Category Archive

We’re looking for stories with a twist. So when I’m trying to think of something, I start by thinking of ironic situations.

The person who gets robbed on the way to the bank after stuffing money in a mattress for years.

The kid that everyone picks on turns out to be this online guru.

Mistaken identities, waiting too long to act, poor timing, a slip of the tongue all make for good short, short story topics.

Today is finally the day, I tell myself, as I sit down in my desk. Three months of chickening out are over. Right after the bell rings I’ll “bump” into her and ask if she wants to go to the dance. I can do this.

“Hey, Phil. Where’s Katie today?”

“Didn’t you hear? She moved.”

Under the Rug
Two weeks passed and it happened again.

For Harold Haley the disturbing loss of his toupee was only superceded by the disappointment of the comet’s passing being partially obscured by foul weather. These were not unexpected events as it had been a particularly dreary year and Harold, himself a dreary person, had become quite absent-minded in his quest to discover the secrets of the comet. He was always forgetting those mundane aspects of life such as feeding his cat, brushing his teeth, or changing his socks.

In-fact, Harold had become so focused on the comet that he even became unfocused on that matter. The night that the comet passed close to the Earth’s surface, the first such encounter in more than ten thousand years, Harold twittered about his observatory mumbling about the blasted weather and scratching his toupee all in the hopes that some idea would come to him of how he could get a clear view of the comet. Had he been more focused and patiently sitting at his telescope, he would have noticed through a brief cloud break a tremendous explosion of cosmic particles. Such an observation would have guaranteed Harold a promotion at the observatory, which was long overdue. As it was, Harold went home that night without observing this spectacular event and without a promotion.

Upon reaching his home, Harold slouched in his leather chair and fumed at his missed opportunity. It was at that moment that he discovered that he had missed his toupee as well. Unwilling to risk missing anything else, Harold decided to not miss out on any more sleep and promptly fell asleep in his chair.

The next day Harold forgot about the toupee, but not the comet. He hurried back to the observatory in the hopes that he might be able to catch a glimpse of its tail as it sped away from Earth for another ten thousand years. Among the things he forgot to do that morning before leaving: change his clothes, brush his teeth, and look for his toupee.

Harold returned to his empty home late that night disappointed again by the comet and his life. He had forgotten to eat that day and was only reminded of it by the gurgle that emanated from his stomach. He warmed up some soup and sat down by the radio to let its melodious notes distract him from the emptiness in his life.

It was at this moment, when Harold let go of his solitary focus on the comet, that he noticed something move. At first he thought that he must have seen his cat, but then he remembered that his cat had wandered off (most likely because he had forgotten to feed it) and that he had forgotten to look for it. He dismissed the movement as some apparition of his mind and went back to slurping his soup and listening to the radio.

Harold suffered through the deepest of depression for days as he grew to the realization that he had wasted his life on his singular obsession over the comet. He had nothing to show for his years of focus. He became so depressed that he could barely look at, much less through, his telescope. His telescope came to symbolize all of his dreams, ones that he could only look at from a distance.

Therefore, it was only through a quirk of fate that he had come to look through the telescope once more. Harold’s boss from the Association of Extraplanetary and Incendiary Observatories Union (or AEIOU) was coming in for a surprise inspection and Harold had to get things in top shape lest his life get any worse. It was during his cleaning of the wretched telescope that Harold found himself being drawn in to look just once more through its lens.

What he saw perplexed him. It must be a smudge he thought and attempted to wipe the lens again. He checked again, quite sure of himself that he had fixed the problem. To his amazement IT was still there. The comet, his comet, had come back. Harold suspended his disbelief to allow for a moment of joy to pierce his depression. It had come back for him.

Immediately, his mind began to race to and fro between plausible explanations (The Earth’s gravitational pull must have altered its course) and expectant accolades (I’ll surely win the Atomizer Award for this). In fact, Harold once again became so distracted with his own thoughts that he stopped looking through the telescope. And once again, he failed to note the strange burst of particles the emanated from the comet’s tail.

Harold worked through the night alternating between his acceptance speech and his ground-breaking research paper. When he finally returned to his empty home, he heated up a can of soup on the stove and went into the living room to turn on the radio just as he had two weeks earlier. Then he was lamenting the loss of his comet and his toupee. Now he was bubbling with excitement over the finding of his comet (he had long since forgotten about his missing hairpiece). He was so excited that at first he didn’t notice it, the movement beneath the rug. But when he felt the rug tugging at his feet he could no longer ignore the curious mass that was wriggling underneath.

Harold gasped, then gurgled, then squealed. Had anyone been there to witness it, they would have been witness to a symphony of eccentric emanations from the body of Harold Haley. Once he completed vocalizing his shock, he quickly grabbed the nearest object to him, his chair.

Harold stood poised above the moving mass beneath his rug ready to strike just in case. His mind, being a scientific mind, raced through all of the plausible hypotheses that could explain this mysterious object. After quickly considering and reject several possible explanations, Harold recalled that he had seen something move two weeks ago. It could have been a coincidence; however, it was the only thing that Harold had to go on. His mind quickly calculated all of the things that happened that night two weeks ago and tonight. Then it dawned on him that the comet was the only thing in common with both nights. Somehow whatever it was beneath the rug was connected with the comet.

The mass wriggled again beneath the rug towards Harold. He leapt back in fear, brought the chair down in front of him, and hopped up on it in one awkward motion. Standing on the chair, he tried to determine whatever could be under the rug. He scratched his head in puzzlement. He scratched again and an idea came to him. It was two weeks ago that he had missed his toupee. He thought to himself whether it was possible that the comet’s passing had somehow brought his hairpiece to life. Harold was about to dismiss this idea as a ludicrous figment of an imagination raised on science-fiction movies when it wriggled again towards him.

It was now just inches from the edge of the rug and merely a foot away from him. Harold was petrified with fright, mortified that his own toupee could be the menace of his house. Even for someone who spends hours staring vacantly into space, the next few minutes seemed an eternity. Harold nervously sweated and shivered and shaked atop his chair while the wriggling mass below him crept closer and closer towards the edge of the rug. At last he spotted something black and hairy peek out from beneath the rug. “This confirms it,” thought Harold, “It really is my toupee.” He nearly fainted at the impossibility of it all when his toupee made the most unusual sound.

Once your site is set up be sure to send me the link to it so I can get everyone connected through this site.

Now we need to make a posting. I would like you to pick two of favorite pieces of writing thus far and put them in two separate posts.

Then check back here to see other people’s blog.

We’ll be creating our own blogs for Creative Writing to showcase our work and to comment on each others’ work.

Instead of recreating the wheel, I’ve borrowed instructions from Mr. Stearns at Shorewood for creating your own blog.

1) Go to learnerblogs.org and choose a Username (einstein+ last name), Blog title (last name’s + class blog – for example Smith’s 7th grade Creative Writing blog), give them your email address, and click “next.” If you are unsure about using your own email address, try using a temporary email address like dodgit.com. The biggest issue is that your username has to be unique because your URL will be based on it.

2) Go to your email (or the dodgit email) and follow the instructions for logging in. It will give you a link and a password. Write down the password. You’ll be able to change the password later.

3) Once you are in, click the profile button at the top right of the screen and change your password to one you will not forget. You can write the password down on a sticky or make it the name of your dog or little brother.

4) Next, email me (matt.gillingham@shorelineschools.og) your URL; you can just forward me the email you just got from learnerblogs.