The Animal Empire Strikes Back By Patrick Henry

From a small boat we looked around river-creeks for fresh-water crocodiles. A wealthy German had one brought aboard to sit on his knee; jaw bound with rope by the Aborigine crew; his glamorous wife photographing. I criticised them all. The Abos protested they never hunted or ate these creatures, as many people do; now releasing this victim. I said they had killed it, partly, by capture, reducing its spirit forever, taking it for food was better. A real crocodile farmer I met, respects his stock, despises Irwin. When that lethal ray hit the TV star, the animal empire strikes back.

Send your entries to hundredwords@thisisull.com and we'll print them. We'll even send out some gifts for the best ones ... So get scribbling and send them in, and remember to mark your entries: One Hundred Words.

Fiction - The Post Office of Doctor Moreau By Kenton Hall
	I was lying on my back - hands tucked neatly behind my head - and staring at the ceiling, where the Visigoths who had decorated the hotel room had utterly neglected to place a slow-moving fan. Sometimes, a protagonist just can't get an even break. I mean, I could feel it in my bones. I was about to be summoned on an adventure that would utterly and irrevocably Read more...

Fiction - 100 Words Competition - Admission Cost By Patrick Henry

	I hitched to The Edinburgh Festival, giving poetry-readings, arriving daybreak, sleepless, my literary hostess, Nancy, American, Gertrude Stein-monologuist, whirling me off to see The Festival Director, John Drummond; complaining about publicity, calling me as witness, newly arrived and bewildered. Wearily I agreed. Nancy's salon lacked audience. One performance, Read more...

Fiction - 100 Words Competition - The Head By Marc Heeley

	The words that break free from a head, that's trapped inside a box on top of a wardrobe. Feeling the words, the ones that fall on the skin, breathing down your neck and asking to be seen. Odourless saliva soaked speech, without colour also. You know it's there. The head no longer wants the words, they've been ejected. The head now makes no sound, the words clatter against Read more...

Fiction - The Prodigal Son By Joe Hakim
	stuck in my room again/ looking up at the blinds/ gaffa-taped shut, keep out the light/ single beam escapes through a gap/ one piece of light concentrating on the wall/ imagine it to be hot like a laser/ imagine the smoke rising up like a spirit/ but it's not there, not there at all/ it's only in my head/ only in my head Read more...

Fiction - 100 Words Competition - Surfers on the Sofa By Gemma Durham

	How hot is Hull? With it's seductive, cosmopolitan avenues, the chip spice, the late taxi's always on the way. Ask someone from down south to sit on your sofa and you'd think they would have a date in the ocean with a surfer. Awards for the friendliest university, and a special up and coming indie rock scene that has hottened hull to the top. Learning to speak Hull has Read more...

Fiction - 100 Words Competition - Walking Into Doors By Nick Boldock

	She squinted into the mirror and looked at the bruise around her eye. Already it was turning a sickening shade of purple. It throbbed when she prodded away at it. The thick laceration in her bottom lip was stinging as well, as she dabbed at it with a wedge of TCP-soaked cotton wool. She knew she ought to be more careful. Less clumsy, less thoughtless. He'd say he was sorry, Read more...

Fiction - 100 Words Competition - The Graveyard Shift By Rich Mills

	The taxi office is beige with nicotine and age. Battling with the Sandman, my weapons of choice, cigarettes and coffee, dispensed from the whirring-gurgling coffee machine. Of things I've done for money this is the lowest. Six calls all night, only TV to numb the brain. Cups, and corners filled with cigarette butts. I wait for the dawn. Then my replacement comes on, Read more...

Fiction - 100 Words Competition - Big Slaughter By Kate Askin

	As Big Slaughter housemate 'Little Wee' Jim gave a final tug on the garrotte round the neck of the only other remaining contestant, he knew he had won...he knew... He knew by the sound of that last gurgle...It came from the throat of six-feet-six Thai hermaphrodite Om Lui (whose height was enhanced by foot-long calf extensions, no less). He knew, by the last desperate, Read more...

Fiction - 100 Words Competition - Debit Column By Patrick Henry

	Raymond, abrasively-witty, biography-reviewing journalist, worked during endless pub-going; volumes under arm; notes mental or beer-mat-jottings; from Five AM. around Smithfield Market, through mid-day Fleet Street, Soho; to evening Chelsea, exhausting his trail home. Early hours meant snatched sleep and eating; columns grittily-written: cold turkey! Five A.M. his taxi Read more...

Fiction - 100 Words Competition - The 1st One Hundred Words Are The Hardest By Rich Mills

	He'd started that first sentence many times, deleting it and starting over again. The cursor blinked in the corner of the screen, taunting him, daring him to write something. He stared at, became hypnotized by it. Time ticked by, blink, blink, blink. His mind was just blank, blank, blank. Then in a sudden rush to fill the white expanse with black he started banging away at Read more...

Fiction - End Of The Line By Nick Quantrill
	This is how it happened... I was driving down Lowgate. There's got to be a better way than this, I thought to myself. But then I saw her, clinging to a lamppost, holding her hand out as her friend tried to stop her from falling over. I indicated and pulled over; she would do nicely. Her friend bundled her into my car. No respect for anything, least of all herself, I thought Read more...

Fiction - Another Brick In The Wall, Another Man In The Crowd By Steve Rudd
	'It doesn't look any different on this side,' the disembodied voice yelled over the void. 'I never said that it would look any different. But I bet it feels different,' ventured an old man's voice on the Eastern side of the wall. 'Not really,' the disembodied voice declared. 'At least not from where I'm standing.' To some people, the momentous fall of the Berlin Wall signified freedom Read more...

