Here's a line from a short story I once had an idea for; sadly I forgot all about how it was supposed to go. So I thought this could become a collaborative effort and forwarded it to my colleagues in office. Each person added a line or two and forwarded it to the next. Tragically, it got stuck after a while, so feel free to add your lines as a comment, and I'll keep updating the story...
There was once a notorious pirate who lived on a pirate ship in a glass bottle. He had no recollection of his past, and never knew why he was so notorious. He got so depressed that one day he started blogging. And he got even more depressed when he realized that he couldn’t upload his notorious image from the glass bottle. So he hit it, the bottle I mean.
Meanwhile, down in the hold, Maroon Marakkar awoke, startled. The nightmare of a drunk woman chasing him with a severed head in her hand was troubling him more every night. Not the drunk woman or the severed head, which actually reminded him of his parents and was oddly comforting but the little girl with them—who could she be? He suspected her to be Marie Pester in disguise, the only one who had ever managed to beat him in a duel. Just the thought of facing her again sent chills down his spine. In desperation, he groped around for his favorite solace—the bottle. But the night had been long and there was not a drop left in it.
"Must check the store," he thought to himself. He got on his helicopter, flew to New York City, rushed into Walmart, and started smashing all the bottles in the store.The NYPD ignored the arson but gave him a ticket for parking the helicopter on the wrong side of the road. He read the ticket and crumpled it underfoot in anger. “Aaaaaargh!” screamed Marakkar, as a stinging pain shot through his leg.
"Someone in pain?" asks a sugary voice behind him. Our hero/villian turns around to find a Keira Knightley types looking at him, her false eyelashes fluttering like she wants to catch something in them.
Before he knew it Marakkar found himself being tossed in the air. A decoy! Not the Keira Knightley of his dreams but Pipretta Tishkey, a buxom three-toed villainess from the mineshafts of Muscaglia! Marakkar visualized himself landing in those loooong eyelashes... But, oh no! Maroon’s eyes widened, and he unofficially changed his name to Green! As he was free-falling from dizzy heights, he was terrified to notice that the eyelashes had changed into sharp spears. The thought of being impaled against this fiends unnatural and deadly body part made his stomach churn. Falling to certain death, he thought of a less troubled time in his life, when he was a pimpled teenager.
Craaash. . . splinterrr. . . yiiiii. . . Marakkar didn’t know what came first, the sound or the pain. Had he been impaled on the Amazon’s eyelashes that had morphed into spears? Nothing so exotic for the brigand from Mumbai; he had fallen out of the bunk and landed on the empty bottle. He had a life-changing decision to make. Should he succumb to the nocturnal charms of exotic sirens or quench that raging thirst?
He chose to quench the raging thirst—he firmly believed that after a dog, alcohol is man’s best friend. All those sirens came and went without any trace; but the bottle and its effects stayed with a man long after he went to sleep (in some case the effects stayed for a whole day; that’s how faithful the bottle was).
He’d have to go up and find the alcohol. He looked at the Rado on his wrist. It was 6 a.m. Time to take over watch from Rastafa. He snatched a fresh pair of clothes and headed across the aisle. And he took a bath, not once but twice. In fact, Maroon was always well washed, and fellow pirates who hadn’t heard of OCD bore this anomaly with more disgust than they reserved for righteous men.
On the deck of this hijacked ship, Rastafa was looking at a little screen they knew was the GPRS. It was some kind of satellite imaging system, and they saw themselves as moving speck on screen. It made Maroon uncomfortable.
The ship listed gently and the bottle by the bunk rolled over. The pirate in the bottle trembled with excitement. He saw what no GPRS could see, and smiled as knew now what he was notorious for.
He had a special talent for breaking glass…he had the shrillest voice in the whole wide world!
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