Micro Fiction Challenge: Bilious
Posted by David Duhr in 
Our most recent Micro Fiction Challenge, using the word “catholic,” was lots of fun, and brought out the biting wit and cynicism in many of you. That’s what I like to see.
(The results are here in case you missed ’em, but the winning writer has already claimed her prize. So if you didn’t claim a prize from us for the last Micro Fiction Challenge, well, then, you ain’t the winner, Mac.)
Since we’re all already cranky this week, let’s capitalize on that and look at a fun new word for this week’s challenge: bilious. According to that Internet web page I hyperlinked to on the World Wide Web information superhighway, bilious is an adjective meaning “pertaining to bile or to an excess secretion of bile,” “peevish; irritable; cranky,” or “extremely unpleasant or distasteful.” (And don’t miss the sample sentence, which uses a scarf (!) as an example.)
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to write a piece of flash fiction using the word bilious, in any of its forms and/or definitions. As always, keep your story to 25 words or less, write it out in the comments section below, click “Notify” to keep abreast of your competition, and feel free to use a pseudonym if you’re shy. Your story doesn’t have to make us laugh, but as some cutesy fool once said, “Funny is money.” We’ll announce the winner in this space soon, and we’ll give a shout-out to our favorites on Facebook and Twitter.
This week’s winner earns a pile of galleys we’ve recently received, one of which is being labeled “the ‘it’ book of the summer.” I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the word bilious than to give away a book whose tagline fills me with bile.
My match has been struck. The man says I am bilious. I correct him, “I am volcanic.”
Good one, Tiffany!
“Blious, isn’t it?” She turned away. He stood over the body and nodded.
“Bilious, isn’t it?” She turned away. He stood over the body and nodded.
The roasted slugs, which she imagined would taste bilious and ate only out of necessity, reminded her of sugar-free organic gummy bears from grandma.
She wasn’t sure what sickened her more, his bilious wads of dirty money or knowing she couldn’t spend them. Still, she pursued him endlessly.
In limbo she stares at his coffin, knows her bilious tongue has no home now, no abuser to confront and overcome. All that practice wasted.
There was no denying, Ernie noted inwardly, with a peptic, wordless, bilious rage, that the fems indeed wrote better prose than he did.
“Is that your fixed-gear?” she asked coyly, looking up from her vintage typewriter.
“Yep,” he said, adjusting his bilious neon cap –
And then, the sex.