“I can’t go to jail for three weeks. I’ll lose my job.”
The judge looked down. “This is the third time you failed a roadside blood alcohol test.”
Dom swallowed. “I’ll take the optional.”
“You’re sure?”
§
He stopped in front of a guy who looked a little shorter than the rest. The man gave a gap-toothed grin and said, “Bad choice.”
Then his hand slammed into Dom’s chin.
Water on his face woke him, and Dom heard the words. “Sentence served.”
He tried to mumble his thanks through missing teeth.
Gustavo Bondoni is
novelist and short story writer with over three hundred stories
published in fifteen countries, in seven languages. He is a member of
Codex and an Active Member of SFWA.His latest novel is a dark historic fantasy entitled The Swords of Rasna (2022). He has also published five science fiction novels, four monster books and a thriller entitled Timeless. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).
In
2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest
and in 2018 he received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The
James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the
Future Contest.
His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com
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,
determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to
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 key word: punchline.
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