Fox Pass

The hen cocked her head to one side, as her species was wont to do. She narrowed her eyes as she looked the glossy identification card over. “I don’t know,” she said, sliding the card across the hardscrabble ground outside the hen house with her taloned foot. “I’ve never heard of the Office of Hen House Inspection before.”

The fox’s expression remained unchanged, wearing that slight smirk of one possessed with self-confidence that is forced to engage with their intellectual lesser on a regular basis. Clasping his glossy black front paws together before him in a gesture of askance, he asked, “Madam… I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”

“Henrietta,” the hen bawked in response.

“Of course, how very droll,” the fox replied in a voice as smooth as silk sheets. “Madam Henrietta, do you know what the Office of Hen House Inspection uses as its primary means of pursuing its mandate in the inspection of hen houses?”

Henrietta turned her head again, focusing one beady eye on the smiling fox. “Well, seeing as how I’ve never heard of it, it seems as though it would follow that I wouldn’t know what its… its…” her voice trailed off.

“Primary means of pursing its mandate in the inspection of hen houses?” the fox
offered helpfully.

“Yeah,” Henrietta said, coming as close to smiling in relief as her beaked face would allow. “That thing.”

The fox adopted a look of studious contemplation and nodded his head in acknowledgement. “That’s all well and good,” he said. “In fact, this is exactly how we prefer to operate over at the oh hi.”

Henrietta looked around in bewilderment. “Hi who?”

“No no no no, my dear sweet thing. O-H-H-I. It’s an acronym for Office of Hen House Inspection.”

Henrietta gave a blank stare. “An acro-what?”

“Acronym, it’s an acronym,” the fox sighed in exasperation. “A word made from the first letters of other words.”

“I see,” Henrietta said in that precise tone that indicated that she did not at all see and was desperate to end the conversation before her ignorance could be further exposed.

“Anyway,” the fox continued, picking up the previously dropped thread of conversation, “we over at the OHHI—that’s the Office of Hen House Inspection, remember—prefer to conduct surprise inspections.”

“Well,” Henrietta said warily, “that’s all well and good, but I’ve still never heard of any such thing.”

The fox spread his paws before him in presentation. “Precisely! What better way to ensure a integrity of a surprise inspection than to make it so surprising that the residents of the hen house have never even heard of it?”

The eye that Henrietta had facing the fox went unfocused, as though she were staring at something on the distant horizon. The fox could veritably hear the clockwork turning in her small head as she processed this information, though in his estimation there was probably only enough room in that skull for a few cogs and perhaps a flywheel.

“That… does make sense,” Henrietta said at long last, just before the fox had thought that she had perhaps spontaneously fallen into a waking coma. “We’re all certainly surprised at your arrival, that’s for certain.”

The fox nodded knowingly. “It’s quite all right madam, this is exactly how these affairs are supposed to occur.” With a sweep of his forelegs, he gestured to the gangplank leading into the darkened interior of the henhouse. “Now, shall we proceed with the inspection?”

“Of course, of course,” Henrietta clucked amicably, striding up the wooden plank ahead of her guest. At the top of the ramp, she pulled up short and spun on her heel. “Just a minute,” she said, her eyes narrowing in suspicion, “are you sure that you aren’t a fox?”

The fox blinked in surprise at the sudden accusation. “Madam, certainly not! Foxes all work at the, uh—Foreign Office of… Xylophones.”

Henrietta’s gaze remained unchanged. The pads of the fox’s feet began to sweat from the sudden nervous onset.

“Okay,” Henrietta eventually said, her expression softening. “I should know better than to argue with an officer from the Office of Hen House Inspection.”

“Indeed,” the fox said, a wave of relief washing over him. “After you, madam,” he said, licking his lips as Henrietta disappeared inside the shelter before him.

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"Write about bears having sex"

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“Honey,” Natasha’s voice came from the darkness near him.

“I’m not going to get any honey right now,” Boris grumbled. “Go back to sleep.”

“Not that honey. I mean you dear.”

“I’m not going out to get any deer right now either,” Boris grumbled some more. “That’s even worse than getting honey right now.”

There was a pause in the darkness of the cave. Boris’s eyes were heavy and leaden, and it didn’t take long before he drifted back off to sleep.

“Honey, are you awake?” came Natasha’s voice again.

“No!” Boris growled. “I’m hibernating! And so should you!”

“I can’t sleep,” Natasha whispered, her muzzle so close Boris thought that he might feel her fur on his ear. “I’m feeling to frisky.”

Suddenly, Boris didn’t feel too sleepy anymore. And that’s where baby bears come from.

-The End

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"A time traveler arrives early to a party, years before it's scheduled to happen."

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So as you may or may not be aware, I’m part of an online writing group where I compete with a bunch of anonymous strangers on the interwebs to win the accolades of the rest of the strangers. It’s all in good fun, even though I’m secretly self-conscious that I spend far more time than I should reading and writing up critiques for everyone that may or may not always be appreciated. I am not, after all, a professional writer or editor, so the chances are high that I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.

Except of course when I’m talking about animals, that I’m usually pretty on the ball about. Gotta put that college learnin’ to some purpose, right?

