Even Shorter Really Short Short Stories: The Scraped Scenes From Shakespeare Series

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The To Be Or Not To Be Series
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The One Monologue Fits All Series
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The Misplaced Monologue Series
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The Same Old Soliloquy Series



IJuliet wakes up in the tomb and finds Romeo sprawled across her bosom. She spots an empty vial in his hand and immediately (and correctly) deduces what has happened. She takes Romeo's dagger and positions it at her breast, saying, "Oh happy dagger – to be or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler ..."

But before she could finish her existential ramble, the Friar enters the tomb ...

Then the Capulets ...

Then the Montagues ...

Thus the feud does not end. Juliet takes the veil and spends the rest of her life contemplating, "To be or not to be ..."



IIOthello is torn deciding whether or not to kill Desdemona: On one hand, he is unable to disbelieve Iago; on the other, he cannot completely believe his beloved wife.

With the pillow poised, Othello begins, "To be or not to be ..."

Halfway through, Emillia (who happens in on the scene) goes mad from the tediousness of Othello's meditation, and Desdemona, to keep from screaming out loud from boredom, claps her hands over her mouth, and eventually smothers herself to death.



IIICaesar happens upon a secret gathering of members of his senate, and, to his horror, realizes they are all wannabe-actors, and all of them have chosen Hamlet's monologue for their audition. As the lot of them begins to murmur in one voice, "To be or not to be ...", Caesar lets slip a tortured groan, and is thus found out.

To prevent Caesar from letting the cat out of the bag, they decide to stab him to death. When Caesar sees his pal Brutus, who is the last in line to stab him, in scandalized disappointment with his dying breath, he utters, "Et tu, Brute – an actor?!"



IVMacbeth deliberates over Lady Macbeth's suggestion to vanquish Banquo to fulfill the witches' prophesy.

"To be or not to be ..." he begins, and the ghost of the dead king of Denmark whispers, offstage, "Wrong play, asshole ..."



VHamlet forgets.



Fin.

Even Shorter Really Short Short Stories: The Happily Ever After Series

ICinderella marries Prince Charming, only to find he has a foot fetish. She divorces him soon after because after he got bored of her feet, he is constantly seeking new feet. This comes shortly before the collapse of his kingdom.

Cinderella goes on to be a foot model and shoots to astronomical fame. When Prince Charming comes crawling back to weep and beg at her feet, she sends him on his way with a good kick to his ass.



IIWhen Peasy, the Princess who got her pedigree confirmed by a pea under tons of mattresses, marries the Prince, she is sleepless on her wedding night after she realizes she is cursed to be plagued her entire marriage by a pea-sized problem: her new husband’s dick.

Finally, she runs away to join the circus. There she falls in love with and marries the star of freak-show, the Horse-Man.



IIIAfter Prince Charming wakes Sleeping Beauty with a kiss and breaks the spell, they marry in a resplendent wedding in his castle.

Never has an angry word passed between them in their long marriage - for, when she is not nodding off from her narcolepsy, he is boring her to sleep.



IVAfter the piece of poisoned apple has been dislodged from Snow White’s mouth and she awakens from her stupor, she sees the Prince (who has rushed to her glass coffin-side) and says, “What kinda sick fuck are you to fall in love with a dead girl? You may be into necrophilia but I’m not. I’m calling the cops.”

Then Snow White goes on to become a highly successful psychologist who specializes in treating the distress of damsels, and continues to live with the seven dwarves, who have given up their mining profession and now run a women’s shelter.



VThe Princess may have lost her golden ball to the pond, but she soon forgets about it after a delicious snack of black pepper frog legs.

A year later, after she has learned to swim, she manages to retrieve her golden ball all by herself, which sparks her interest in diving.

Three years later, she is an avid certified diver and runs a dive shop with her partner, a gold medalist in the women’s Olympic diving.


End

Really Short Short Stories: The What's the Point, Again? Series

IA girl wakes up one morning with a swollen left eyelid, like from a mosquito bite - except it’s neither itchy nor painful. As the day wears on, the lid swells more and more, until the girl is unable to open her left eye and is forced to go about her daily chores with only one eye.

