#10 - The Game

Today's words: Sufferer, Midday, Gentleman, Animal 

Word Count: 480

Summary: A young man has his life disrupted forever due to something that happened when he was a kid.

Trigger warning: hints of abuse

 Every Saturday at midday, Michael dies.

Holding onto the closest available object, he clutches it in desperation until his knuckles turn paper-white. His whole body feels like it’s rejecting his soul, like someone’s trying to exorcise something evil out of him. Eventually he collapses into a trembling heap on the floor, struggling to collect as much oxygen as he can whilst his brain repeats for what feels like hours that he’s going to be okay.

Saturday afternoons with his dad would be something to look forward to every week. He’d prepare his clothes, comic books, and homework days in advance, alerting his friends at school whenever it was nearly the weekend. With his elbows on the windowsill overlooking the front garden, he’d press his forehead against the cold glass and wait until he could see the white registration plate that had his initials at the end (if you changed the ‘5’ for an ‘S’), and the friendly one, two, and three flash of the headlights. Scrambling from the window, he’d grab his backpack, kiss his mother, and run out of the door like an over-enthusiastic puppy, scared that its owner had left forever.

One Saturday, Michael’s dad invented a game.

“Are you ready, Mikey?”

“What do I have to do, again?”

“When you see the all of the hands of the clock move to twelve, you have to close your eyes. Then, I have to try and make you open them. If I can make you open your eyes in five minutes or less, I win; if not, you win, and I’ll give you a bag of sweets.”

“Butter fudge from Thornton’s??”

“The very same.”

“What if I lose?”

“If you lose...I have to dare you to do something, and you can’t say no.”

“Like what? Something scary...?”

“All you have to do is win, Mikey.”

The first time that Michael played the game, he lost after a few seconds.

“Hey! No fair – you know I’m really ticklish, dad!”

“Haha okay, I’ll try something different.”

A person is most vulnerable in two situations: when they can’t see, and when they’re naked.

“Dad, this feels weird.”

“You want this fudge, right?”

“Well, yeah, but--”

“Then keep your eyes closed.”

“Dad, this is starting to hurt, can we stop?”

“We’ve still got two minutes left. You want to win the game, don’t you?”

“Daddy...”

Every Saturday at midday, Michael’s dad shrugged off his regular skin; like a werewolf at the sight of a full moon, he turned into an animal.

And he used to be such a nice gentleman...

--

Michael’s nearly thirty now; he has a job that he loves, a steady girlfriend, and a cosy house in California that he paid for with his own money.

Michael is also a long-term sufferer of weekly panic attacks that tend to last for five minutes or less. He can’t remember why.

#9 - The Frog

Today’s words: Correspondent, Frog, Assault, Hospital
Today’s genre: Drama/Mystery
Word count: 475

“For the past few weeks, several people have been assaulted by people in a manic state asking variations of the same question: “Where is the frog?” However, this is no fairy tale. The people who are on this mission to speak to ‘the frog’ have turned violent once their victims deny knowledge or the whereabouts of said frog. This strange phenomenon is spreading, not just in the UK, but worldwide. Doctors are stumped, as are other health professionals. So, the question on everyone’s lips is...who or what is ‘the frog’?”

It felt like the world had undergone some 28 Days Later  spin-off, but in a really lame way. I turned off the television, watching as the correspondent’s face faded away on my TV screen. Why was it that every reporter, no matter what the news story was, rarely smiled? If I had my cock in her, she would smile.

I picked up a bottle of vodka to wash down the ridiculous imagery and bit down on my bottom lip, hard.

The girl on her knees looked up at me, tears clouding her eyes. She looked...what was the word, ‘sad’? “I love you.”

“I love you too, but it’s rude to talk with your mouth full.”

“It isn’t--"

I pushed her head down. “It is, now.”

The bars on Saturday nights were like a pic ‘n’ mix bowl in a supermarket: soft ones, sour ones...sweet ones that made your tongue wet and your dick hard. I’m talking candy, you dig? I’d go shopping for candy nearly every week and that night was no different. There was a lot of candy, I remember that much.

I had decided to buy a new drink that had been released the month before: Spawn. The adverts always showed people swallowing this drink, close-ups on their throats, various moans of pleasure drifting from their nostrils before dark green lettering floated onto the screen: ‘Spawn – It Goes Down a Treat.’ As a fan of my liquor, I gave it a shot. It went down better than a slut in heat. From that point onwards, recall was impossible.

“Did you find the frog?”

My eyes opened and all I could see was whiteness. This wasn’t my bedroom, I thought. I turned my groggy head in the direction of the foreign voice. “Where am I?”

“You’re in hospital.”

I looked around: white curtains, steady sounds of beeping, an anti-bacterial smell wafting through the air. What the fuck had happened?

“The frog, did you find it?”

I narrowed my eyes. Was this dude fucking with me?

“You came in a week ago shouting about needing to speak to a frog, you don’t remember?” he laughed slightly. “You had about six guys trying to retrain you on the floor over there,” he nodded to somewhere past my head. “Well...did you find it? Your precious frog?”