Happy summer! We’ve got another bundle of weird funny stories for your brainhole so you can maintain your aplomb despite all the chaos of 2025. Nissa Harlow’s tale “The Noodle War” will make you rethink your next slurp. In Michael Stonebow’s story “Just a Dollop,” the world starts closing in on our narrator in a very unexpected way. And we bring you a Flash Fiction Contest winning mini-story from Armadillocon.
The Noodle War
by Nissa Harlow
“One time, there was just a single noodle in the whole cup. I slurped it up, unbroken.”
We laughed and jeered. “Yeah, right! Video or it didn’t happen!”
“I swear, it was one long noodle. Took me half an hour to eat it.”
The rest of us shook our heads, used to his exaggerated stories.
“You think that’s something? I once fit the whole thing in my mouth!”
“The cup? Or just the noodles?”
“Just the noodles, smartass.”
“Why?”
“To see if I could.”
We laughed some more.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I managed to wind the entire cup of noodles on my fork at once?”
“Yeah. Many times. Too many times.”
“So what? It’s a good story.”
“Not as good as the time I saved up the flavour packets for a week and used them all for Sunday’s lunch. Total MSG bomb.”
“You couldn’t even finish.”
“Too salty.”
“It would’ve been more impressive if you’d finished.”
She shrugged, unperturbed by our rejection of her entry into the impromptu contest.
“I’ve got you all beat.”
We turned and looked at the figure in the corner.
“How could you beat us? I’ve never even seen you eat noodles.”
“I eat them all the time. Three servings a day. The stringy ones.”
“What stringy ones?”
“I get ’em in the woods.”
We all exchanged a glance. I didn’t know about the others, but something about the way he said that creeped me out.
“What kind of noodles do you get in the woods?”
“The hollow kind.”
“Like rigatoni?”
He shook his head. “No. They’re long.”
“How long?”
“A few feet.”
“They don’t make hollow noodles that are a few feet long.” I caught the gaze of one of the others. She shook her head. My stomach sank. “Do they come in a cup?” I already knew the answer. I just wanted to verify.
“They come wrapped in skin and fur.”
The room erupted in exclamations of disgust.
“Those aren’t noodles, dude!”
“How many times do you have to be told not to eat the local fauna?”
He frowned, seemingly puzzled by our reaction. “I’m not eating the humans.”
“Yeah, but the humans are going to notice if you keep eating the smaller wildlife.”
“I’m only eating the noodles.”
Someone held up a phone. “It’s already made the news. Squirrel mutilation in the local parks. Only the intestines are missing.”
“Damn it, V’hroen. Stick to ramen, will you?”
Just a Dollop
by Michael Stonebow
So, I spilled some honey yesterday.
I like to suffocate my biscuits in honey, when they’re warm and you split them in half, fill them up with honey and smoosh them back together, a perfect sweet buttery sandwich, truly divine. But I spilled this honey (my mom keeps bees, gives me a new jar every now and then, it’s so much better when it’s fresh), I was spooning it out, and I got a phone call, my mom calling about the weekend because I’m supposed to go up and see her, she always does this, it’s not enough for her to come do my laundry every week and see me most weekends, she needs to talk to me every day, or she gets anxious, and when I got her call, I forgot about the spoon and let it droop until a quarter-sized dollop of honey fell on my hardwood floor in front of my cabinets. I looked right at it, whoops, I should wipe that up, but then I got distracted with this and that, you know how it goes, and I left it there, I didn’t notice it again until now.
It has moved.
Now I know what you’re probably thinking, maybe my floor is slanted and it just slid downhill a bit, and you would be right, I live in an old building, when you walk down the halls, through the window at the end, you see one story down on the building outside, the floor is slanted.
But it’s slanted the other way, toward my overflowing hamper.
This honey is gravity-defying honey.
I lean down to look at it, it isn’t old and growing mold like the food my mom cleans out of my fridge when she’s waiting for the laundry—honey never goes bad, it just crystalizes and becomes impossible to pour—but it had moved uphill, so I think to myself, that’s strange, but there’s no way it moved like that, I must be imagining it. I take a marker, not a permanent one, but one I can wipe off later, and put a little dot right beside the dollop, parallel to its center, that way I can tell if it moves again, and while I watch it, I have this feeling.
It’s watching me back.