Soon, however, she finds herself having double vision - not seeing double, but double vision. She tries closing her right eye, and finds out, to her surprise and shock, she can still see with her left. Eventually, she figures out her left eye gives her the vision of what has already happened (be it two minutes ago or two years later), and her right what is currently happening.

At first, she is excited she can look into the future, but after a week, after she has seen everything that will and has happened, she grows more and more disillusioned and depressed. Inevitably, she begins to contemplate suicide.

However, seven days later, she wakes up with a healed left eyelid. She can only see the things that are currently happening now. As she goes about her life from that day onwards, she tries to do things that would surprise herself: because she now knows that whatever she does in and with her life, whether or not she gets answers and/or wiser, when her life ends, everything she does and is ends with her.



IIA young man falls in love with a girl he thinks is the most beautiful person with the most innate grace in the world. This girl has become his world, and he finds himself imagining a shared life with her. He is thrilled when she falls in love with him. They become the couple everybody envies and hopes to be.

Three years later, still blissfully and blessedly in love, they are planning their marriage. The week before the solemnization, out of curiosity and on their parents’ behest, they consulted a fortune teller - who turns out to be the harbinger of bad news: if and when they should marry (the fortune teller warns), they will be bounded to each other for life but will find their love and happiness and desire for each other completely vanished within the first year of their marriage.

Worried, the couple asks what could be done to remedy this, but the fortune teller tells them it is their destiny; and, try as they may, they cannot change it. As the couple walks away, the girl insists they not believe the fortune teller and get married anyway; the young man, however, wholeheartedly believes in the fortune teller’s words.

On the day of their solemnization, the young man does not turn up. Thus he manages to retain his love and desire for the girl for as long as he lives, but loses her love and desire forever. He dies a happily miserable man.



IIIOne afternoon, a young lady alights several bus stops away from home to buy slices of pie for her mother. Since the bakery is located along a long stretch of road well-known for good food, the girl decides to walk a little down the road to search for nasi lemak, which she suddenly has a craving for.

When she has walked the distance between two bus stops, she sees a shop that sells nasi lemak. However, she walks on, because she thinks it does not look too good - and also, there may be a store farther down the road that sells better nasi lemak. When she passes by the next bus stop, she finds another shop that offers nasi lemak, and yet again, she finds it wanting and walks on thinking there may be better nasi lemak down the road.

Finally, three bus stops and three nasi lemak stores later, she still hasn’t found the nasi lemak she craves, and is getting hungrier and more tired and weaker by the minute. Finally, she realizes she is only one bus stop away from the stop she usually alights to walk home - a walk that is the distance of about four bus stops.

Therefore the girl decides to walk all the way home, the hope of finding something to eat still burning, although less brightly. Unfortunately, all the eating places she passes then are closed. So, when she spots a small dry-provision store, she goes in and buys a bag of crisps.

When she finally gets home, she eats the crisps and finds they taste better than the nasi lemak she had craved.



IVA girl, who wishes to acquire every piece of knowledge about the universe known to man, one day gleans piece of knowledge she immediately regrets to possess: she can see more and much farther than she is able to comprehend.

She despairs about this fact for a long time, at the expense of time and her studies.

Then, it occurs to her that even if she should be killed by what she does not know, she would still die in the bliss of her own ignorance; and if she should die knowing with a clear knowledge of what has killed her, she would die in comprehension and awareness - but in any case, when she has died, what else will and can matter?

She lives to learn as much as she can, and dies having not learned more.



VA man vows to spend his life seeking the al-iksir of life - Immortality - and the Truth.

When he has found, not just one, but both, he is slaved the infinity of his immortality to searching for a way to die – and to forget.


End

An Even Shorter Really Short Short Story

Before Zeus, in the guise of a swan, could make love to - or rape - Leda, the Ugly Ducking waddles up and asks, “Are you my Daddy?”

Really Short Short Stories: The Birds Series

IA little woodpecker flies through the woods, and finally settles on a sturdy-looking tree. Perched on the highest branch, it then begins to peck at the trunk, ceaselessly, industriously. Soon, there is a growing pile of woodchips at the base of the tree and the tree is bleeding.

