Five Story Ideas a Day

Jonnie hated playing the drums, but it was all he knew how to do. So he played in a band with some friends, and then they became famous, and there he was, playing the drums and still hating it.

Marla the mermaid wanted nothing more than a speedy motorboat, because she wanted to go faster than her fins would carry her and she wanted to feel the sun on her face. So she seduced a man with a speedboat, a man with a red face who drank a lot of beer and won a lot of races. She got her speedboat, but then the man died and she found herself responsible for two human children. Extra difficulty: Her time with legs was rapidly running out, and she was in no way interested in the little mermaid cliché. She liked having fins.

Ellen the leprechaun went on a crusade to publicize the fact that not all leprechauns were guys, and especially not all of them had beards. The problem with publicity for a leprechaun, though, is that it really puts your pot of gold in a lot of danger.

Jonah the centaur secretly dreams of pulling a cart and giving human children rides on his back. He feels like a pervert and can’t tell any of the other centaurs—who love freedom, and loathe humans—of his desires. Then one day he meets a friendly human family in the forest.

Anthony the faun wants nothing to do with cozyness, or dancing in the forest. He is all punk, all the time, until one day his human girlfriend finally notices that he has hooves and thinks that he’s either satan or way more into body modifications than she realized.

Jesse’s car broke down, local public transportation sucks, and he works far away from his job. So he begins hitchhiking to work each day. He meets a series of interesting people (and a few duds). Then one day, he gets into the car with a woman who works in a hospital down down, a woman who, at one point during the commute when she seems to see something that surprises her, warns him that things are about to get really rocky. In a flash, he finds that he and the woman are in a chariot racing down a dirt road, and are most certainly not in the city they were in a moment earlier.

Elphaba has green skin and when she was a child she had pointed teeth. She went through a phase in her twenties when she was a political activist of the most un-nuanced sort, but despite two or three brushes with the law she eventually settled down into a calm adulthood and began to deal with the issues that caused her to be driven more by her principles than any kind of love for fellow human beings in the first place. She marries and has two children (one lime colored, one a peachy color with taupe undertones), and lives a happy life until she dies at 80, surrounded by her family.

Rachel Cohen moves to a small town in Georgia with her family. They are well received and fairly happy where they live. Rachel becomes obsessed with becoming a gospel singer. She listens to the music day and night and practices singing it herself whenever she is alone. One day her father comes home and finds her singing about Jesus, and they have a long, slightly uncomfortable talk. Soon afterwards, Rachel finds an audience for her singing—a local Baptist church.

Mary likes cats very much, and has noticed that her neighborhood has a lot of strays. After she sees the third litter of kittens in one spring, she decides that she’s going to start spaying and neutering the cats, and she does. The cats start hanging around her place constantly, and the entire neighborhood thinks of her as the crazy cat lady. Really, she isn’t; she just wanted to get them all fixed to keep the population down and can’t exactly have them hanging around and starving when she can give them food.

Marietta Jenkins is one of the first women allowed into a front line combat situation in the military. On the day of her first combat, she is standing in line listening to her commanding officer give them orders and explain the situation. He assigns everyone roles in the combat to come, and he hands out weapons and drinks. Suddenly, Marietta is overcome with hilarity and insanity all at once and runs off towards the enemy lines yelling “MARIETTA JENKINS.” It does not end well for her, or for anybody else in her squadron.

Steffie finally gets approval for her bioengineering project at work, and her coworker Elise volunteers to be her test subject, since the project is a seemingly harmless one involving dyes and nerve centers. Unbeknownst to Steffie and Elise, however, Elise is pregnant, and her unborn child reacts in a very strange way to Steffie’s simple experiment. When the baby is born, she shifts colors constantly, and as she gets older she starts to display strange abilities.

It turns out that Joseph’s dog Raffie can count to fifteen. That turns out to be a bit of problem when Joseph ends up with seventeen sheep, but dogs that can’t count tend to do alright, so Joseph doesn’t know what the problem is with Raffie. Raffie explains to Joseph—on the night when he demonstrates that he knows a lot more than how to count to fifteen, and can actually type with a keyboard and knows a whole lot of English—that it has something to do with anxiety and with Raffie’s methods for herding, which involve counting. Most dogs have simpler methods. Joseph and Raffie set out to learn how Raffie’d be herding if he was a simpler dog. Meanwhile, Raffie fantasizes about another job altogether.