But it’s staying put, so I go to work, I work in an office downtown where I review things and enter data and sign things and write things and do mostly what I’m told but take great pains to avoid my boss and then I leave at 5, every day, and by that time my brain is reduced to a nothingness so profound that only my most basic systems remain up and running, move foot, swipe metro card, put key in lock, turn, open fridge, grab beer.
And there’s the dollop.
It hasn’t moved any farther.
Well, you can imagine how relieved I am, especially after all those videos on TikTok recently about murder hornets and killer bees. I make a mental note to clean it up later, but I don’t get to it, I don’t know why, it’s just not that important I guess, and I have to check my Snapchat feed and reply to my mother’s email to tell her, yes, I do understand that working with my laptop on my lap might lower my sperm count, but since I have no intention of having children in the near future, that isn’t particularly important to me, and, yes, I still plan on coming up for the weekend—see how she smothers me—and I have to take out the trash and all the other things then meet up with some friends at the coffee shop on the corner—they have these amazing spinach egg bites made from organic spinach and pasture-raised eggs— where we compare how many likes our photos get and share videos of old neglected bridges falling down, before we go out for drinks, but not too many because I have to work tomorrow, and when I get back, my key doesn’t turn in the lock.
It feels sticky.
But the deadbolt can do that when the weather gets cold because there’s no heat in the hallways of my building and the guy down the hall likes to go out on the fire escape outside the hallway window to smoke a cigarette even though it’s a non-smoking building, and he always forgets to close the window (my mom threatens to report him every time she comes) so I put some oomph into the lock, and it clicks. I can finally go to sleep. When my alarm wakes me up the next day at 7:30, I make breakfast—a bagel and lox—and look down.
No dollop.
A hair’s-width shimmery line runs from the dot I drew on the floor to the lock on my front door, like a snail got into my apartment, made its way across my living room, ate the honey, then slid its way back out on the exact trajectory from whence it came. I touch the line, it’s dry, not sticky or anything you’d expect from a line like that, just dry, and when I scratch it with my fingernail it releases from the ground in hazy flakes, but the flakes on my fingers are more disgusting than the pigeon shit that dropped into my hair when my friends and I went out for cocktails on Ditch New Year’s Resolution Day, and it disturbs me in a way that no regular dirt ever has. So I leave my bagel half schmeared on the counter, wish I had bought a Swiffer like my mom told me to, but settle for a wet paper towel or ten because my floor is so dirty the towels keep turning black, and proceed to erase the whole damn line.
But when I do so, I get a twinge of guilt, like I’m causing someone pain.
Still, I clean it all up, even eradicate the dot I’d made with my marker, and it takes so much time, I’m late for work, so I grab my keys from the bowl next to my door, and go to turn the deadbolt, but I can’t get it open. I lean all of my weight into it, but it won’t budge, I pull and push and twist until my fingers are red and pockmarked by the thumb turn, but nothing, so I get my hammer out—my boss is going to have a conniption—and set to attacking it, probably making my neighbors think I broke my couch again (I got my mom to call her handyman for me, and she paid for it, lol) but instead of freeing myself from my apartment I only manage to break the turn off the lock, and now I’m trapped. So I have to call the super who lives in the basement and is a real pain in the ass, getting her to so much as provide me with a spare key, something that is the most basic part of her job, requires more coaxing and cajoling than stopping a depressive from doomscrolling, but I call her anyway, and when she answers I hear the sound of her licking her fingers. I’ve interrupted one of her prodigious meals, she likes to talk about them when she’s fixing the refrigerator or the radiator, how many different dishes she got from Panda Wok, or the many flavors of wings she got from Frank’s, she’s got a paunch to show for it, although not a three-cheesesteak-at-a-time paunch, more like a two-cheesesteak-at-a-time paunch, and she tells me she’ll be up as soon as she’s done, so I call my boss, explain the situation, and he unloads on me.
I’ve neglected to mention quite how many times I’ve been late to work.
But it’s not my fault, my company blocks all social media on their computers, and one of the many things my boss has conniptions about is catching anyone on their phone, so I have to check everything before I leave home—I can’t tell you how maddening it is to miss all the conversations my friends have while I’m at work—and I have to comment on and react to everybody’s posts before I walk out the door just in case I can’t get good reception on the metro. My boss has given me final warnings so many times I stopped believing he meant them, but I guess the last one, well, he meant that one, and I have to hold my phone away from my ear for the next ten minutes, then suddenly getting out my door isn’t so urgent.
I plop down on my couch.
