I wrote this for the original fiction ficathon on LJ.

I got challenge three:
Genre: Young Adult, Humor
Rating: K-M
Like: A Group Of Odd Friends, Card Games, Matching Cell Phones, Cake
Hate: Any Official Romantic Pairings
Words/Quotes: "By the Great Gatsby!!", "I saw Atlantis In Your Pantis.", "Together y'all!"

I didn't get to finish it, but I will this weekend.

---

Dinner Party

The woman with the pointed nose was throwing a Halloween dinner party. It seemed a bit odd to be having one in September, but it was the only time she and all of her friends were available. They lived a high class life, one that involved bragging to anyone who listened that they lived near New York while all the while complaining to those closest about how chaotic the city was.

Her kindergarten best friend Katherine decided to attend the party, even though the two had not spoken since the time they split that chocolate chip cookie right down the middle. (Katherine totally got the bigger half.) She brought along her boyfriend, Douglas Willingham, and, suffice to say, he was not getting along with the other guests.

He bragged to the man-who-was-wearing-the-toupee-that-fooled-no-one that they had the same cell phones, but the man had a lifetime plan while Douglas’s was prepaid. He spoke to a girl waiting outside the bathroom about their mutual fondness of undersea life; she with a PhD in Marine Biology, Douglas having seen a one hour special on the squat lobster on the Discovery Channel. He was pretty sure he used the phrase, “I saw Atlantis in your pantis!”

But, despite Katherine’s begging, he refused to stop trying to win them over, and as the odd group finished their deserts (a strawberry cheesecake, half of which was now on Katherine’s blouse, but she wouldn’t notice it until she got home and cursed it to high heavens later), he was going into a rant about classic literature and whether or not the right choices were made in selecting what to study in modern society. “I mean, think about it!” A piece of rogue cheesecake flew from his mouth and hit the fish lady on the forehead. “We only started studying black writers, post-Civil rights. Women, post-feminism.”

“So you’re implying that we’re post-feminist, that we’re past racial issues as of now?” the pointed nose woman asked.

“No! Well, not exactly.”

Katherine grabbed his arm and whispered into his ear. “Have you ever seen a hole, Doug? You seem to be digging yourself into one pretty well.”

“There was an opportunity for you to make a well/hole pun and you didn’t. I’m disappointed, Kat.” He softened to her angry glare. “I’ve almost got them.” Katherine’s face said, ‘You don’t,’ but she said nothing else and returned to her empty plate, wondering how she managed to eat her whole piece so quickly.

The woman with the pointed nose’s husband, a chubby, British lad, suggested that the group exchange scary stories. “I just love stories!” Another woman that Douglas didn’t recognize literally clapped like a seal. The woman with the pointed nose seemed to be thinking the same thing, giving the woman an odd look before she spoke.

“I’ve got one! I’ve got one. This will most certainly get us in the Halloween spirit. I think you’ll in particular enjoy this one, Kat.”

Katherine raised an eyebrow, but The Woman with the Pointed Nose did not elaborate and instead just began her story.

--

--

Seconded

Alicia was a very talented rock musician with a devout cult following. While not known on a national scale, people would come from all over the country just to see her band play in small New England clubs. The shows were loud and obnoxious, and there was no place she felt more loved than onstage.

But, then again, that was the only place she felt loved.

When she was not strumming her guitar, she was a bank clerk who came home from her nine-to-five job and sat in an otherwise empty apartment with her cat Alice. And, once the show was over, she walked the dark, lonely streets home, very rarely being offered a ride, and even less often accepting it.

That's where she was right now - walking home from a concert, swinging her guitar case as she went, allowing it to every once and a while bang against the side of leg just slightly. Tonight was a worse night to be walking home than usual; the moon was nowhere to be seen and so it was spookily dark. The streetlights flickered on and off, and Alicia thought to herself that the town really ought to fix them.

