Mahogany

I'm entering this story into a contest for Writers Digest. The prompt is: Your return to the home where you grew up, only to find it condemned. The story has to be 750 words or less.

Here's what I came up with:

Mahogany

A roaring vibration yanks me from a slumber filled with deeply satisfying dreams of sinking my teeth into the silky richness of dark mahogany. Sometimes, I imagine feasting on a syrupy maple or a crisp evergreen, but these musings are much less palatable. The blaring sound shakes our home to its core, inspiring my brethren to scurry about. I sense their panic, and it incites me to jump up and follow. It is now time to leave our home forever. I know this as surely as I am running frantically down the tree I call home. I was told this day would come, but I didn’t expect it quite so soon.

My New Alligator Shoes

My New Alligator Shoes

Chingola, Zambia – 2010

     In a remote village on the outskirts of the Congo, the Urdubongo tribe was being terrorized by a particularly vicious alligator with a yellow streak across its head. Unlike the other alligators in the region who stayed near the water and only attacked when provoked, this one crept up when least expected, destroying their huts, demolishing their livestock and even devouring a few of their newborns. They chased him through the brush with poisoned spears, but he had speed unlike anything they’d ever seen and seemed impervious to the toxins that killed everything else they hunted. They set up clever traps for him, but somehow, he always managed to escape. They began to believe that the alligator was possessed by the Mambu Fosim, an evil warrior spirit born from the souls of enemies they had slain in the Tambika Revolution. They considered relocating to a spot north of the Waadhu River, but they feared they would never be safe.

     After another baby was claimed by the Fosim gator, the men of the tribe huddled in a hut to discuss their options. The women of their clan gathered outside, crying for yet another life lost. As the men argued about where in the jungle the good spirits were most likely to find and protect them, they heard loud popping sounds outside. They rushed out with spears poised to find a white man in their midst. When they saw what he held in his hands, they stopped in their tracks. The white man backed away slowly, all eyes on him, dragging an alligator with yellow markings across his head marred by the blood of two gunshots. As he disappeared into the forest, the Urdobongo men and women broke into song and dance. After years of being stalked by the Fosim alligator, they were finally free.

Thunder Thighs

Here is another story I wrote around the theme "lucky". This one is very different from the "Luckiest Girl in the World." I'm now debating which to enter in the contest.

Thunder Thighs

     Just call me Thunder Thighs. Everyone else does. Ever since the fifth grade end-of-year pool party, when I dared to wear a swimsuit in front of the whole class, I’d earned the nickname. My mother had told me the suit she bought me at the mall would be flattering, its skirt hiding my worst parts, and although I didn’t really believe her, I wore it anyway. I wanted to have fun like the other kids, playing Marco Polo and volleyball in the pool, celebrating the end of elementary school. I’d been called other names in the past, like “piggy” and “fatty” and “lard ass”, but this one for some reason hurt the most. And when they called out to me with this name, it was usually followed by a “whoosh-whoosh” sound to imitate my large thighs rubbing together. The name stuck all through junior high, and now that I was in high school, a whole new set of kids were learning my lovely nickname.