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Eastern Oregon Word Round-Up Flash Sledgehammer 36-Word Writing Contest

Congratulations, Kristen Blanton, winner of a one-hour consultation with an Indigo editor!

Incorporating the prompt exhibit, Kristen wrote this piece of flash fiction (a week before :

Imagine an exhibit where people want to be, with lots of gadgets and tables to see. Sounds like the fun you’ll have at Wordstock, without me.

©2013 Kristen Blanton

Wordstock Flash Sledgehammer 36-Word Writing Contest, Part 2

There is usually only one winner of our Mini and Flash Sledgehammers, but our judges were so taken with another entry to the Wordstock Flash Sledgehammer that we decided to award a second place to Kaitee Steiert. She’ll receive 15% off an Indigo service. Congratulations, Kaitee!

Incorporating the prompt free-for-all, Kaitee wrote this piece of flash fiction:

It starts perfect. A smile, a free-for-all with the air. Next: pain, eating dirt, that stubborn horse wondering why the hell I did something like that. She won’t be broken after all.

©2013 Kaitee Steiert

Wordstock Flash Sledgehammer 36-Word Writing Contest, Part 1

Congratulations, Eric Butler, winner of a one-hour consultation with an Indigo editor!

Incorporating the prompt free-for-all, Eric wrote this piece of flash fiction:

The meeting adjourned, the doors opened, the free-for-all began. I moved a moment too late, and found myself shut out. Their conversations were walls against me; how strange to have no audience in a crowded room.

©2013 Eric Butler

Mini Sledgehammer September 2013: Blackbird Wine & Atomic Cheese

For the first Mini Sledgehammer since the main event, we had a small but strong showing. Congratulations to Ian Drew Forsyth for winning his first Mini!

***

Prompts:
Character: someone in a red hat
Action: playing cards
Setting: In front of the computer
Phrase: “I have to!”

***

Metaprogamming the Gods

by Ian Drew Forsyth

When the series of events that interlocks our existences is activated, it takes superior concentration to impede the unfolding events. For Dr. Azarel it seemed too late even in the manifold possibilities in front of him, at the helm of one of the first quantum computers in the multiverse.

I have to, he kept muttering to himself. With only a host of his befuddled associates to contain him, this seemed the best path.

The concept of “best” fails to take into account the full ramifications of such a path. He had read the cards correctly, laid each one, each electro-tarot, played with the possibilities, and some essential intuitive force had urged him to such conclusions.

Earth was in the midst of the battling mundane, and it had been beckoned by the call of the ‘red hats’ as they were called. Much as the British imperial soldiers had been deemed: red coats, these mad psychoneuronauts were an imperial force of the mind—close to the intangibly mystic spirit, for this mind they purposed to exist in all simultaneous glories was beyond all former conceptions of self.

Even the most far bent religious esoteric sects couldn’t filter such specific illuminations. Of the main electroaxioms that Dr. Azarel and his colleagues professed were as follows:

  1. The self is a fabric of individual parallel selves and layers of collective being composites.
  2. Time is beyond mere Einsteinian dimensions: past-present-future or pasenture as it is known is compounded by full directional non-sequential “time” which continually disassociates itself from not mere dualisms but even ten dimensional states: infinitude is the superior attitude of a simultaneous I and We interlocked in tangled illusive improbabilities of possibility.

There were more rules, or rather, supposed theories, that were a boggled mouthful. Although, the red hats had demonstrated miracles on the daily, although they’d long ago superseded the limited thoughtform of the day.

And thus is was on this “day”, that Dr. Azarel was prepared to ultimately refract himself, the self, the entangled being, into supradimensions. He carefully with full detachment placed the supracelluar hyperdimensional metaprogramming orbital circuit nodeform on his forehead drenched in sweat: also known as the womb helmet, or red hat, for its phosphorescent crimson hue that surged and crackled with the raw potentiality of infinity.

Just as the womb helmet slipped over his visage, his assistant, the hyperion grad student: Dr. Iblis entered screaming at him to cease his hyperspace actions.

“Don’t you dare!”

Dr. Azarel turned with a malignant glare. “I will do as I wish.”

“Your wishes are pure hubris, and I won’t see you exit this planet without explaining to me why you want to leave it so badly.”