The super comes two hours later and I am still sitting there, feeling buoyed by every sad-face reaction to the selfie I posted with the tagline, “Fired! And Trapped!” She tells me to grab a screwdriver—luckily, when I moved out of my mother’s house she forced me to pack the tool set my uncle gave me for my tenth birthday—and the super painstakingly describes the three bacon, egg, and cheese subs she ate from the food truck down the street while she instructs me as to how to dismantle the deadbolt because it can’t be done from the outside. Once it’s off, she looks inside and scrapes out these hardened yellow crystals that look like scratched-up foggy amber, “I don’t know what kind of freaky shit you get up to on the weekends,” she says, “but try not squirting things into your locks in the future, will ya?” I protest; it isn’t my fault, it had to have been there when I moved in, the building is responsible, but she isn’t interested, she scrapes it all out into a little jar, replaces the turn, puts the deadbolt back into the door, packs up her tools, and leaves me a bill for her time. I put it on a pile of others next to the couch. I get a Facebook notification and place the jar by my stove, some of the yellow stuff seems to have softened, but it’s still mostly dust and crystals, and when I go back into the kitchen that afternoon to get a kombucha out of the fridge while I’m venting to my friend, Ben, it has all melted back together again, and I can’t shake the feeling that the honey is once again staring back at me. I wonder how it could have melted, maybe the residual heat from when I made breakfast? But I toasted a bagel, I didn’t use the stove, then a text notification chimes, so I leave the honey there, again, and go out with my friends, make fun of how stupid my boss was to fire me, and celebrate by drinking too much.
***
I wake up the next morning with a massive headache.
It’s Saturday, my phone says it’s ten, and I have twenty messages from my mother. I know she’ll want me home for lunch, which means I have five minutes to get out of my apartment to make my train, so I brush my teeth, throw on my sneakers, head to the kitchen to grab a protein bar, and when I open the cupboard, out of the corner of my eye, I see that the dollop has grown, honey now fills half the jar, and three shimmering lines just like the one I saw before lead away from it, one to my coat closet, another to my bedroom, and the third underneath my door into the hall. But I don’t have time to deal with it, so I grab my green parka, follow the last trail out to where it veers off to the stairway, the elevator comes, and I call my mom on the way down to reassure her that, yes, I’m still coming, and that, no, I never planned to do so on Friday, I had always said it would be today, she’s pretty upset with me, but eventually says, “Agree to disagree, but I can’t wait to see you!”
On the train, I notice a drawing of a unicorn riding a narwhal and remember an old girlfriend who thought one was just as imaginary as the other and who, according to her Instagram, is now a personal trainer. I take off my parka and fold it next to me, causing a lady across the aisle wearing a paisley shawl to give me a look like I’m a bastard for saving a seat even though the train is mostly empty, the entire hour-long trip she complains on her phone about her unruly grandkids and how she’d like to whip them into shape until we finally reach my stop, I get up to disembark, and she says, “You should clean up your mess.”
I stand, stunned.
She nods to my seat.
I look back and see nothing.
She points out a tiny dot on the fabric, it looks like part of the pattern, I lean closer, it looks sticky, it can’t be mine, the only thing I brought with me is mints, no way in hell am I touching a random sticky substance on a train, so I walk away and feel her glare as I descend the steps to the platform where my mother squeezes the life out of me and pulls my arm to the car. She spends the whole drive telling me stuff about the kids I grew up with, most of which I already know because we’re all Facebook friends, she parks in front of my childhood home, hops out of the car and rushes to open the front door, leaving it open for me to follow as she heads to the kitchen and continues to flood me with details. Lunch is delicious, she’s prepared all my favorites including homemade biscuits, beside which sits a jar of her honey just like I have in my apartment and a honey dipper with a hive-shaped ball at the end. This honey doesn’t feel like it’s staring at me, the dipper lays on the table beside the jar, still clean, the butter baked into those crusty circles pulls at my nose, still, I can’t make myself take one because, you know, the honey, I only like them with honey, and I can’t… So I eat baked ziti with meat sauce, my mother reminds me not to forget the green beans, I spill some ketchup off a tater tot, and she says, “Don’t worry about that. I’ll clean it up,” and I say thanks then go play my old N64 while she washes the dishes, wipes down the table and the counters, puts away the leftovers, brings me milk and cookies, then makes meatloaf for dinner, more tater tots, then we open a bottle of chianti and watch Fried Green Tomatoes. Underneath her television she still keeps VHS tapes of Winnie the Pooh from when I was a kid, and more than anything in the world my mom loves to tell the story of how when I was four and dressed up as Pooh for Halloween, I couldn’t understand why I had to wear pants when he didn’t. In my old bed that night, full of food and comfort, I scroll through my TikTok feed, watch my friends eat extravagant meals, play peekaboo with their kids, party with influencers, and wonder why I still let my mother clean up after me.