In the periphery of her vision, she saw a glittering light. She turned to it and noticed that it was somewhere down an alleyway. Despite her better judgment, she went down the alley. A cat crossed her path, causing her to jump.

Alicia kept walking, and, there at the end was a beautiful woman with long, blonde hair, wearing typical hippie attire, strumming a guitar.

“Um, hello?” Alicia asked. The woman did not answer. After several moments of awkward silence, she pressed again. “Hello?”

The woman sharply looked up, glaring, with red, red eyes. Alicia felt her palms grow sweaty, and she rubbed her thumbs across each hand, unconsciously.

“You could be contributing something to society!” the hippie growled.

“What do you mean?”

“YOU COULD BE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“What??????”

And then the ghost jumped and feasted on Alicia’s flesh. And then her cat died because no one was there to feed her.

The end.

--

--

The group was chuckling by the end of the story; well, except for Katherine, a professional musician. Douglas caught up on the thread. “Subtle,” he wryly noted.

“What? It was scary.”

“Very.” Katherine was scowling.

“It was based on a dream I had.”

“Well if that’s the rule for tonight…” Douglas trailed off, smiling. The Seal Woman appeared with a pack of cards, apparently having gone to get them thanks to the instruction of Pointed Nose.

“Do you have bad dreams?”

Katherine looked at Douglas out of the corner of her eye. “His dreams aren’t bad as so much horribly, horribly strange.”

--

--

The Rise and Fall of the Evil Government, No Thanks to Douglas Willingham

A teenage boy entered a tall, glass, imposing building. You know, the kind of building where stodgy office types work in films. Anyway, Douglas – I mean, the boy, went into the building. He had this really cool hair that did this whoosh thing that it would stop being able to do by the time he was twenty-five.

He walked up to the front desk and approached the secretary, a bespectacled woman who looked kind of like the office chick in Ghostbusters.

“How can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m here to get my test results.”

“Oh, yes.” She smiled, almost knowingly. “Down the hall to your left.”

“Thanks.” The boy nodded and walked off. Now, he couldn’t really tell where he was going because this was a dream but, Ugh, did he have to piss. So he stopped for a bathroom break and then continued on his way.

He finally got on his way and ended up in a room where a bunch of kids were playing the coolest, latest games.

(What? Ataris?

Shut up, Katherine!)

They were playing the coolest, latest games and seemed eerily out of it.

“Hey.” The boy sat next to a red-haired girl on the floor close to the door. She didn’t say anything back.

He thought it was weird, but his attention was soon directed elsewhere: A couple of grey-haired, white-coated scientists had arrived.

“I wonder if they’re the ones who are going to give the tests back.”

But they never did. Instead, they just gave the kids more games! The boy soon grew restless and approached one of the men.

“When will we receive our test results?”

The man played dumb. “What test?”

(I’m wondering that as well.)

“You know, the test I had to take?”

(It was a dream; I don’t know what test it was!

I wonder what Freud would say about this?

Probably something about my mom, but he’s dead so does it matter?)

The scientist’s face betrayed nothing, and the boy began to pull his hair out. The other scientist came over and whispered something into the other one’s ear. “We have to go,” he said, and so they left.

The boy ran and found a cabinet and pulled out some papers, eventually finding his test. He grabbed the red-haired girl and they ran, down the creepy halls and out the door.

The boy and girl were shot and killed.

--

--

“Uplifing,” Katherine commented.

“You kind of tuckered out at the end there,” the British man said, while exchanging hearts with the marine biologist. (They were playing Go Fish.)

“That’s true, I did, but Katherine, has, um, a thing to do.” His story was less empowering than he wanted it to be, and he was getting sick of all these people’s faces. He was going to admit defeat. There was no way they could like him.

“I want to tell a story!” Katherine exclaimed out of nowhere.

“By the Great Gatsby!” Pointed Nose muttered under her breath, having been discreetly heading for Katherine and Douglas’s coats.

“This is based on a dream I had too,” Katherine said.

--

--

TO BE CONT.