MISC June 2018: So Long and Thanks For...

Astaroth

[*screaming into the void intensifies*]
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MISC: Monthly Iwaku Story Challenge
June 2018

DISCLAIMER: This is NOT the Miscellaneous Iwaku Storytelling Contest. We kept the cool name, changed the game!


Each month on Iwaku, we will post an official writing prompt. This is just a fun challenge to inspire ideas and allow our users to stretch their creative writing muscles! Short stories, poems, and even roleplay posts are allowed as submissions. To participate, all you have to do is post your submission in this thread.

All users are also encouraged to give feedback on posted replies to the challenge and discuss ideas!

This month's prompt is


SO LONG AND THANKS FOR...

fish.png


A character wakes up one morning only to make the shocking discovery that their own head (one they are quite attached to) has been replaced with a fish head, complete with gills.
 
When I said madmins I meant that you guys are making decisions that's questionable
But this...
Who came up with this????????
Y'all be trippin'
 
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When I said madmins I meant that you guys are making decisions that's questionable
But this...
Who came up with this????????
Y'all be trippin'
That would be me! 8D
 
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You know, I have just this idea where I would write for a non-human perspective and their own head is their prize shrunken head was replaced with a fish head with gills.
 
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I'm tempted to used characters from another MISC entry of mine :bsmile: This should be fun.
 
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  • Nice Execution!
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I'll just leave this here...

 
Submerge


SPRING
Raindrops pattered his face but he barely felt it. The cardboard box in his hands was soaked, the yielding mush of its content's weight pushed into his palm like wet sand. The dog-shaped paperweight looked like it was crying.

His eyes were far away, sad, longing. It was not his boss' fault, he knew, not his fault that the company was hitting a rough patch, not his fault that they had decided to let some of their own go. Yet a bitter part of himself, deep down, kept asking "Why me? Why not someone else?". Still he suppressed that anger, pushed it down, buried it under determination. This was far from hopeless, only another bump in the road. He would recover.

The drizzle felt more like mist than rain, a veil of condensation that drenched every inch of everything he was. His shoes splashed through dirty puddles of the half-flooded street toward his car, the water lapping against his ankles like ocean's waves on low tide, encircling, tugging. Rising.


SUMMER
A light touch on his hair jerked his head up from the hospital bed. Raising his gaze, a tired but relieved smile coloured his lips.

"Hey, dad."

His father's skin was deadly pale, his eyes sunken and his cheeks hollow. The starkly white hospital light overhead threw mournful shadows over his features.

He tried to smile, but one side of his face didn't seem to respond and he paused momentarily in puzzlement.

"You've been here all night?" His father's voice came out in a croaked breathless whisper, and the mere act of speaking seemed to drain him, slumping his shoulders and drooping his barely opened eyelids.

"No, dad, I just got here." He lied. His eyes glistened and he wiped at them as if trying to rub the sleep off. Gently he squeezed his father's hand and the old man squeezed back, his grip barely detectable, weak as a child. The smell of disinfectant was overwhelming, hanging in the air like a palpable sheen. He had always hated hospitals. They felt like death and sickness masked under frigid indifference.

"Glad you're here kiddo..." His father's words trailed off into silence and his eyes fluttered close. He was asleep in a moment, an uneasy, labouring slumber.

"Get some rest dad." Pulling the blanket tight around his father and brushing a tender kiss to his head, he exited the room and closed the door softly behind him.

His knees felt weak and heavy, the world dragging his every step. As if he was treading through waist high water, the current violent and merciless. As if his life was flooding.



FALL
The door slammed shut with a resounding crash, cutting off his last glimpse of her. Faintly, the clicking of heels and the swishing of suitcase retreated further away until they were swallowed by the white noise of the outside world, the sporadic rumbling of cars, the constant humming of everyday lives, and the sharp keening of distracted grief. This city had just devoured another part of him.

She knew, she had to know that he had no choice but to sell his home, their home. She knew, and she left anyway. Perhaps knowing wasn't understanding for her.

It was for him. He understood why she had to go, why it was for the best. His father was dying, and she would live, perhaps even better without him.

His heart broke all the same, into a hundred thousand fragments that were quickly washed away by the waves that battered against his chest, its powerful force chipping away his hope piece by piece.



WINTER
His face grew pale, bloodless, as colourless as the white-knuckled grip of his hands trying to stop their shaking. The chair underneath him felt weightless, light as a feather. Or perhaps that was just his head spinning.

"And there's nothing you can do?" An overpowering mass choked his throat, his words barely forced through the sea of dread. He found himself unable to breathe, or move, or avert his eyes from the doctor's resigned, sad expression.

"Well, there is a program we can put him through, it's only on the first few experimental stages, and it's very costly..."

"I'll take that."

"Sir, I think you should at least take time to consider your options. Right now surgery is still your best chance financially..."

