100-Word Story: The Peanut Butter Omelet

[jwgh]

Another one. urbeatle at one point mentioned a hyper-short fiction contest that required that all storie have (1) two characters, (2) a setting, (3) dialogue, (4) a conflict, and (5) a resolution. This might be the only one of these stories that I've written that satisfies all five criteria. The title and one line of dialogue were provided by schwa242.

The Peanut Butter Omelet

Two roommates:

"We shouldn't eat out every day."

"Have you cooked anything before?"

"No. How hard can it be?"

"I cooked dinner once. It went OK, but everything smelled funny afterward. My clothes smelled like peppermint, and a week later ..."

"... What?"

"I don't know why, but the toothpaste still smelled like bacon."

"Whatever. But we can't keep eating out. It's too expensive."

"Fine. I'll make a shopping list. What to cook?"

"Omelet?"

"Sure. Eggs, peanut butter, ..."

"Peanut butter?"

"And which of us has cooked before?"

"Point taken."

The next day:

"Delicious!"

"Told you."

Contented sighs.

"Say, do you smell pepperoni?"

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

These little exercises have taught me, among other things, that the heavy use of dialogue maximizes the amount of story you can fit into a given word count.

[jwgh]

It also increases the amount of vertical space your story takes up, making it look longer. Long live tiny short paragraphs!

I have a couple left to write, so maybe I'll try to minimize the dialogue in one or both of them. (For better or worse it can't be eliminated altogether because of the nature of the challenge.)