The Judge

The judge had no idea what she had gotten herself into when she had entered in the next daily writing prompt- "Write a story or poem about the consequences of not following directions." Now here she was, a day later, ready to embark on the tedious work of reading the short works of aspiring writers. Focused and determined to be fair, the judge steadily made her way through several submissions without much incidence. She finally opened up the story that would slowly lead her to realize that today was the day that her darkest nightmare would come to life.

The judge could imagine evil and pain, though she preferred not to dwell on it, and she knew she was lucky to never have gone through her worst fears, like watching her skin melt off while being burned alive, or being drowned and brought back to life repeatedly, or opening the fridge to see you only have Natural Lite. But today, the judge came face to face with something much, much worse, a kind of torture she thought only possible in the darkest depths of hell.

Today, the judge faced the worst story ever written.

In all of history.

Like from the very beginning of time.

And to the end of time, too.

It was neanderthal bad. It was farting in an elevator bad. It was tying a 3-legged dog to a treadmill bad. I mean, it was just bad!

Also, it was highly repetitive.

It's title: "The Judge."

It's opening had her bored to tears- "The judge had no idea what she had gotten herself into..." How cliche! The following words after that were just that- words. meaninglessly Jumbled together words into a incoherent set of phrases attempting to be poorly a sentence. Was this even a story? What was the point?

The next minute felt like hours. Words in. Words out. With an exasperated sigh, she began to wish she had never volunteered to be a judge. But how could she had known the pain it would cause? Could anything help?

Wishing she had something to shoot up her arm, the judge settled on taking some asprin for the headache inducing spelleng errors. Bottomed down a bottle of Pepto to help with the nauseous sentence fragments. She brushed her teeth for 30 minutes to cleanse the bitter aftertaste of cheap shock value imagery. Then, she passed out in a pool of her own blood.

Weak and delirious, the judge opened her eyes and began wiping the cold blood off her freshly cut wrists. From the corner of her eye, she looked at the screen with the horrible story. The horrible story looked back at her.

She could not escape the futility of the situation. A moment before the attempt on her own life, "it" hit her like the ground rushing up to meet a skydiver with no chute. "It" being the overwhelming impact of hundreds of nihilistic cage fighters delivering an eternity of kicks and blows.

"It" was the requirement to follow the writer's prompt. Or more accurately, "it" was the writer's complete neglect to adhere to the writing prompt. The writer wasn't following the directions at all.

The despair was unbearable. All of this mindless babbling, this cluttered reading, all of this suffering was in vain. Did the author not realize that this would immediately disqualify him? The story was truly meaningless.

In a daze, the judge simply acted without thought, and in the growing spirit of desperate masochism, she scrolled through and continued to read the painful text, inflicting self harm just to feel something, because there was no point to go on as there was no point to do nothing and it was absurd to stand still while it was absurd to read more, to keep running, and to run on, with no destination, no completion, no satisfaction, no order, no thought, and no identity, though there was an experience, boring and painful, in the endurance of reading this never ending and ridiculous run-on sentence obviously going nowhere.

But the judge simply read on.

Words in. Words out.

Finally the reader,
Now not judging at all,
Listened to the words
Slow down.
And gratitude
Swelled
As she reached
The End

Afterword:

The judge experienced so much joy and ecstasy because this horrible story (from a writer who didn't even bother to follow the directions) was finally over, that the very crappy writer was announced to be the winner.