“Once With a Blue Moose” • by Lori Jensen

Eighty-five percent of New Brunswick is forest. 

The land is broken by the lumber industry. Still, the trees loom. They swallowed the road I was driving.

I was lost. True, I was on the only road, but I needed a gas station. I needed people to stop me obsessing about moose. “Watch for moose!” everybody said. “They’re unpredictable. They’re everywhere! They’ll take your car off the road with their antlers before they kick it to rubble.”

My car sputtered, then stopped; and a moose walked out of the forest. Its antlers spanned the hood of my car. In the moonlight, the moose was blue. It moved forward as its head wove down toward my window. It tapped the glass. I don’t know why, but I rolled the window down. I could smell it; count its teeth; feel it’s breath on my cheek as it enquired, “Are you out of gas?”

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Lori Jensen has been an Adult Protective Service Worker, teacher, Presbyterian minister, children’s book reviewer, psychotherapist, karate sensei, artist, and bead-weaver. She plays guitar and sings. She has lived in New Brunswick for months and is still waiting to see a moose. Her speculative writing has appeared in Illumine magazine and Bards & Sages Quarterly.

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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, 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, inspired by and using the phrase, “out of gas.”

Special Thanks to Paul Celmer: for going above and beyond to help with this challenge!

Categories: The Pete Wood Challenge