Anyway, as an experiment one time, a bunch of these aforementioned strangers decided it might be an interesting idea to get together online in a Google Plus Hangout (surest sign of my approach to middle age is that I didn’t quite know what the fuck this would actually entail) and try and cobble together an impromptu writing group. I was all about it though, as the sharing of writing and feedback is one of the few things that bring something that might be mistaken for enjoyment in my cold, dead heart.

The problem was, I didn’t have anything to write about. I had already come up with my entry for the week, but wasn’t ready to share it with the others. I spent the first round of writing kicking out the secondary idea I had come up with as just a piss take to do. Then the second round came by, and all I had to go with was “bears having sex.” That one was considerably less successful than the two previous stories I’d come up with so far.

The third entry, though, I was bone dry. I had nothing left in my creative well on tap to write out. In desperation, I pleaded with someone to give me a prompt, anything that would help spur the creative machinery of the mind and help me get something going. Mostly I was met with derision for wanting to take a prompt from a group of people that were seemingly having a hard enough time coming up with a prompt of their own, but someone eventually gave me something:

“A time traveler shows up for a party years too early.”

Okay, that was something. That immediately opens up a can of worms of time travel paradoxes, however. Does the person throwing the party know that they’re going to throw the party that far ahead of time? Does the attendant showing up years early set into motion the events that would lead to the party being thrown in the future? Is this Terminator time travel rules, or is it Back to the Future time travel rules? Or does it just make shit up as it goes along like Looper or Time Cop?

This was all giving me a headache, so I went down to my kitchen to get a glass of water so I could take some pain killers. I was fighting my way back through the horde of cats that had amassed at my feet (I was in the kitchen, so naturally they assumed it was to feed them), when all of a sudden there was a “Blorp!” in my living room! I screamed in a manner that was not at all like a little girl, and wheeled around to face this unexpected incursion into my home. And who should I see there, standing in the rubble of what used to be my chaise lounger before it was destroyed by some sort of temporal displacement field?

BATMAN!

“Batman!” I called in surprise. “What are you doing here? We talked about this, I’ve got a restraining order against you.”

“No, you don’t understand!” Batman coughed.

“Oh, I understand perfectly well,” I assured him, reaching for the phone. “I’m calling the police.”

“Wait!” he cried. Something in his voice gave me pause. “I’ve come to warn you! Something terrible is going to happen!”

My hand hovered over the receiver. “What? What’s going to happen?”

A pained expression came over Batman’s face. “I… forget…”

“You came to the past to warn me about something terrible that’s going to happen that you’ve forgotten what it is.”

“Don’t blame me!” Batman exclaimed. “One of the side effects of time travel is that you lose most of your memory! For Christ’s sake, man, didn’t you ever watch Quantum Leap?”

“Calling the police,” I said as I picked up the phone.

“Wait!” Batman cried again. “I planned for this outcome! I can use the power of prep-time to overcome any obstacle! I wrote it down, just give me a second…” He started fiddling with his utility belt, apparently endowed with the memory that he had written his warning down, but not which pouch he had placed it in.

Eventually he found it, holding it aloft in triumph. “Here it is!” he cried. He unfolded the note, and read from it aloud: “See, I wrote it all out, it says… ‘remember the terrible thing that’s going to happen.’”

We both stared at the note for a brief moment. “Fuck,” he said.

“Police,” I said, going for the phone.

“Wait!” he implored once more. “Okay, so I don’t remember what it was, and I didn’t write it down! But I remember that it was really, really bad! Bad enough that I risked coming back in time to tell you, knowing that the side effects would include massive memory loss and catastrophic failure of molecular cohesion!”

“Hold up,” I said. “Isn’t this almost exactly how an issue of Squee! by Jhonen Vasquez went down?”

Batman tried to answer, but his jaw melted off his face as he dissolved into an unsightly puddle of his constituent elements. I can only imagine that the impending disaster he was trying to warn me about was how hard it was going to be to clean that shit out of my carpet.

LEGENDS OF BATMAN!!!

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Ourobolus said:

I will say the gratuitous nudity was a bit much for me, but I suppose you have to take the good with the bad.

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Cyan said:

P.S. Nezumi's accent was disappointingly non-embarrassing. I feel lied to.

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Ourobolus said:

Man. I really need to finish this damn thing, regardless of how bad it is...

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Ourobolus said:

Well it's certainly nothing great, but at least I hammered it out.

Faux Pas - 1486 words

Quote for Password

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- Using the theme as the title of your piece is discouraged.

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Mike M said:

The title is a faux pas unto itself.

How very meta.

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Mike M said:

The title is a faux pas unto itself.

How very meta.

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kehs said:

Crunch time baby!

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Zakalwe said:

So, is the etiquette that we choose our top three and provide feedback/critique on each sub? I'm not the most confident writer, so critiquing others is not something I find comfortable.

If it's what's expected I'll give it a shot, I don't want to get all meta in here. ;_;

This has been a lot of fun. All I've managed to write over the past year is scraps of ideas and first chapters to novels that never happened. Finishing something, as short as this is, feels great.

Reading through the other subs has been fun too, lots of different interpretations and some imaginative ideas. Looking forward to the next one already!

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Ourobolus said:

Pick top 3 for voting purposes. You can still critique everyone's actual writing, not just top 3.
Critiquing everyone's work is optional, but highly encouraged.. We all want to get better!

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