passing the cloth to me, “for a blow job. You’ll need to drop your pants and clean yourself up with this first.”

 

“Two hundred if you swallow,” I replied.