This forum has been dead long enough! It's time to revitalize everyone that has remained since the change, and engage the newer members!

Your challenge should you choose to accept it is to incorporate a trolley car, a slug, a  flip-flop sandle and a doll into a short short.  You have 1, 000 words or less to amaze us all!

love, LinnAnn

Little over a thousand, but apparently, nobody else is even trying.
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        We met them at Ozark, as the sun forced its way into the night. It was an International Harvester, just every other schoolbus I've ridden since the nineth grade. They were different. Their eyes followed us as we pushed our way to the back and rearranged equipment dufflebags. We bummed a ride up to Springfield. They did us a favor, but their eyes bore into us all the way through the bus.
    Big Jim talked me into this mess.
    "It'll be a great experience. You'll get to see what a real tournament's like. Won't be like Cass, like last year."
    Cass was a disaster. It was their tournament, held up at Cass Job Corps. I got knocked out in the third round. My first fight. Yeah, Big Jim did quite a number on me. We trained half-assed, smoking and drinking and goofing around on a speed bag. That Cass kid pounded me till I shut down.
    Ever been knocked out? My eyes were open. I could see Big Jim, screaming from the ropes. He was jumping, bouncing around like a doll on strings. I told my hands to move, but nothing worked.
    Hell, I thought I's dead.
    The bus ain't so bad, but they smell and that music splits my head. One of them has an eight-track and is playing some squealing kid named Jackson, over and over. Big Jim stares out the window, watching the morning sun cut across the trees. There's lots of pines, not oaks like we got back home. Must have clear cut these here mountains. Pines come back after the brush, you know. They come back first.
    Springfield is a huge town. As we passed through the outskirts where there are billboards advertising Girls!!! with a cutout of a naked woman. Big Jim catches my wide eyes, grins. Nods toward the sign. He says we'll go to a peep show after the weigh-in. God, if I'm still alive after dieting for the last three days on hard-boiled eggs and orange juice and being pounded by Squeaky for the last 3 hours, it'll be a miracle.
    My head thumps and my stomach gnaws at my backbone, and I weigh in 144, three pounds under weight. We leave the Arena, stash our gear over at the YMCA, and go out for a burger and COKE. Along the way, we hook up with some Subiaco Acedemy kids, friends of Big Jim's. We call a cab. Time to see the show.
    The Checker picks us up and ferries us all the way to the outskirts to a squat building beneath a naked silouette. He dumps us off and pulls off the on shoulder across the road. We try the door and it's locked, doesn't even open till 4 PM. $26.50 fare and the cab thinks he's going to carry us back to the Y? We call a Yellow and flip him off as we drive away. We get the Yellow to take us to a theater where we watch Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. My first breasts. I wish I's a movie star. What a lucky jerk, dressed up kind of fruity, though. My head hurts from the smoke in the theater, from the cigar Big Jim chugs.
    The light is bright when we come outside and it only intensifies the pounding in my head. A bus goes by that looks like a old fashioned trolley car. Big Jim waves off a ride because it's cheezy and part of a tourist package. We head back to the YMCA and pass the Arena on the way. Big Jim says a high-rise is going up. Next to a bundle of re-bar is a whole pile of blank quarters and I jump the street guard and start filling my pockets.
    "Damn, you act just like you never been to town. Leave them slugs alone, they're just punch-outs from electrical stuff. Damn, lucky I made you wear your shoes or everybody'd know you was a hick. Come on now, let's get outta here."
    Rich Subiaco kids laugh. I laugh, too. I thought they were quarters. I drop them, except one.
    Later, I fight twice and make it to the finals. I face a kid younger than me who's all pumped up by his trainers. He comes out growling with his hands a little too low. Two lefts and a right, hardest right I ever threw, and he's on his back for the count. I feel sorry for him. His corner's yelling something about, Just like in football, but it ain't the same. It ain't nothing like football, nothing at all.
    Showers at the Arena are moldy. There's crud along the ceiling and the floor is dark and slick. I don't have no flip-flops, so when Big Jim tells me to be sure and wear them in the showers, I just sort of shrug. I got cracked toenails and split heels from the showers at high school, so I figured it don't make no difference.
    We don't have to stay at the Y, Linberg, Big Jim's friend from the Acedemy, puts us up in his motel room. He's got a bathtub full of Miller and Coors and Orange Vodka. I wish it was empty so's I could take another shower. But after I drink a couple of Millers, some vodka, and a couple of Coors, I forget about the shower.
    In the morning, I wake up on the floor, hugging a chair leg. I'm down to my underwear and my head is pounding. When I go to the bathroom for a drink of water, the sight and smell of puke sets me off. I flip the commode lid and puke until I can't puke no more. I use a towell to push the puke on the floor into a corner and get into the tub. The ice has melted and I shower with a couple of Coors and an empty vodka bottle. Steam rises off me, fogs up the bathroom and I feel clean.
    We hitch back to Ozark on the Subiaco bus. It's a quiet ride, stopping every 15 or 30 minutes, so's I can jump out and puke. I hate boxing. I hate buses and I hate booze.
    I left my Golden Glove medal back at the motel.