Agatha is a gardener, and spends her afternoons out in her brick-walled garden tending to the plants. She grows a few flowers, lots of herbs, and as many vegetables as she can fit in her yard. She has also cultivated a crop of fairies, who dance on her small lawn at dawn and dusk every day except the coldest ones in the winter (when they stay under the small, well-tended hill that Agatha put in). Agatha has fallen in love with one of the small fairies, a princely sort who wears yellow rosepetals and blue snapdragons, but the love is unrequited and strange, besides.

Martha is a shepherd. One night as she is out in the field tending to her flock, an angel visits her and tells her that humanity’s saviour has been born in a barn halfway across the country, and that Martha should visit. Martha is in the middle of lambing season and is not at all religious, but something in the angel’s manner convinces Martha that this is as real as it gets, so she hires someone to come in and tend to the lambing and takes off in her pick-up truck to visit the newborn saviour. Along the way, she picks up many others who are making the same pilgrimage, all bearing a myriad of strange gifts and desires.

Michelle is a lesbian separatist. She lives in a small village of women on an island off of the coast of Virginia. This is only the first year the village has existed, and one of the women gives birth to a boy. A long debate about what to do with the child ensues, because several of the village leaders think that the ills of the patriarchy are encoded in male genes and nothing they can do will cause this child to be raised as a non-sexist. The rest of the village thinks that’s ridiculous, and that it’s fascist to take a child away from its parents, no matter the gender. Amazon warfare hijinks ensue.

Jenny and James fall in love and take up male/female synchronized swimming together. They are superstars in the world of synchronized swimming, the first male/female couple to really get anywhere at all. Their synchronized swimming career is very important to both of them. On the eve of an important competition, James finds out that Jenny has cheated on him.

The entire population of a small midwestern town shaves their heads for a charity event. The glints and flashes from their bald heads are misinterpreted by some aliens hanging out nearby as a signal to attack. Alien warfare hijinks as a result of a good act ensue.

Jonas sells homeopathic weight loss medicine, despite believing that nothing he sells works. One day, he meets a strange woman who asks him what he does. When he tells her, she does something he can’t quite see with her hands and he passes out. When he wakes up, he begins losing weight. Quickly. And there’s nothing he can do about it.

Lorelai was working in her garden one afternoon when her hoe went clang against something under her garden. She finds a safe buried there. Lorelai happens to have a friend who used to be a safe-cracker, so he comes over and opens the thing up for her. Inside, there’s a lot of money—tens of thousands of dollars. Unnervingly, some of it is dated recently. Lorelai decides to do some more digging in her yard, and soon she has uncovered a tunnel leading up to the safe. She starts to worry about her safety.

Greg Sanderson wakes up one morning to find that he has turned into a stalk of asparagus. His grandfather takes a bite out of his back. His sister takes good care of him until one day she bathes him in butter and the whole family eats him up.

Rebo was angry at his friend Jeff because Jeff had stolen Rebo’s alligator. Rebo wondered why Jeff thought he could get away with it, given that Rebo was the only person in 100 miles who had a pet alligator. Jeff had other motives, though, and Rebo learns about them when he shows up at Jeff’s house to reclaim his reptile companion.

Monica is sitting on her lawn, reading a book, when she notices the first globe of light rise up from the ground. She sits, staring, as another, another, and another rises up out of the ground to hang in front of her, shimmering and beautiful and utterly strange. The globes are transparent, and Monica can’t make out what’s inside of them because of the light. She is afraid to touch them, and doesn’t know what to do, so she does nothing. Over the next few weeks, the globes hang around her yard. Sometimes they decorate the tree out back. Sometimes they hang out along the path to her door. One night she wakes up and they are all hovering outside of her window—and they are waiting for her.

There are tree gnomes living in Alice’s trees. She has been trying to get rid of them humanely for months, but of late she’s begun thinking a little more murderously.

One day James comes home from school after a field trip with a lion. He tells his mother that the zoo gave it to him. James’s mother decides to let him keep it after a very bizarre argument with him and his father (who wants to keep the lion, too). Meat acquisition hijinks ensue.

