Spookymilk Survivor Challenge #1: Fiction 59

The first round Spookymilk Survivor challenge for the intrepid WGOM writers was this: write a complete story in 59 words. Fun! While it is nice that we were writing something of shorter length, we found out that it isn’t easy to convey a full story within those constraints. I was particularly proud of The Winner Group for coming in a strong first place the first week. With a possible 5 points for best score, my team averaged about 3.75 points each. I really liked a lot of the submissions, but the judges could be harsh at times. Results

With this in mind, here was my submission:

Black [Hole] Cat

Chandrashekar’s Acura worked its way once more through the throng of protesters. “Unfounded fear of scientific experimentation has existed since the Dark Ages,” the biophysicist lamented.   Later, though, his complex machinery released the upside-down cat, its rapidly-increasing rotations spontaneously creating a gravitational singularity. Chandrashekar wasn’t comforted that there were no survivors to say, “I told you so!”

Judges comments:
Spookymilk: Every now and then comes a story that makes me wish I hadn’t given out any other perfect scores. This one has nice pacing, artful prose, memorable characters and even a twist ending. In 59 words, mind you. 5
Beau: Black [Hole] Cat, brought to you by someone in love with the English language and who knows how to use it. Either that, or someone is playing on my love for Star Trek. Chandrashekar’s Acura! Tee hee. 5

Notes:

• I’m a little nervous (and a bit embarassed) that this was selected as the “Judges’ Favorite” this week.
• Part of the idea for the story came when someone’s comment in a gamelog at WGOM reminded me of something I’d heard about years ago, called The Buttered Cat Paradox. It goes like this: A dropped cat always lands on its feet. A dropped slice of buttered bread always lands butter-side down. What happens when you strap a buttered slice of bread to the back of a cat and drop it? Unfortunately, there isn’t room in 59 words to include the buttered slice of bread, but it wasn’t required anyway.
• The second part of the idea for the story was based on the protests by many scientists that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider could create a gravitational singularity (a black hole) which would swallow up the Earth and end all life here. The thought that something as innocuous as a dropped cat could spawn a black hole (or that people would protest the experiment like there was anything remotely dangerous about it) seemed to be the kick in the pants that this story would need.
• I chose “Chandreshekar” as my biophysicist as a nod to famous Nobel Prize winning Indian-born astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who did studies on the mathematics of black holes. (Beau, I’m sure Star Trek also used his name as a nod to the scientist.) Earlier drafts had a physicist named “Alejandro Diesanto” or somesuch, but a single name made for a more terse story. And he drives an Acura because his research grants are successful, but not successful enough to drive something pretentious like a beemer or Mercedes.
• I’m not sure how that last line came about, but it just hit me that since a black hole would wipe out everyone, he didn’t have to be bothered by the fact that the protestors were inevitably correct.

Can’t wait for Challenge #2…