I guess I’m still the boy who doesn’t want to wear pants.
In the morning my mom drives me to the train station, leaves lipstick on my cheek and waits on the platform to wave goodbye when the ten-thirty pulls away, then I climb the stairs and get déjà vu because I’ve entered the same car as yesterday, yup, there’s the unicorn riding a narwhal. The conductor stops me and ushers me to the next car, when I look behind him, the floor is covered in honey, I ask him how it happened, he says he has no idea, it was clean when he started his shift, I find a window seat, my mother is still waiting on the platform, and I wave goodbye. The conductor stands guard at the entrance to the dirty car until about ten minutes from 30th Street Station when someone relieves him, and as he walks away, I see threads of honey stretch from the floor to his shoe with each step.
When the train arrives, I do my best to avoid the conductor’s sticky footprints on my way off. It’s a nice day, so I walk home, instead of taking the metro, and stop to get a hotdog with ketchup and extra relish, so I can sit in the park by my apartment and enjoy the unseasonable sunshine and check my Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Discord, LinkedIn, and Twitter feeds (I refuse to call it X), but when I drop my phone in my parka’s outside pocket and reach inside for my mints, my fingers dip into a thick substance.
Golden goo.
My hand is covered in it, I wipe it vigorously on my pants, then reach back in for my phone to take a picture so I can post it, the phone comes out dripping, honey falls on my pants, and I can’t wipe it all off on my sweatshirt. I touch as little as possible when I enter my building, but it oozes out of my parka and drips all over the carpet in the lobby, more drips out in the elevator, my parka has turned into a fountain. As soon as the doors open on my floor, I run to the end of the hall and toss the parka down the trash chute, which stops the flow, but I’m sticky all over, and when I pull out my keys, I notice the trail from earlier reflecting off the floor and leading into the stairwell.
I freeze.
I open my door slowly, wary of what might be inside. Light streams through my windows, but nothing seems to be awry. Over in the jar, the dollop has gone back to its original size.
I feel the honey dissolving into my flesh, I have to get clean.
I pick the jar up and rinse it, throw the water down the drain and fiercely scrub it out with the brush, then wash my hands, and soak a roll of paper towels, so I can follow the trail that leads to the coat closet, rub it off along with the one that leads out my door, then attack the one to my bedroom, scrub, scrub, scrub. I turn on the light in there, poke my head around the corner, nothing seems off, the trail goes into my clothes closet, I look inside, slide my polo shirts back and forth, peer between the boxes of never-to-be-used-again ethernet cords I can’t seem to get rid of on the top shelf, nothing out of the ordinary there, my shoulders relax, I’ve removed the offensive substance from my apartment. I get in the shower.
It’s never felt so good to be clean. I put on my favorite sweats and queue up some YouTube videos on hoarders I’ve been wanting to watch for a while, I scroll through TikTok while they play, then I feel myself start to fall asleep, so I set an alarm for my dinner plans later, and take a much-needed nap. When my alarm goes off, I have a moment of panic, somehow the entire building feels heavier, I swear the walls have swelled, they encroach into my living space, but when I check the counter, there’s nothing there, so I throw some wax in my hair, pick out my clothes for dinner, my shoes lay at the foot of the bed, I pick one up and slide it onto my foot.
Squish.
Honey flows over the side, dripping onto the floor and coating my shoelaces.
I fling the shoe away, and rip my sock off, I look more closely at my other shoes, all of them are filled with golden pools, honey oozes out the eyelets, an alarm goes off in my mind, the trail in the hall to the stairway. I run to my front door, barefoot, and slam it open, follow the trail to the stairs, slam that door open too, jump down each flight, the trail goes all the way to the basement. I break into the hallway down there, follow the trail to the right, sprint around the corner and come face-to-face with the door to the boiler room.
A viscous, amber liquid oozes under it.
My whole body goes rigid. It’s a miracle I don’t shit myself.