        The faded green trolley leaned heavy to one side. Streaks from a waxy-faced Jumeau Doll advertisement ran toward a dipping corner. The face, unblinking and sad, spoke of an exhibit long since forgotten. The tracks vanished beneath a film of smoky green where islands of swampy grass touched the car's undercarriage. Marty turned one last time and shook his head. The lowlands deed had been held by his family for more summers than he could remember. Nothing left to do. Rot left his feet green, pocked with blistering sores. The damp slowly ate him away.
    "Sorry I have to leave you old gal."
    He turned back toward the field of sedge, grown waist high, and leaned into the crooked pipe he used as a cane. The distant rachet of cicada broke the labored rhythm of his breathing. He had grown so fat of late. Sprays of sweat flew from the thick folds at his thin lips and jowls. The press of his waddle and the loud lapping of his flip-flops were the the only intrusions on an otherwise summery afternoon.
    A shallow ditch, green with duckweed, cut across his path. In another time, and under the right circumstance, he might have found an enjoyable snooze or paddle along its warmth. That was another time, a time long, long breezed away. He shuffled through the soggy ground leaving wide tracks sucking at his heels.
    From the pocket of his heavy waistcoat, he took a few compressed tablets. Vitamins and protein, Stuff of Champions, at least that's what the surgeon said. Something to give him a boost, something to tide him over in these last of days. He was like the old rail car, a totem of an era long since slipped away, but not quite of the time of the doll.
    Sweat ran down his bald head, blinding his eyes. He used to be able to spot dragonflies and damselflies drifting low across the distant wetlands, the source of the swampy outlet he slogged across. Now, he could barely see their glinting of iridescence, even in bright sunlight. His hearing, so muffled, their sawing wings were no more than a hum. And cataracts, the gauzy veil of age, attacked him with the stealth of a mocassin.
    He chewed a few more compressed tablets. Nothing seemed to slack his hunger anymore. He always felt the rumble of a gassy pocket, low in his wide belly. He silently cursed this new age, the age of enlightenment, the age that had removed him from that which he loved the most, the cool shade of the trolley.
    And now the cattails. Resisted everything he tried. Burning, digging, chopping. Their deep tuberous roots brought them back strong and thick, sucking the low settled water. He hated cattails. They were too tall, their leaves offered nothing but obstruction and the damned insects wouldn't feed on them. And Fall, Fall scattered their powdery seed-fairies everywhere. He shifted his thick waist and brushed them aside. He snorted a low grunt that echoed off distant trees.
    He froze. His hand brushed against a frond bent low in a great arc. A pair of thick leopard slugs wrapped around each other, mating, dancing. He watched them slip and ooze over one another, exchanging the mucous of life. He observed the dance and felt a quickening he had not experienced in quite some time. A pulsing, hardening seized him. He moved his free hand to the cane to steady the quickening that shook him.
    A warmth spread through his chest and his tongue hardened. His mouth watered and filled with saliva. The clear, watery mucus ran from the corners of his mouth. He fixed his stare on the insinuating pair, wrapping round and round, growing thicker with a milky slime and then he shuttered, lashed out catching the pair with the tip of his tongue and flipped them back with the slapping motion of his head and the snap of his jaws.
    A smile slipped across his lips.