Fiction on Unnamed Website

Guest Post: Short Story 5

Anthony Wang — Thu, 16 May 2024 15:52:44 -0500

This story was written by my friend Peter. It’s the fifth installment in the Short Story series and only uses words from my Short Story 4, counting multiplicity.

Zhou was falling back from a year of flashcards and tired of frequently eating instant noodles. He decided to idly do crazy math problems for a month. “11!-7!, …” Zhou screamed and threw a flashcard mountain on his head. “So Zhou-over,” Zhou muffled.

Zhou called Lin in flashcard review gear, freaking out from his grueling work. “Great, I can show up in around 7,” whispered Lin. “I ran a large 11-SAT videogame for some time.”

Short Story 4

Anthony Wang — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 12:00:16 -0500

This story is narratively a sequel to Short Story 2. It’s the fourth installment in the Short Story series and only uses words from Kevin’s Short Story 3, counting multiplicity.

Zhou was looking around, surprised. His nap is a year large! But, Zhou’s tired and attempted to sleep again. Dead, burned, fancy instant noodles (IN) covering the room! From when? Zhou screamed and scrambled to 7-11.

Zhou quickly reached 7-11, in flashcard review gear. He spent time painstakingly checking important round 7-11 boxes of IN, then sat down, and meticulously sped over the cards he pulled from his flashcard mountain on the shoebox. Great. They only say IN.

Guest Post: Short Story 3

Anthony Wang — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 21:39:37 -0500

This story was written by my friend Kevin and is narratively a sequel to Alek’s original story. It’s the third installment in the Short Story series and only uses words from my Short Story 2, counting multiplicity.

Lin waited at the top of the mountain. He had never known Zhou to break a promise before, but Zhou always arrived belatedly from slowly eating his favorite food: fancy instant noodles in burned round boxes. Lin decided to idly do math problems on the mountain for a month to give Zhou time to come. If Zhou didn’t show up by then, Lin would make a plan to go to Hu’s house some night to find Zhou’s dead body in a video-game.

Short Story 2

Anthony Wang — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 22:18:21 -0500

My friend Alek recently published a short story which you should totally read, so I wrote a parody of it that only uses words from the original story, and each word appears at most the same number of times in this story as in the original. And now there are more stories in the series!

Zhou enjoyed the peaceful process of being disappointed that he was working at 7-11 instead of being a chef somewhere. The occasional car sped by outside, but the really persistent noise was his gross boss taking the year off. “Hey Zhou, what’s cooking?” Hu came over. “Zhou Zhou Zhou Zhou Zhou Zhou Zhou Zhou you down for some games tonight?” Some days Zhou would go. But today was really important, it was the day he reviewed his calendar. “Sorry Hu, gotta make fancy instant noodles (IN)”. “Ah, too bad, I got some really good ones!”. “Hu, we literally played video games all night.” “Ah good point, well see you tomorrow!” Hu walked out the door. That was the only tasty food Zhou was known to make. He took a flashcard from his pocket. He happily checked “close up shop” off the list, and reviewed the remaining items: “Dinner, review calendar, sleep”. When Zhou arrived home he quickly threw some eggs and tomatoes and IN in a pan and idly tended them. In a bit he sat down at his desk with a slightly burned dinner and got out his calendar. He added this day’s cards to a large shoe-box filled with similar items. He was a little dejected to see how most only had IN written on them. He flipped to the next month and was surprised to see a short note cramped on the page, covering the boxes for the first few days of the month.

Calumny

Anthony Wang — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 13:25:05 -0500

Oh, joy! Another sequel? Maybe we’ll actually learn Ben Qi’s secret this time. Now, enter Calumny, the slander-loving sister of Ennui and Miasma with a personality thinner than a tabloid. How utterly charming.

Ben’s viral meltdown was literally a magnet to Calumny, and she quickly devoted herself towards discovering Ben’s secret. Forget about personal boundaries. Just imagine the mouthwatering gossip potential!

Anyways, Calumny’s first genius plan was to organize a fake IOI consisting of only the A Plus B problem and join the exclusive club of IOI winners. Unfortunately, the contest attracted the attention of Ben too, who swooped in, smashed his keyboard, and cleared all the test cases faster than Calumny could open her IDE. Ben might have lost half of his brain cells, but his fingers were still perfectly intact. Oh well, no IOI gold medal for you, better luck next time!

Miasma

Anthony Wang — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:36:47 -0500

Winning the IOI only requires a dash of creativity and problem solving. Baking the world’s largest Oreo and shattering the Guinness World Record on the other hand, requires perseverance, humiliation, wait no, I meant humility, and filling out a lot of government paperwork so that the FBI doesn’t come knocking on your door asking if you’re scheming to use your two thousand pounds of baking soda to build a life-sized volcano to terrorize people with a really impressive science fair project.

Maseeh

Anthony Wang — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 21:03:11 -0500

Once upon a time, there were three naive MIT freshman named Kanthony, Eter, and Pevin. One ordinary Tuesday, they walked into the Maseeh dining hall for lunch. There inside, they saw three lines: one line for detergent rice, which tastes like detergent and everyone who gets it immediately vomits and throws the rest of their rice away so Maseeh collects all the thrown away rice and washes it and serves it next week, one line for pizzas with grease painted on top with a paintbrush, and one line for pure helonium acid, which consists of hydrogen bonded to helium so that this molecule instantly donates a proton giving it a pH of around -50. After a taste of the vile food, the three freshmen were instantly thrown into shock and rushed to the emergency room. Scarred by their horrifying experience, they vowed to never vist Maseeh again.

Ennui

Anthony Wang — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 03:09:25 +0000

Oh, great. Another doe-eyed rebellious anime girl to add to the endless parade of generics that litter the media landscape. Ennui, huh? Well, isn’t that just perfect.

Ennui had a seething hatred for modern society, because honestly, who doesn’t? She despised the endless monotonicity, er, I meant monotony, of her life and the only emotion she could feel nowadays was boredom. Endless, dull, tedious boredom!

One day, Ennui had the brilliant idea of running away from home and going for a joyride on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Because, you know, nothing screams excitement quite like sitting in a cramped, musty train for days on end.

Azerbaijan

Anthony Wang — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 05:20:13 +0000

The long road from Tehran, Iran to Baku, Azerbaijan stretches a thousand kilometers across the unremittingly barren deserts of western Asia, filled with ancient intrigue, treachery, mystery, and let’s be honest, just a lot of boredom and “are we there yet"s. Especially when you’re trying to survive a 12-hour bus ride with two Taliban fighters, a Ukrainian ex-dictator, a Chinese anthropology professor, and a cute Pallas’s cat who may or may not want to kill you.

Beavers

Anthony Wang — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 15:11:05 +0000

Leiaou stood breathless, surveying the horror below her. There, stretched out in a long line, was a density of military-grade urinals that she had never seen before, not even in her worst nightmare. She knew of their terrible power, but hadn’t expected them to be here, of all places. They were certainly not intended for human use. They were for beavers.

Beavers.

The mere thought of that word conjured up vivid images of a nation of Quebec separatists, dying polar bears, and the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.