Two Sentence Stories by Douglas Gilbert
A Descriptive Deception and a Surprise
You may find it odd that you’re struggling to write something frightful in two sentences, when everyone else is doing it easily. Yet though yours is a bomb, the others are explosive. However, you don’t want to use the expedient of common gore. After all, a herd of sheep in Doom Valley only needs a wolf. Yes, dinner can be served in many ways beyond mutton and lamb chops with theatrical ketchup blood.
Many people think it’s limited to two simple sentences: an aphorism opening followed by a killer sentence. Sure, you can do that. That’s the easy way out. Maybe you’ve seen a few examples with sentences that are stretched a little such as these three pairs:
With quadruple embrace, I had said will you marry me. She had said I will until divorce of the species and execution.
Late on the day she was to testify, she was waiting in her car, listening to the radio, and heard her number confirmed for the billion dollar lottery ticket sitting in the glove compartment. The bomb in the car exploded.
They practiced the live war games with two new robot designs, one for the red team, and one for the blue team. A lady and her baby dressed in blue strolled by the perimeter of the camp as a rogue red team robot, looking for the best logical short cut, broke out of the enclosure in search of blue flags to kill.
So Start in The Middle and Elaborate With a Dependent Phrase Or Clause
“Will you marry me?” is in the middle of something… Give one detail from the scene with a prepositional phrase perhaps that enhances the basic sentence in the middle. Who is getting married is a surprise.
She was waiting to testify… Waiting where? Who is watching?
War games is the basic middle… For what purpose? Who are the innocent bystanders.
Write a Short Story In a Paragraph And Then Change All Sentences Into Dependent Clauses or Phrases Except for Two.
A dependent clause is something that can not stand alone as a complete and independent sentence but can be attached to one. “When she appeared” has a subject and verb but is not a sentence. A dependent verb phrase has no subject but can refer to one. A sentence can be spread out with intervening clauses. She came home. She, bleeding profusely, came home. “Coming quickly, she being nearby” is not a sentence but is useful to stick somewhere.
Longer Two Sentence Pairs
If only you will play without the evil powder your manager supplied, I will kiss your tune lips ’cause anything goes when slinking down your keyboard, tickling doleful note doodles, plinking your chords, caressing pianissimo, bopping forte, top a’ ya board, chording love accolades, staying for improvisations when cool mistys get hot. I shall be cool when you transpose the glory keys to high toned harmony that sees me exposed with whistling kisses blown all sax-ified, but that’ll be later after your sweaty performance when we shall go to the showers where we shall install a froth of warmth above a soapy love, meeting by the steamy wall where flights of fancy are never scrubbed but played out with fragrant soap in tribute to a love we’ve had ever since I’d been a mere calf and you’d been shy, knee high to a love like a soap opera sung in April showers, cool loving, if only you wouldn’t die from the poison.
The psychic woman had showed her rough seas ahead in blood and fish guts, said beware the tides and flowing kisses, but that seemed like shallow waters to her as she drank, her thick handkerchief mopping up her eyes, highly high on her trumpeted mope, slipping on her poor spilled cocktail of his love kisses lost crawling across the stage where she was to sing beige before a sea of mahogany tables over drunks and hecklers, sticky stinky, beckoning bass strings plucking her heart, blubbering woe tales wagging about him, the bragging whale who blew his spout and left her high and dry to go out on the high seas, always jealous even away, but seeing her collapsing, I could not bear her despair, rose to say, “I have always loved you,” and we all stood, hecklers and all, to beg a last song before the massacre. On stage, she knew me at last in a kiss, me, the little one, then she, turning from beige to blue, caressing the mike, rasped in weeping harmonies, “Stand for me, the stood-up one, to sail me to the Port, wine me down mellow, me, a cello solo, singing this tale,” but that night of hell, we were all swimming in blood when returning, he shot her with a harpoon gun and gutted us all with his fishing knives to fulfill the curse of the Neptune serial killer.
Always wondering if you really needed my gifts to kiss, tulips for you when I was blue, you wearing the blue dress for me when you tickled me and needled me, loving my laugh, your two lips saying, and too when your were blue, food for thought, Fontina cheese for melting on a lily day, making lasagna, you saying that there were layers to the fragrances of Parmesan, of provolone, of wet flour
creaminess to Mascarpone, though you thought I said “mass car pony,” and I had oregano and basil
but I couldn’t buy you a pony or a car, only a heart race at a pace of joy. I’ll never know if it was I who fed you too much because an autopsy is often not done for a heart attack or loneliness, and I would have loved to see you again just for a laugh or pony ride.
By the Wayward 