"Not medically?" His voice was not accusing, only resignedly bitter. He knew the answer in his heart without even needing to read it on the doctor's face.

The air felt stuffy, smotheringly still, like a crushing weight blanketing every inch of his being. The sensasion of snakes slithering across his body, revolting, constricting, sickeningly wretched. He thought he would scream, he thought he did. The deafening silence of desperation devoured the very possibility of such vocal relief.

"I'll manage something."

"Mr. S..."

"I'll manage!" He said with a forceful confidence he didn't feel.

The chains around his ankles dragged him down, down, down into the darkness. He could barely move, barely able to fight his way to the surface to get a breath. The water was suffocating him, choking his hope, drowning his light. Around him predators circled.



SPRING
A shimmering veil hung in the air, the sun's wrathful gaze seemed to warp reality itself into a distorted mirror through which the heavy streets of this desolated city glowed incandescently a light of malformed pleasure and a child's innocent destructive glee.

He hated it, this city that gave him meaning only to strip them away one by one like tearing flesh off bones. For all its cloudless brilliance of day, its underbelly nurtured blood sucking worms that revelled in eternal gloom where their feeding was masked under garrulous glamour.

The neon sign seemed to mock him, sneering its vicious mirth and perforating sadism of a beast that devoured souls for breakfast. He would be the breakfast today, he knew. And willingly offered.

There were other choices, but the water whispered to him its mellifluous siren song of the soothing dark, and the necessity of the gamble. He only had time to inhale one last lungfull before the door opened and he stepped inside, plunging into the depth.



SUMMER
Blood dribbled down his numb lips and splattered on the dirty warehouse floor, a crimson rose in a sea of lifeless bones.

"I promise I will have your money by next Thursd..." The heavy thud of hardened wood hitting flesh cut off his whimpering voice. An ashen-coloured mass blinded his right eye, his left caked by a pus-like mixture of tears and leaking wounds.

"You promised you will have our money by today." Another swing connected with his jaw with a resounding crack, shattering teeth and breaking bones. A choked whine burst through his split lips, full of agony and terror.

"You say next Thursday. We believe you. In fact, we believe you so much that we'll leave you a token of our trust." They enjoyed watching his lit up hope crumbled into fear and defeat, then proceeded to beat it out of him twice over.

He felt each impact, every single cut, bruise, snap. He felt his body tore apart by predators of the depth, savouring their feast. His lifeblood painted horror itself onto the canvass of the sea as they dragged him down, down, down.



FALL
His mournful cry cut through the graveyard, a keening wail of hopelessness and absolute desperation. Icy tears fell all around him, playing a cacophony of scorn and contempt on the thin veil above his head in time with the explosions of blinding vision and deafening buzz reverberating through his head.

His father looked peaceful when they lowered him down. The downpour drenched the earth blackened, pieces of it crumbling in his hand like wet sand. He missed that dog-shaped paperweight. Where had he put it? Soft hands brushing his shoulder felt like affirmations of his failure, unspoken verdicts that damned his existence to darkened pits of despondency and helplessness.

He could see no hope, no light. The surface was so, so far away, merely an impression rather than sight. Raindrops shattered against the pavement, tap, tap, tap, like the sound of popping air bubbles escaping his lips.



WINTER
Sinking the knife into the loan shark's torso was effortlessly easy. Simple motions, in, out, in, out, smooth as making love.

His face felt alien, his features twisted into a vicious and inhuman expression he could not recognize. The others must not have recognized it too, because the tugging and yanking hands that were trying to pull him away from their boss suddenly slackened and recoiled.

With each thrust a strange sensation blossomed in his heart, intensifying with each stab. In, out, in, out. The blood soaked through his clothes and hair, a blanket of forfeited life. The climax of pleasure jolted across his body, intoxicatingly in its familiarity. The heavy scarlet invigorated him, as if the dead body was the suffocating ocean that drowned everything he loved.

Stab. The choking mass lessened.

Stab. A popping boom resounded in his head of relieved tension.

Stab. With a gasp air flooded his body, muddied, weighty and labouring, but air nonetheless, infusing him with vitality.

The countless cuts on his body were liberating in their agony, as if he was breathing through the cracks, as if they were carved gills. His blood and the body's pooled around his kneeling feet and coated every inch of his soul, and he revelled in the rancid foulness of its smell, letting it saturate his desire. A shark's maddened hunger perforated his own.



SPRING
The bullet hole in his chest felt strangely numb, inconsequential. He had thought his father would be on his mind, but he wasn't. Nothing was.

Hunters cornered him with their harpoons of compacted lead and their glaring red blue light invading his bloodfilled water, and impaled him. Slowly they pulled on the wire and dragged his tainted life out of the depth.