When it starts to bleed profusely, the tree stirs and groans, begging the woodpecker to stop its pecking because it hurts, and asking the little bird why it’s doing what it’s doing. The woodpecker only continues to peck mutely.

Finally, for the last time, the tree asks the woodpecker, and this time, the woodpecker stops its pecking to say the tree is no longer a tree. And it’s true: the sturdy tree is now a naked slender young girl who is bleeding where the woodpecker’s claws and beak have been digging into.

The girl looks at the blood running down her arm and asks the woodpecker why. The woodpecker looks at the girl, who doesn’t hear the bird’s answer but now understands everything. She accepts the woodpecker, still perched on her arm, whose claws are still digging into her flesh and making her bleed, and asks the little bird to teach her more.



IIA young lady walks through the market-place and spots a seller of birds surrounded by cages and cages of the winged creatures and is attracted to the store. There she sees a cage with a nightingale and buys it without bargaining down the outrageous price the bird-seller quotes her.

In her house, she feeds the bird honey-water and it begins to sing. She opens the cage and takes it out. The bird is still singing as she lays in down and runs the sharp tip of a knife from under its beak to the bottom of its tail feathers. Then she pries apart the body of the nightingale and bends down to breathe in the nightingale’s singing.

Later that day, in the evening, she puts on a beautiful gown and goes to the opera house, where she sings sweetly before a mesmerized audience. At the end of her singing, they give her a standing ovation, whereupon she uses her knife and runs it from her forehead to the hem of her gown. From the slit the blade has made, a little brown bird emerges and flies away, and the woman’s entire being and costume - wig, birthday suit, and gown - collapse onto her shoes in a pile.

Outside the opera house, the bird seller waits with the cage. As the nightingale flies out from the opera house, he catches it in his hand and puts it back in the cage. He walks away into the night. In the morning, his bird store has completely vanished from the market place.



IIIEvery night for a month, a young man dreams of a young lady who wears a black half-mask of shaped a like swallow. She sings to him a song which he cannot understand but nevertheless thinks is sorrowful because he feels drowned by tears whenever he hears it. When she stops singing, he awakes.

One morning, he sees a black swallow perched on branch just outside his window. Without much difficulty, he catches the bird and places it in a cage beside his bed, so he can gaze at it until he drifts off to sleep. That night, he dreams again of the young masked lady, but she doesn’t sing to him. He gazes at her until he falls awake.

The next morning, he finds the cage locked but empty. He is inexplicably sad, and feels his heart ache. By late afternoon, he has taken to bed because his heart hurts too much and he feels drained by the pain. That night, in his dreams, the young lady sings again to him. After her song has ended, she removes her black swallow half-mask. She is so beautiful the young man in his dreams thinks he must have died and found paradise.

Some time later, the young man is found dead in his bed, wearing a black half-mask shaped like a swallow, and where his heart is supposed to be is a small nest in which are four little eggs that hatch into four black swallows that fly away and are never seen again.



IVOnce, there is a young woman who keeps a whole aviary of birds about her. Every time she feels for someone, a single bird will fly away, never to come back. Therefore, she is very careful about the people she comes in contact with, lest she should find herself bereft of all her birds and left with an empty aviary.

One day, as she is taking a stroll in the middle of a field, the front of dress bursts open, and from her breast hundreds of birds fly out from their aviary and soar into the sky. As they fly pass above her - an avian cloud - feathers rain down on her, burrowing under her skin, until she is feathered like a bird in her aviary.

Just as she is about to fly away with her birds, she is caught and placed in someone else’s aviary.



VA young man buys a cuckoo clock from a little shop tucked in a corner of the market place. The shop is crammed with cuckoo clocks of all shapes and sizes, and, on the hour, every hour, the shop sounds like an aviary of hungry birds.

When he gets home, he realizes the clock he has bought should have two cuckoos coming out on to cuckoo every hour on the hour but one cuckoo is missing. By then, it is too late to go back to the cuckoo clock shop, so he decides to go to bed and return to the market place the next morning.

