IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT - ARCHIVE II

"Winners" from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Archive

1988

Like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built, Portia was sleek, shapely, and gorgeous, her red jumpsuit molding her body, which was as warm as seat covers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, her eyes flashing like bright hubcaps, and her lips as dewy as the beads of fresh rain on the hood; she was a woman who was driven - fueled by a single accelerant - and she needed a man, a man who wouldn't shift from his views, a man to steer her along the right road, a man like Alf Romeo.

Author Unknown

 

1990

Delores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever skipping across smooth water, rippling water sporadically but oblivious to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank, due to an overdose of fluoride as a child which caused her to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred-pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center. 

Linda Vernon, Newark, CA 

 

2007

Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee.

Jim Gleeson, Madison, WI