A tunnel of bright white light blinded his sight, overwhelming, terrifying, and in a hard tug he was through, breaking the surface. Air, pure, clean, real. The air of hope he had longed for, yearned, craved. But it was another time, the other side of the point of no return.

For a shark, the open sky was only death.
 
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My age is showing again! I'm having images of the incredible Mr. Limpet. I am quite hesitant to follow the above post but, I am going to reply to every one of these threads so....here goes~

Harold looked at the scrawny kid in front of him and grabbed his hair, "Keee...nnn...eeeyyyy," his voice taunted, "You want to give me your lunch money don't you?" The much younger boy handed the money over with shaking hands almost dropping some of it. "Thought so..."

There were very few kids at their school who weren't afraid of Harold. He was much bigger than everyone else, because he'd been held back three times, and much stronger. Most kids took to fleeing or hiding to avoid losing their money or possessions to the bully. One boy though decided to do the unthinkable, he tattled to the principle. Horrifyingly though, nothing happened to the bully and once the truth was known things became far worse.

The tattler, Jimmy Logan was a daily victim. One day he had nothing to give and so, as an example Harold pummeled him. Arriving home Jimmy ran to his room to clean up. He didn't want his dad to see him like that, no that would be worse than having Harold beat him up. Fearfully he looked into the mirror and frowned. "No hiding this," he shined at the bruised and battered image before him.

There was a tiny knock at his door and he opened it. There stood his grandma, short and gray headed with wrinkle upon wrinkle cracking her once smooth skin. there was a tender light in her eyes as she looked at him. "Jimmy...who did this to you?"

"Harold Fisher...he's a big mean bully...he hurts everyone. I tried to stop him...told Principle Goodwin but nothing happened and Harold found out I told..."

Gramma Logan nodded, "I see..." Was all she said and she tottered away.

The next day Jimmy cleaned himself up as best he could and waited for the bus to pick him up. He climbed inside and took his seat, immediately Harold was behind him poking at the back of his head. "Stop it Harold!"

Harold laughed, "you gonna make me?" but then an odd sound was heard and then gasps and then riotous laughter.

Confused Jimmy turned around and saw Harold frantically trying to get away from his own head. Harold was trying to scream but his lips just puckered oddly and his eyes were popping out a bit. His head looked like a really big sardine in the can...and from the look of thins he was one...no...that could not be. He shook his head, Harold..take off the mask."

But Harold did not reply, he was now flailing on the floor.

"Mrs. Harrison?" jimmy called, "I think Harold is dying!"

The bus stopped and Mrs. Harrison climbed out of her seat and came back to see what the commotion was about. Seeing the boy with a fish head was too much for her and she fainted in a heap.

"What should we do?" Jimmy asked.

"Nothing..." Kenny said bitterly, "Let him die...he's no good."

Jimmy frowned. He couldn't let someone die without at least trying to help them. he grabbed his lunch box and the bottle of water his mother had put in there and poured it over Harold's neck. it might not help but it was all he could think of. Fish needed water to breathe. It wasn't enough water though. He needed a big...and then he realized where they were. He moved to the back of the bus and opened the emergency door. The alarms went off but he ignored that and began to drag Harold out of the bus and over to the fountain that marked the entrance to the park. he pulled and pushed and grunted and tugged, but he eventually got Harold into the water. He was worried though that he hadn't been fast enough. Harold was big and he wasn't and no one else would help.

It took a while but Harold finally seemed ok again. When he came up out of the fountain, the fish head was gone. That was weird. "You ok Harold?"

Before Harold could answer Gramma Logan stood beside Jimmy and looked pointedly at Harold. "Harold will be fine as long as he is never mean to anyone again..."

"What?" asked both Harold and Jimmy in unison.

Gramma held out a hand and there were scales on her palm. "Every time you bully someone, or even say something unkind I will do this to you again."

Harold blanched. "You...you did that?"

Jimmy blinked at his sweet Gramma, "But how?"

She tipped her head, "I was so cursed long ago and when I had proven I learned and changed i was given this power. So, what shall it be Harold?"

He paled even more, "I promise...I'll be good...promise..." he crossed his hand over his heart and help up a salute.

"See that you are...I will know if you aren't." She gave Jimmy's head a kiss and disappeared.

Both boys were more than a little freaked out, but neither spoke. "We better go wake up Mrs. Harrison and get to school." Jimmy said.

The two got back on the bus and closed the emergency door, then they woke her up. "What happened?" she asked.

"Nothing Mrs. Harrison...just a prank." Harold said.

She wasn't amused and dragged Harold to the front of the bus and informed the principle of the prank. Again nothing happened except Harold was not permitted to ride the bus for three weeks. However, at the school EVERYTHING changed. Harold no longer bullied people, and he was in fact very helpful and courteous to everyone. People began to speculate that he'd found religion, or that he'd had a stroke, but Jimmy knew the truth.