Gun in hand, Kip crept through the unmown grass.
Twenty feet. Ten feet. Not yet. He wanted her to see him, wanted to savor the look of terror in her eyes.
Finally, he broke cover, ran around her. Her eyes widened when she saw the raised gun.
She tried to protect herself with a hand that held a glass of water.
Kip’s dart struck the glass. The suction cup stuck. The movement of her hand sent water flying, drenching her.
“You brat!” his sister screeched.
Kip ran. It was no use; she would catch him and pound him, but he looked towards the fir tree behind which his friends hid, knowing this would go down in neighborhood legend.
Totally worth it.
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
Gustavo has become a frequent contributor to Stupefying Stories and we have quite a few stories of his stories on this site. Check them out!
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 was inspired by the author’s choice of two words from this list: turkey, parade, football, fir tree, stocking, or cranberry.
More stories to come!
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