Emperor Guillard tossed his cards. He hadn’t won once today. And Lord Whiskers couldn’t even hold the cards without assistance.
Guillard sighed. “How did it come to this?”
Whiskers smiled, sporting needle-like fangs. “You have no poker face.”
“No, that.”
From somewhere beyond the walls, people shouted. You could almost make out the words now.
“I don’t even know what they want.”
Had he, perhaps, trusted too much in his advisor’s feline cunning?
Whiskers yawned. “Peasant stuff. The guards can handle it.”
There was a distant scream.
“And if not?”
“Then we jump.”
Guillard stared at the window. It was a four-story drop. For a second, he wondered if Whiskers was trying to kill him.
Tobias Backman is a Danish fantasy and science fiction author. He dreams of writing novels one day, but right now his attention span is limited to the shorter side of fiction. His stories have previously appeared in magazines such as Daily Science Fiction and Grievous Angel. He occasionally rambles about stories and writing in general over at www.tobybackman.com.
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The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood
spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a
few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted,
usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries,
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Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.
You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.
This
time the challenge was to write a flash fiction
piece playing off at least two of the following key words: cat, poker, storm, sandwich.
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