50wordstories.ca

Being a tale told in 50 words, wherein the protagonist, a man named Arcturus Morgenstern (Third of the name) is eminently surprised to discover that the body of his wife, whom he’d found murdered not five minutes previously, is now animated with an unholy life, and for whatever reason is burning important-seeming papers that Arcturus had been working on previous to the gunshots that had seemingly (but not conclusively) killed his wife.

The gunshot startled him.

Turning, he found his wife, dead of a gunshot wound.

He ran out, looking for the assassin. Upon his return, his wife’s body was busy burning his writings.

Taking the last sheet from her undead hands, he nervously reads off the title: “How to Make Zombies”.

Every night, at precisely 1:34 am, he would be awakened by a loud, piercing, bone-chilling scream.  After the scream ended, the subsequent silence seemed even more unreal.

One night, as he was awakened again, he decided to scream back.

Later that night, he was awakened again by another scream:

“WHY NOT?”

The Poet would sprinkle some iron shavings on a large white board, and then place a bunch of randomly tangled wires under the board.  Then he would run electricity through each wire.

The shavings would then rearrange.  The results would then be decoded into poetry.

Sometimes, the results were good.

“I’ll see this through to the end,” she said of her first store that sold products and material dedicated to the gay and lesbian community. Her business soon turned into a multinational corporation that eclipsed even Wal-Mart!

She’d reached the end of the rainbow, and found the pot of gold.

The same old story:

Boy meets girl.

Girl doesn’t like boy.

Boy does something clever.

Girl still doesn’t like boy.

Boy does something nice.

Girl still indifferent.

Boy does something grand.

Girl starts to worry.

Boy gets desperate.

Girl calls the cops.

Boy is arrested.

Girl is abducted by aliens.

When the aliens came, we weren’t ready for them

They came as friends, but we took them for conquerors

They wanted to share their culture and science

We thought they were trying to assimilate us

So we attacked.

And they left.

And now we’re all alone.

Quarantined civilization.

Xenophobic doom.

And there you have it (for now.)  To emphasize the fact that the song is in three parts, the recording will be made up of three distinct-sounding parts.  Each of the three 50-word segments has its own rhythm, and they will be linked with something special (which I haven’t devised yet…)

Now, in order to catch up to the back-log, I still owe you another story.  This will come later tonight.

They brought all this technology
And showed us how to use it properly
They taught us their way of life
And they introduced us to their culture

They solved many (but not all) of our problems
And they only asked for friendship in return
…and we weren’t ready for that.

I thought I’d have this song ready before the end of the weekend.  It’s the reason for the lack of updates since Wednesday.  Anyway, here are the three 50-word parts of the song.  It’ll probably take me another week, at least, to record everything and get the full song ready for posting here.  In the meantime, you can enjoy the words outside their musical context, and evaluate them on their own merit.

And don’t bother looking for rhymes, I didn’t put any in there, at least not on purpose.

When the aliens came, we thought we were ready
When they landed, we cautiously greeted them
But we kept our arsenal behind our backs

In friendship we held out our hand
And we secretly made a fist with the other

We thought we were ready
But they had us already!

He walks up to the teller, and hands her a note.

Without reading it, she triggers the silent alarm and waits for the whole security shebang. Before he knows it, he’s trapped in a net, and being carted out to jail.

She finally picks up the note, reading, “I’m mute.”

The girl kept on seductively stripping, but every garment she removed left a residue that  gradually covered her again.

“That poor girl’s going to die of exhaustion.”

“Not my problem, she signed the contract, she can’t leave the stage until she’s completely nude.”

“It’s inhuman, yet I can’t stop watching.”