Fiction - Off To See The Wild West Show Part 2 Chapter 2 By Frank Beill
	It was too late in the day to visit Tweed Street school - the children and their teachers would be long gone by now. This left only the address I'd been given for George. Hessle Road was not a long walk from Princes Avenue but a tram ride was quicker or to be precise two tram rides were: one into the city centre and one back out again to get me to my destination. All the old reactions Read more...

Fiction - The Service By Joe Hakim
	I'm a professional. I get the job done. It's already getting dark as I arrive at the station. I make my way past the perimeter fence and park my car in the shelter. So begins the process of shedding everything that makes me who I am, in order to become somebody else. You can never tell what kind of night it's going to be, so even now after all this time the anticipatory adrenalin Read more...

Fiction - The Emporium of Illusions By Andy Bilton
	I cannot decide which foam bath to put in to the tub. Mood, I feel, is an important player in a first date situation and I do not want to fold at the first hand by getting in to the wrong one before tonight's encounter. So do I pour in some of the Marks & Spencers 'Tranquility' that has an unnerving resemblance to Rowntree's Lime Jelly and 'treat myself to an indulgent bathing Read more...

Fiction - The Horrible Death of Tony Clare: Retribution and Revolt By Sean Davey
	Tony Clare, British Premier, bringer of war, pestilence, famine and social impotence, died today. Killed by an unknown man. A man driven not by his hatred for the Prime Minister, but by his own need to right the wrongs that Tony Clare's society was responsible for. A society which neglected its own people, raped the land, taxed the workers and killed the innocent. Read more...

Fiction - Dig Your Own Hole By Joe Hakim
	Things were going well. We were on schedule and under budget, Chris Chambers, so my boss was chuffed to bits. "It's going to be a good year," he said slapping me on the back, a huge shit-eating grin plastered across his face. As he looked around the building site, he tipped back his hard-hat and his chest expanded like a proud father watching at his children running around. Read more...

Fiction - Load the Cards By Sean Davey
	Loading up the cards and I start thinking. I think about casino's, and all that is. Imagine a building dear reader, where degenerate, and often eccentric behaviour is not only the norm. its positively encouraged. Heavy drinking and gambling is as much a part of the punters mind as work, or going for a meal. Its just what they do to get their kicks. Read more...

Fiction - Charity Begins in the Toilet By Shep
	Like most stories this one starts at the beginning with a middle aged man kissing a middle aged woman on the middle of the lips. I'm not sure where the middle starts or ends but I'm fairly sure its centre is an equal distance from these two extremes. The man's head jacks back and forth like a mother bird trying to vomit out some nourishment to her Read more...

Fiction - Goths in Denim (I only dress like a Goth!) By Jason Ince
	'That can't be the time!' I scream, staring at the clock-slash-radio-slash-CD player. This is the last time I try a DVD marathon within one day, I'll kill Stanny for suggesting it to me. The phone starts to vibrate before the ringtone kicks in. It's Clark's tone...again, 'damn you, Clark!' I charge across the room and leap over the chair and snatch the mobile. Read more...

Fiction - Absinthe - A Cautionary Tale By Sean Davey
	In pursuit of the perfect high, man invented absinthe, and I among others regularly enjoy its powerful effects. But on some days, store-bought brands are far too timid for the task at hand. On these days we need the homemade stuff. Created in garages and lofts, jam packed with wormwood and all those other alpha-terpenes to get the brain synapses into full gear. Read more...

Fiction - Punishment By Nick Quantrill
	Punishment by local crime-fiction writer and thisisull.com contributor, Nick Quantrill, has won a nationwide short-story competition run by HarperCollins. Entrants were invited to submit a story of no more than 1,000 words in the crime-fiction/thriller genre. Here's what the judges had to say about Punishment : 'We were impressed with the use of Read more...

Fiction - Friday Feeling By Nick Quantrill
	Friday 3pm It was building up to being another busy Friday afternoon shift. It was probably no busier than any other shift, but the extra tiredness that Detective Constable Maynard felt by this point made them feel that much longer. He had been sent to Young's general store in East Hull straight after attending a suspicious death over on the other side of the city. It was Read more...

Fiction - The Morning After By Joe Hakim
	They'll be here soon. There's nothing much to do other than wait, so I make another strong cup of coffee and light up another cigarette. Even these seemingly arbitrary actions are cast into a new focus now. This patch of time I'm occupying is a bridge - a bridge that spans the space between the way my life used to be and the way it's going to be. I look around my living room Read more...

Fiction - In A Room By Joe Hakim
	I wish there were bars so I could hold them, wrap my fingers around the cold steel and press my face in between them, but it's just a room, I'm in a dark room with no windows and no features, so I just sit and think and think and think. I am a captive, a hostage in a foreign country. I'm apart from my family and friends and I don't know if I'll ever see them again. Every so Read more...

Fiction - Off To See The Wild West Show Part 2: Prologue (June 1904: Hull, Yorkshire) By Frank Beill
	From the outside the two-storey building looked even more forbidding now than the first time I saw it. Eighteen more years of Hull soot had turned bricks from red to dark brown. The dank smell of Grandmother's skirt returned to me. I caught my breath. So many emotions stirred inside me. Doors in my mind that I'd kept closed for so long were opening again but this time Read more...

Fiction - Buried In The Past By Joe Hakim
	Arriving back in Hull, the first thing that hits me is just how much hasn't changed. As I walk down Princes Ave, I look at all the café bars that have sprang up to replace the odd little shops and businesses that used to line it, but it still feels the same somehow. There's a kind of progress, I suppose - even if progress means it's starting to resemble everywhere else in Britain - Read more...