Category: Words

This is a short story about two men in the middle of the Iraq war from each person's perspective. One is American and the other is Iraqi. I messed up this assignment because it was supposed to have three perspectives, which threw my creative writing class off. They were confused as to who was speaking. To compensate for that problem, I color-coded the text. But it took away from the point of the exercise. And we can’t expect people to print stories in color. That’s called a comic book. Anyway, I decided to keep the two speakers in two different fonts because I wanted it to be <i>immediately</i> obvious that there were two different narrators.

The assignment was to write from the perspective of someone who is wearing two different shoes and suddenly realizes it. They were supposed to think that everyone noticed and (I guess) freak out about it. My only fear with this story (besides how insufferably lame it is) is that someone might completely miss the irony. Dude, I swear I’m not, like, represented in that story. Like, you know, dude?

I originally started writing a story where the author torments the main character by putting him in various weird situations. I set it aside for a long time until I was told to write a metafiction story. I pulled out the sections that did not fit my new story and wrote the rest months later. This was actually enjoyable to do because it allowed me to do something with a piece that I have had a hard time finishing. There are so many things you can do with the seed idea that I just left it alone because it was so open-ended. This, however, is a relatively satisfying way to compress a book into a short story.

This was an assignment where I was supposed to read T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “The Hit Man” and rewrite it using any other profession. It is intended to be a humorous piece about the life of a drug dealer. Special thanks to Boyle for not suing me (yet) for “borrowing” the idea. Try not to take this piece too seriously. There are a lot of half-jokes and wordplay here that is supposed to mimic the original. It actually got a few good laughs when they read it in class. Maybe you'll laugh, too.

There is a scene in the movie “The Matrix” where the main character, Neo, is visiting a so-called oracle. As he waits to see her, he looks at the other…