Agledy is a homeless, weird little man who lives in a box in the woods behind Natasha’s apartment complex. He is in love with Natasha and leaves flowers on her balcony every day. Natasha just thinks he’s homeless and weird, but begins to build sympathy for him over time. Unbeknownst to Natasha, Agledy is under a curse and if she kisses him he will turn into an international supermodel.

Noel inherits the shoe-making business his grandfather began. He also inherits the shoe elves. He knew nothing about the shoe elves before inheriting the business, and the shoe elves give him some mischief at first that makes him doubt that he will ever succeed with the business.

Joe moves out to the country to start a farm, but it turns out that the piece of land he bought is overrun with pixies, sprites, and elves. They come up from the basement, they pull up his carrots, they pull the tails on the goats and make the dogs miserable. Joe finds an unexpected ally against this onslaught in his cat, Saxon, who can talk.

Ally can’t stand her roommate Josh, so when she comes home to find Josh wrapped in a cocoon in the kitchen, she is more dismayed by the oddity of it than by any worries over her roommate. After a week, he emerges from the cocoon and he’s more handsome and charming than he was before, and Ally begins to see him differently. That is, until she starts noticing some strange little things he does.

Kate wakes up one morning with the urge to sing in the shower, and so she does. Except, her singing voice is not the singing voice she has always had—she sounds good, and when she sings for a music critic friend, she learns that she sounds as good as any high-level professional. Then she begins singing songs that she does not know and has never known, and then she begins singing songs in foreign languages that she does not speak. One friend thinks she’s possessed. Her therapist thinks she’s developed some kind of split personality. Another friend thinks that she’s been blessed by God.

Julia worked as a middle manager in two corporations before she decided to quit the office life and go work on farms as a migrant worker. It suits her better than anybody believed, and she spends her life that way.

Angela has been telling people for months that she was visited by aliens, but nobody believes her until her newborn baby comes out green.

Joshua has been telling people for months that someone—or something–is following him, but nobody believes him until the monster slips from his shadow at the mall and begins terrorizing the Nordstrom’s.

Janice has been telling people for years that she has a third eye, but nobody believed her—they all thought it was spiritualist nonsense—until the day it opened and laser beams began shooting out.

Misha had been telling her parents for years that something wicked lived under her bed, but nobody believed her until the purple girl came out and befriended Misha and they got into a world of trouble.

Natasha has been telling folks for years that she didn’t kill that man, but she totally did.

Michele was sick, but it wasn’t a normal kind of sick. She didn’t have a fever, her nose wasn’t running, and she didn’t have a hurt stomach or a hacking cough or any of that. Instead, her skin was turning colors, in patches. She had rainbow arms for a while, and then she had purple feet, and then orange knees. Her doctor can’t figure it out, and nobody else can, either.

Nataly has forgotten how to read, which is especially a problem because Nataly loves books beyond all measure and has no idea what he’ll do with himself if he can’t read. He looks at words and simply can’t make sense of them, no matter how he stares. He puts an ad in craigslist to find someone who can read to him at night, and a girl named Anna answers the ad and seems perfect. She comes to his house at night and she reads to him and it is so lovely that he begins to fall in love. Then he inadvertently gets a phone message meant for Anna and learns that she is responsible for his inability to read; it is all a plot to get close to him by a lonely girl who had a crush, a lonely girl who had access to certain neurological toxins. He begins to remember times in the past when he has seen her, and why she seemed so familiar when she first came to his apartment. Things get a little bit Fatal Attraction.

Penny has a box that her mother gave to her, and it is locked. Penny’s mother told her not to ever open it, and whenever Penny’s mother visits—and that is often—she says to Penny, “You didn’t open it, did you?” and Penny says “No,” and Penny’s mother looks relieved. It is a beautiful box made of a dark wood; it smells very faintly of ashes and dirt. Penny wonders if it is cremated remains, but she can’t think who it would be. One day, she tries to pry the lock off, but the wood begins to splinter and Penny can’t bear to damage the box—and what would her mother say? Sadly, Penny’s mother dies—and in her will, she has left Penny a small key and instructions not to use it to open the box until ten years into the future.

