My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

He was wearing a shirt and tie, and a hooded sweatshirt pushed up at the elbows.  Was in a band called the Prepared Gourd Segments.  They were playing tonight with the Atomic Harvesters, and this guy’s handing out flyers, can’t go home till he’s empty handed.

“What kind of music is the Atomic Harvesters,” old man flannel asked him.  “It’s kind of like neojazz/funkcountry.”  Then I said “hmm.”  I had a fistful of turnips and old man flannel was staring at them, jealous of their beauty.  “Like who else for example,” I apparently said.

“Nobody you’d know,” said Gourd, “Gay German & The Neon Sneakers maybe? You know them?”  I did not.  Neither did Old Man Flannel.  At this point Old Man had had enough, and stomped away to short grill veggie burgers on his fire escape.

He will cut large chunks of onion, “For [his] intestines,” he will say aloud, even though he eats alone.  His look at my turnips had been enough to tell me that.  Gourd still slinging his little slits of paper.

His bassist steps out of a bush, grabs a flyer and says, “Who designed this piece of shit?  I wouldn’t use this thing for a, how you say, coaster.” She has a miniature wrench through her lip, long as a toothpick.  “I know you from the library,” she says to me.  “You the one always in audio/video.”  She pronounces it Odio/Vidyo.  I can’t tell if she’s Italian or pretending.

I did talk to her once.  She was microfiching old newspaper clippings about people dying alone.  I walked over to her, she was reading an article about an alsation, locked and starving in some Dutch apartment, that ate its owner’s corpse after the woman’d fallen from her chair to the living room carpet where she slowly, over a matter of days, began to turn into mulch.  The dog, not having eaten, began to eat.  A week later, the complex begins to smell like Delicatessen, and the cops are banging down a door to a dog pulling its bloody head from the rib cage of a dead woman in a nightgown.