“I wouldn’t visit Wonderland in the off season. Why not try somewhere less unstable instead?” says the travel agent, sliding a Visit Mordor brochure towards me across the desk. “It’s changed a lot since they abolished heirloom-jewellery-based governance…”
I pack my bags—a mushroom identification guide. A specially designed saltwater umbrella that can be upturned and used as a boat. A vorpal sword. Just in case.
Once I arrive, the sea of blood I have to wade through to get to customs should have been a clue.
Turns out the travel agent wasn’t straight with me. What she should have said was, “Don’t visit Wonderland in the off-with-their-heads season.”
Oops.
Sophie Sparrow writes fantasy fiction and humour. Her work has appeared in PseudoPod, Arsenika, Mad Scientist Journal, (Dis)Ability: An Anthology, and previously in Stupefying Stories, in “Angels” and “The Ghost of Moscow.”
She has worked as a content writer, transcriptionist, and software tester, speaks Russian and French, has previously been paid to wander around film sets, and is now quite tired of writing about herself in the third person. She likes cats and red wine, though not in the same glass. Keep up to date with what she's doing at www.writersophiesparrow.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 story of no more than
150 words in length that played off the key phrase:
“the offseason.”
Funny + Grim = Perfect
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