Alex can’t solve a particular crossword, and he is normally very good at crosswords. This is one given to him by a strange man on the street, and it is hand drawn, with handwritten clues. Alex becomes certain that it’s just constructed poorly, and that the two or three words he can’t figure out are clued incorrectly, but then he sees the man again and he is assured that it is all done well, and correctly, and it’s crucial that Alex solve it.

Carl is camping with some friends when he becomes lost in the woods. He stumbles into an unimaginably cute little glade where three unimaginably cute squirrels are lined up on a branch, and it even looks like they’re holding paws. Then a hidden squirrel throws an acorn at Carl’s head and the battle begins.

Jonathan’s books begin to whisper to him on a stormy night when he is sitting in his small library. They whisper their stories, their facts, and they even whisper of their bindings and the paper and the ink. Jonathan goes to the town library, and the same thing happens, but some discreet asking around makes Jonathan believe it is only him. He wonders if he’s going crazy, but some of the things he is told by the books check out as true.

Marsha is a time traveller and she so wants to go back and spend time with some of the major Beat poets. She finally gets permission. When she gets there she finds that, while they have a lot of charisma, the culture is deeply sexist—despite reports that it was progressive for its day. She is treated as if she is dim because of a few temporal and cultural slip-ups early on, and has a hard time with her reactions.

A gentle minotaur named James is kicked out of the maze-like city of the minotaurs because he is gentle, and not ferocious. The minotaurs are a warmaking culture, and James values thinking more than he does fighting. He sets off across the country, looking for a place to call home. He spends a brief time in the middle of a king’s labyrinth.

Janine takes up drinking as a hobby and nobody knows why. She begins to alienate the people around her, but one of her friends—Sue—won’t be pushed away and continues to spend time with Janine and try to talk her into cutting down on the drinking. Then one day, Janine disappears in very mysterious circumstances. Sue decides it’s her responsibility to find Janine, especially since nobody else seems to care or assumes that Janine died somewhere, drunk. She didn’t, though. Sue is on to something important, something that will change her life.

Maurice bought a used bookstore, along with most of its stock, from a very strange old man. As soon as Maurice took possession of the store, strange things started happening. He heard strange whispers from the bookshelves. The same book would fall to the floor each day, even if he put it on another shelf. Sometimes the door to his office would get stuck, and he’d hear noises from inside—other times it would open without a problem. Then the little old man turned up at the counter one day and said to Maurice, “I need your help. They’ve gotten out.”

A young girl is given permission by her parents to draw on her bedroom walls. She begins to draw a forest filled with animals and monsters. At night, the forest comes to life and the animals roam and the monsters menace and play, but nothing leaves the wall. The little girl only watches it. One night, however, a gazelle steps out of the wall and wanders around her room before going back into the forest. This is the beginning of things.

Rafael has a fancy inbox. It has not always been an inbox; it used to be just a wooden box with a lid that his father owned. After Rafael’s father died, Rafael inherited the box, stored the lid, and put it to use as an inbox. It is a very nice box, whatever use it is put to, and smells like wood stain and cigars and books—his father loved cigars and books. Every morning just a short while after Rafael gets up, he empties that inbox, and he adds things to it throughout the day that he can deal with the next morning. One morning he empties the inbox and finds, at the bottom, a letter addressed to him. It is on very nice paper and it is sealed with a wax seal with an imprint of a griffin.

Marcela spends her evenings with her neighbor, learning how to cook middle eastern food. Her neighbor is an older woman who left Libya a long time ago. She is the matriarch of a large clan, and invites Marcela to their Sunday lunches that the older woman has at her apartment.

Sheila wakes up one morning to find moss growing on her left arm. It covers her arm; she can barely see the skin. The moss is green and bright. She tries to wash it off and it grows back within moments. She wears long sleeves. The next day, the same thing happens but to her right arm. Eventually, her entire body is covered with moss that she can’t remove permanently.

Someone is stealing the bricks from James Anderson’s wall, and he’s pissed. He tries to stay up all night and catch whoever is doing it, but he falls asleep every time. He tries to set up a camera to catch them, and his camera malfunctions before it can take any pictures. Slowly, one by one, his bricks are being stolen—sometimes just one a night, sometimes five or so, but never a whole lot at once.