I pull down the handle, the boiler is boiling honey, the floor is covered, the walls are coated. A muffled scream breaks through from upstairs—it’s the first of many screams—and I tear out of there, arms akimbo, knock my ankle against the wall, crash my hip into the railing, slip and bang my knee, then reach the lobby where residents are fleeing, their hair matted, their feet scraping the carpet as they try to leave stepped-in honey behind, and join the fray as they bust out into the street where a substantial crowd has gathered, all of them pointing their phones at the façade of the building which has turned honeycomb.
Honey pours out of every open window, glass shatters to my right and a spray shoots over crying residents, another shatters to the left—they come in quick succession—one further above to the right, and then one directly above me. There’s nowhere to go, no place is safe, and as the golden shower I have wrought falls upon me, I can’t help but think,
Why didn’t you clean it up? Why didn’t you just. Clean. It up.
Flash Fiction Winners
We’re highlighting Julia Laurel’s flash fiction winner from our past contests at Armadillocon. Contestants were given a required prompt and five scant minutes to scribble out an entire tale.
Fork Drop (Prompt: Fish Sauce) by Julia Laurel
“We’re out of fish sauce!”
The kitchen went so quiet I heard a fork drop.
“We’re out of fish sauce,” said the chef, “on our fish-sauce specialty night.”
Whichever poor soul had spoken choked out, “Yes, Chef!”
Chef replied in a voice so strained and sour it curdled the sauce left in my pan. “Then I suppose we’ll need to source more. Alex!”
I jumped. “Yes, Chef.”
“Put on a suit and go.”
The Interdimensional Fish Sauce we served at our restaurant required a steady hand and firm resolve to pluck through the portal in the walk-in freezer. Why was it my turn?
“Go now,” said Chef, “and come back in time before we ran out.”
About the Creators
Nissa Harlow lives in British Columbia, Canada, where she dreams up strange stories and writes some of them down. Her short fiction has been published in The Hoolet’s Nook, Weird Lit Magazine, and 50-Word Stories. She is also the author of a number of novels and novellas, all embellished with a touch of the fantastic. She donated her story so you owe her one! You should visit her online at nissaharlow.com and maybe buy a book.
Wandering through the streets of Austin, Texas, you discover an inebriated robot in a back alley by the urine-streaked dumpster, surrounded by three empty quart-sized bottles of 10W30 motor oil. In your pockets you have a dirty Kleenex, a ballpoint pen, a twist-tie, a breath mint, and an old promotional AOL floppy disk. What do you do?
First, I’d get some food into the guy, so I’d insert the disk. While he’s busy digesting, I’d take the breath mint, wrap it in the Kleenex, fasten it with the twist-tie, and use the pen to draw a couple of little eyes on it. Voilà! Instant ghost. Then I’d pull some Christmas Carol-style shenanigans, using the “ghost” to convince the robot to go to rehab. Unfortunately, when he tries to look up the rehab centre, the old disk causes him to try to go online via a non-existent dial-up modem, trapping him in a state of digital limbo. I leave the “ghost” with him and get out of that alley before anyone can accuse me of tampering. The robot may still be under warranty, after all.
If you were to write a ten-volume epic fantasy starring a punctuation mark, which would it be and why? What would the one-sentence plot summary be?
My series would star the tilde because it’s not used very often (at least in English). Short summary: A dragon named ~ goes on an epic quest to find her long-lost parents, whom she suspects to be ? and —, but is thwarted by !, a dragon hunter who likes to stab himself at things.
Before Michael Stonebow became a writer, he traveled to all seven continents, but he has settled happily into suburban life with his wife and two daughters. He is pursuing his MA in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been featured in In Parentheses and Baubles From Bones. You can follow Michael on Instagram @michaelstonebow.
If you could rename any person, living or dead, in all record and memory, who would it be, and what would their new name be?
Ursula K. LeGuin – Goddess
If you had to sing the plea of humanity for continued survival, what would the chorus be and what existing melody would you use?
Melody from “Panic Attack” by Halsey
We are cool, no need to attack
Here, taste a bit of apple pie a-la mode
Let’s get stoned, and share recipes for tasty snacks
Illustrations sourced from Pixabay artists wal_172619, Lucent_Designs, and ArtTower. Composited by editor D.R.R. Chang, a designer and game writer from Austin, Texas. His short fiction has appeared in Avast, Ye Airships! and the Cryptopolis science fiction anthology, and he cowrote a free retro JRPG some people raved about.
Leave a Reply