The doctor grit his teeth and slammed his fists on the motherboard signals seizing them up and literally distorting his rationale. It takes much rationalization and reason to believe such bizarre theorems.

“Iblis you insist on an absence of free will in the multiverse because you’re afraid.”

Iblis began to creep towards his mentor ready to seize the red hat from his control. “It’s not like that, I believe in upholding the collective. Your individualized screen of hyperreality has lead you to isolation, even solipsism I could argue.”

“Damnit! It’s not solipsism, it’s what all those sufis, yogis, and the rest of the mystical masses were attempting with no understanding of mass, energy, and the dimensional space—I deserve this technologic samadhi for my work.”

“No one is denying your work—but it is a delusion to assume you would be elevated, even brought to apotheosis by such deletion of your stable self, multiforming into the larger suggestion.”

“Who says that!”

“We all do Dr. Azarel. We’ve been worried about you. Your love calls me consistently telling me to pull you from your lab. The governments of the world want your advice—”

“—Oh they would only use me for weaponry—they’d blow up the stars before walking through them.”

“Your posthumanism has gone to far doctor. We’re suggesting a human intervention.”

“Ha! You’ll never dethrone what I’ve known, seen, and what I could perceive if you babbling peons would let me.”

“Rage all you want—” Iblis finally within grasping distance tackled the doctor—slamming him into the quantum computer and exposing them to the threat of permanent impermanence refraction—

But Iblis was swift and in subduing the womb helmet from Azarel’s skull, the mad doctor collapsed in fatigue.

Iblis sighed, picked up the womb helmet, placed it on his head. And beat Azarel to his own technoapotheosis.

For in science, there is only one god. And it is the scientist.

Mini Sledgehammer July 2013: Blackbird Wine & Atomic Cheese

Ali was back in Portland to host this last Mini Sledgehammer before this year’s main event, and it was a blast! The prompts reflect how much Ali missed Portland, and the stories were all incredible. Daniel, as last month’s winner and this month’s guest judge, and Ali both loved how the winning story worked in a fresh interpretation of what thrift stores sell. Congratulations, Peter!

Character: A gardener
Action: Recycling
Setting: A thrift store
Phrase: “The mountain is out.”

***

Untitled
by Peter D’Auria

This thrift store is different. And yet there is no sign indicating this. It stocks a wide variety of vintage clothes, obsolete electronics, and out-of-print books. Yet there is no sales staff to inform you of this. Because, despite this very respectable inventory (Leonard and I once found a near-mint condition copy of Bat Out of Hell with not a scratch on it, which we still listen to about twice a week), this thrift shop specializes in a different sort of used product: Used-To’s.

Yes, once a month the thrift shop will hang a faded flag with a picture of Mt. Fuji outside its window—“The mountain is out,” Leonard will say over the phone—and we will sprint down to the shop. There is a room in the back filled with Used-To’s, each one labeled and bottled carefully: Used-to-date. Used-to-go-to-the-zoo. Used-to-live-across-the-street. “I wonder how they get them into bottles,” Leonard says, and I tell him I don’t know. When we ask the owner how he gets them, he just gets angry. “They are used-to’s,” he says. “People do not use them anymore. Why shouldn’t I have them. Are you going to buy something or what?” And we do, we buy as many bottles as we can, and then we go sit in Leonard’s garden and drink them. It is, Leonard remarks, a kind of recycling.

Sometimes they are sad. Last month I drank a particularly poignant Used-to-love-me and I couldn’t get out of bed for two days. Sometimes they’re beautiful. Used-to-go-to-the-beach’s are always wonderful. They have a glow about them. Sometimes they’re just weird. Yesterday the flag was out, and that afternoon, as we sat under his pear tree, Leonard looked up after his first sip from a bottle and said “This is one of mine.” I asked him what it was. “It’s about my mom,” he said. “When I was little she used to take me down to her garden. I used to help her pick string beans and pull weeds and stuff.” Leonard’s mother had passed away just last year. “Can I have a taste?” I asked him and he shook his head and said, “I don’t think so.”

I went back to my Used-to-have-this-cat and Leonard finished the bottle. We sat for a minute and then Leonard went inside. I looked around at Leonard’s own garden—his tomatoes in rows, raspberries on strung wire, and the thought struck me that someday this moment itself would be labeled and bottled, sitting in a backroom filled with old friends and lovers and dead pets.

©  2013 Peter D’Auria