Take to the deep

 
This started as something bigger - and perhaps it will end up bigger at some point - but for now it is an interesting little 50-word doohickey. If you want to see more great 50-word stories, head over to 50 to 1.
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The saltwater frothed slightly at my waist as I turned in circles, as if I expected to start a whirlpool and go spinning around into orbit in the middle of the Atlantic. I stopped rotating and started thrashing back and forth. "Spin cycle," I muttered. "I'm a goddam washing machine."
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Third Eye Blind, Anything

When everything else is gone

 
The match lit in a flash of sulfur and red phosphorous, and Andy held it to the cigar in his lips for only a moment before throwing it haphazardly toward the pile of dead sticks and cardboard boxes amassed at his feet. The heap quickly combusted, throwing a grotesque shadow of Andy onto the wall behind him. He stepped back and enjoyed the situation for just a moment, taking a deep drag of the cigar and feeling the steady heat of the flames.

He exhaled a long cloud of smoke and limped out of his living room, past the bedroom where he and his wife used to make love and past his daughter's room. He stopped at the back door and turned to face back down the hallway, puffing steadily on the cigar as he ran his hands down the wallpaper he had installed when he and Sheila had moved in here.

Andy shook his mind clean and left the house, shivering at the transition from warm house to cold winter air. He stepped out on the concrete landing and turned to close the door. His hand grasped the doorknob, but refused to push the portal shut.

Andy's mind went berserk at his sudden hesitation, and he gritted his teeth and fought with all his strength to regain control of himself and force his arm forward. He looked up into the house and saw the orange glow of the growing conflagration leaping down the hallway toward him in bursts of furious hunger, lapping up the crown molding at the base of the ceiling and the picture frames hanging from the walls.

He flashed back to the wreck, the ambulance crew carting away their mangled bodies in zipper bags like leftovers. They picked him up, body perfectly still, and placed him on a stretcher to be taken to the hospital. He remembered feeling the signals, the abnormal spark-up coursing toward him like a shark sensing blood in the water, and then he remembered waking up full of holes, hospital administered and otherwise, and crying for two days.

Andy's parents washed and dressed him the morning of his court date, his father basically carrying him to and from the car before his mother got the wheelchair out of the trunk. They took away his license and sentenced him, though he didn't comprehend it until he could walk again three months later.

Andy wrenched himself back to consciousness like the paramedics had yanked shards of sheet metal out of his body, and it hurt almost as much. The flames were bursting out the windows now, and he could feel the warmth billowing down the hallway toward him in waves. He spat out the cigar.

He turned and looked toward the garage behind him. He could almost see the wreck sitting there, shredded metal and plastic spiraling in controlled insanity at deadly angles. Blood was everywhere, dripping from the car's broken pillars and pooling with shards of glass on the asphalt.

A particularly scalding blast of air hit him in the back, almost knocking him over, and then he heard and felt the explosion as the gas stove blew, catapulting wood splinters and drywall remnants in every direction.

He stared at the flames gathering in the hallway before him, and his hand finally relaxed and came off the doorknob. He stepped back into the house and walked straight through the flames. They tore at his clothes and hair as though there was nothing else combustible in the house. He stopped into the living room and stared at the ceiling. He wondered when the house would start collapsing in on itself.

He decided to wait and find out.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Incubus, Nebula

Add up what they subtracted

 
When I awoke on Thursday morning I wrapped the world in cellophane, desperate to preserve what was left of its dignity. I had to swing the meager plastic sheet around six times because The Empire State Building kept poking holes in my progress.

I peered through the mass of stretchy material. My view was slightly muddled by the multiple layers' clashing wrinkles, but I could still clearly make out crowds of people gathering in squares, schools emptying into playgrounds and freeways jammed with traffic as people gathered in the first-ever worldwide rubbernecking event.

The news media went wild. Glenn Beck warned America that this was the result of the spread of Progressi-facism, a new hybrid ideology he had created in the shower this morning. Jon Stewart made fun of me and had his design team create a graphic that showed me as a middle-aged woman browsing the paper products aisle in ShopRite.

I stared at humanity's loud confusion and listened to its wide-eyed misunderstandings of the situation.

"It's the apocalypse!" shouted fanatics across the globe.

"Shut up, it's probably some really weird science thing we haven't discovered yet," skeptics replied.

They argued for days. They theorized for weeks. They mourned the end of the world for months. They did it all, and they did it loudly.

I turned on my sound machine, careened into bed and waited for them to run out of air.
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Playing on my iTunes at this very moment:
Modest Mouse, The World At Large

Reading tomorrow!

 
- The Broad Set Writing Collective @ The Inkwell Coffee House, 665 Second Ave, Long Branch NJ
- Starts at 7:30 & ends at 9:00.
- Come out and experience emerging authors reading fiction, poetry & prose. Partake in our world famous grab bag! Take home a magazine. Enjoy some good food and meet Andrew Kaspereen in person.

Should be an exciting time, with readings by most of The Broad Set crew, if my memory serves me correctly. Hope to see a lot of people there!