That night, he dreams of meeting a beautiful girl inside the cuckoo clock he has just purchased who has the wing and tail feathers of a cuckoo bird peeking from beneath her dress. He falls in love with her and kisses her. The bird girl tells him to fly away while he still can, and he realizes he too has the wing and tail feathers of a cuckoo bird.

The next day, on the hour, two cuckoo birds are thrust out of the cuckoo clock to cuckoo, and when they are whisked back into the clock, the cuckoo clock seller lets himself into the young man’s house and takes with him the cuckoo clock. His cuckoo clock shop is never seen again in the market place - nor is the young man ever found.


End

Really Short Short Stories: The Matryoshki Series

IA writer of short stories often uses her friends, acquaintances – even strangers who catch her eye - in her fiction. One day, in a blink of her eye, she finds herself ‘kidnapped’ and brought into someone else’s fiction work. (She doesn’t know how she knows that, and she doesn’t wonder about it.) She tries to get out of the fiction she is in by writing that she herself had written about the person (she doesn’t know who) who has written her into his fiction write her out of it. She doesn’t realize both she and the author who writes her into a character are both characters written by someone else who is writing about a writer who gets written by another writer and then tries to write herself into her reality and out of his story.

Finally, the real writer writes the writer of short stories back into her fictitious reality and she is happy, thinking she has won the battle - but not realizing it is only because she has been written to think and feel that way.



IIA girl suddenly realizes she is in a dream of her own dreaming and she tries to get out of that dream and wake herself up. But every time she manages to ‘wake up’, she finds herself waking up to another dream of herself dreaming. After countless ‘waking up’s, she finds herself staring at a sleeping girl who looks exactly like her - and she knows that girl is her and she that girl. Now she is in a dilemma: she isn’t sure anymore whether she is the conscious and real one, or just a dream, and she’s worried if she woke up the sleeping girl who looks exactly like her, she would be obliterated and no longer knows she is dreaming and unable to wake up.

Finally she decides to try to wake the sleeping girl up, and when the sleeping girl does open her eyes, the girl who holds the realization that she is unable to wake up dissipates into the air. The girl who had been sleeping looks around groggily and wonders why she’s awake and who has awakened her. Then she goes back to sleep.



IIIA girl sits in front of her three-paneled vanity mirror, looking at her reflections. Then she arranges the two folding side-mirrors so that there are two sets of infinite reflections. What she doesn’t realize is that she has just created an infinite loop of different realities which is paralleled by another infinite loop of realities. Then she is sucked into one loop and is forced to fall from one reality to its parallel, then back to the first loop but landing in a different reality than the first, then falling into that reality’s mirror image ... endlessly. Much like Alice through the looking-glass forced to move from chessboard square to another chessboard square in a boundless chessboard.

She tries to escape, and once, finding herself in front of her three-fold mirror in one of the realities, she breaks the mirror, hoping to break out of the loops. Instead, the mirror fractures so that there are now even more reflected reflections, and even more realities are created. After a long time, she tries to kill herself by cutting her wrists, only to find herself dying painfully over and over and over ...



IVA girl dreams that she wakes up, but only to another dream that she wakes up into another dream of waking up into another dream of waking up ...

She finds herself unable to stop herself from waking up, and every time she wakes up, she is so tired she hopes to sleep on dreamlessly, but she is unable to break out of the loop of waking up.

A week later, the girl is found, emaciated, and, having not awakened from her sleep the entire week, has died in her sleep.



VOne day, a girl finds an old book in a used book store and finds herself reading about her life since birth, and unable to stop. Although the book isn’t very thick, however many pages she flips, she doesn’t seem to ever get to end.

Within a week, the girl has read her whole life story of her twenty-something years, and can’t find another written page beyond the page that tells of the very second she is sitting down and reading the book about her life story. She flips ahead, only to find blank pages; she flips back, only to read about her flipping ahead and looking at blank pages. Then she writes in the book, filling up seven blank pages with her life ahead, and takes the book back to the used book store and sells it.


End