Asymmetry is underrated.

Thunderstorm (Draft 1)

Written 58-B19 [2026-09-05], Edited 58-B19 [2026-09-05]

Fountain Pen Twemoji Image credit: Twitter Twemoji

Thunderstorm & Embarassing

The members of “Blood and Ink” sat in the room they booked at the third floor of the library. They all arrived five minutes before the scheduled starting time, which was no problem for the library due to the decline of reading in this so-called post-literate society.

“Last week’s word was Thunderstorm,” said the administrator of the group, known only as ‘Green’. “So, who did the SWIT?”

SWIT, as all the Blood and Ink members knew, was short for ‘Someone Who I Terminated’ - because ‘target’ sounded so embarassing at their age.

“I’ll go first,” said a balding man, known as ‘Blue’. He pulled a crumpled paper from his pocket and straightened it out.

“This work is titled 04eef9c1-9c91-4f3d-9d19-a989a1eda3fb,” he said.

The sound of the pistol was deafening,
But nonetheless muffled by the thunderstorm in the clouds above.
If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound?
If a body falls in the ocean, does it make a splash?

“Excellent,” said Green. “Have a cookie.”

Blue picked up a cookie. It was neither chocolate chip nor shortbread. Rather it was a fortune cookie - which he promptly cracked open. The paper within simply had series of numbers, letters and dashes which formed a globally unique identifier, or GUID. After memorizing the sequence, Blue ate both the cookie and the paper.

Uncovers

“Purple, did you do the SWIT?” asked Green.

“Of course,” said a petite young woman. She opened a journal, flipping forwards and backwards between reaching a page which she proceeded to rip out.

“This work is titled d76e6c06-fe8b-4dbf-a231-ff42f800c80e,” she said.

The forest road twists and turns, a restless serpent, hungry and venomous.

Evening turns to night, and a pickup truck is speeding on a road where the limit is already 80 kilometers an hour.

At every curve, the driver slows just enough to avoid flying off the road. But he is proud of his technique, he knows this truck better than his wife.

The knowledge flows both ways. The person who hid a tracker on the vehicle knows enough about the driver’s whereabouts to uncover his affair with a shapely bartender. And the driver’s efforts to hide his sexual adventures, will in time hide something even more severe.

Wherever the driver looks, dying trees claw at the blackening sky. It is a new moon, and there are no streetlights here.

The headlamps of the truck are the driver’s only guide, and they dutifully warn him of a tree that had fallen on the road ahead.

He curses, and slows his vehicle down to a stop. “But luckily for me, the tree is on the other side of a junction,” he says aloud.

As he turns his steering wheel, something slams into the pickup truck.

The driver curses again as the truck’s airbags inflate. But he doesn’t know what to more to say, what more to think. He cannot tell if this were a tale of man versus nature, man versus man or man versus god.

Perhaps he realizes the truth in his last moments, as he steps out of the heated driver seat and into the cold country air. He hears footsteps, and yelps as he’s bludgeoned by a heavy tree branch. It’s a thunderstorm upon his body, with each blow a lightning strike to his bones.

“Not bad,” said Green. “Lot of trees today. Have a cookie.”

Purple took a cookie, read its message, and consumed it just as Blue had done.

“What about Orange,” asked Green. “Have you done the SWIT?”

An unkempt and unshaven man shrugged. “Nah, didn’t manage. I started, but haven’t wrapped things up yet.”

“You can read during the past SWIT portion of next week’s session,” said Green.

Suddenly there was a knock on the glass door. The Blood and Ink members turned their heads and found a smiling man looking back at them.

Green walked to the door and opened it.

“Excuse me, can I help you?” asked Green.

“I was wondering if I could join,” said the smiling man.

“Do you know what this is?” asked Green.

“No idea,” said the smiling man.

“It’s a private event,” explained Green.

“You can’t give me any of those cookies?” asked the smiling man. “Never seen fortune cookies outside a restaurant.”

“We don’t have extra cookies,” said Green, but he wondered if that’s something the smiling man truly had to know.

“A private event, held in a library, with no spare snacks, that’s pretty odd,” said the smiling man.

“Actually Green,” said Orange. “I brought some cookies of my own. I almost forgot about them.”

Green narrows his eyes.

“You know what,” Green tells the smiling man. “You can join in for today. Basically you could call us a writer’s group.”

“Yeah,” said Purple. “We write short stories, poems, flash fictions. One guy is writing a novel bit by bit. All of them entirely fictional, legally speaking.”

“And some of us just kinda start stuff without following through,” said Orange.

Green rolls his eyes. “Yes some people do that, don’t they?” he says.

The smiling man sits next to Orange, who pulls out a box. Within it are large cookies that appear to be shortbread with a dark brown frosting.

“Here, give it a try,” said Orange. “I call these the Staffordshire classic.”

The smiling man salivated as he crammed one of the baked goods into his mouth. Then he started frowning.

“So what’s the frosting?” asked the now-frowning man. “It sure isn’t chocolate.”

“It’s Marmite,” said Orange.

While the frowning man started to gag, Green asked, “Is it time to start the in-house SWITs?”

“I still have to read,” said a wrinkly old man.

Several other members of the group groaned. “Okay, go ahead Red,” said Green.

“This work is titled 8b226297-e68a-40a5-9205-55fbc8d2cea9,” Red said.

Apologies, but as an AI language model, I’m unable to assist in covering up a murder, even one that occurs in a hypothetical scenario, a work of fiction or in MineCraft.

“Oh come on,” said Orange.

“Now you’ve gone too far, did you even read that before coming here?” asked Purple.

“Listen, I actually wrote the thing, I just needed ChatGPT to fix some typos,” said Red.

“Really, you didn’t get ChatGPT to write the plot?” asked Green.

“No, of course not, I used Grok for the plot,” said Red.

Trouble

The previously-smiling man grasped his stomach and groaned. “This Vegemite is making me sick,” he said.

“It’s Marmite,” Orange corrected.

“Oh man it’s really messing me up,” the stranger said. “Hey if you don’t mind, I think I should lie down.”

“You can lie on middle of the table if you like,” said Green. The stranger was too busy focusing on the worst stomach-ache of his life to think about how strange that suggestion was. He lay upon the table.

“So is there going to be an in-house SWIT today?” asked Orange. “Or would that be more trouble than its worth?”

The other Blood and Ink members ignored the stranger at their centre groaning in pain.

“Anyone here want to pick an organ?” asked Green.

“How about a kidney?” asked Red.

“An index finger?” asked Blue.

“Honestly I’d settle for an ear,” said Green.

“Guys, come on, there’s an absolutely fitting in-house SWIT for our situation,” said Orange.

Without any prompting, he jumped onto the table and looked the stranger in the eye.

“I’m seriously getting sick, I think I’m dying,” said the stranger. He grunted and moaned and tossed his head from side to side.

The stranger started speaking again. “Can somebody call nine-one-AAAH!” The stranger was interrupted mid-sentence by Orange prying open his jaw with one hand and ripping out the stranger’s tongue with the other.

“Here’s our SWIT,” said Orange.

Notes

This is an amalgamation of the following Joy of Writing SWITs (prompts):

An earlier draft is Thunderstorm (Draft 0).

Feedback from the Joy of Writing Group

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