Chamblee54

Part Three of the 2020 chamblee54 report on The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is here. Part One and Part Two are there. Pictures for this affair are from The Library of Congress.
Her raven hair, ruby lips, sensuous jaw, and luminous pearly teeth would all be perfectly preserved—Jacques desperately hoped—by an expertly honed blade and carefully positioned guillotine basket. Mark Watson, Chapel Hill NC
“I do enjoy turning a prophet,” said Torquemada, as he roasted the heretic seer on a spit.
A. R. Templeton, Stratford Canada
Minnie was a short order cook with big ties to organized crime and sought respect within the Family, hoping to impress the Godfather, Don Knotz, with her signature dish, a succulent filet mignon, but the meat was stored on the top shelf of the massive walk-in freezer and, in the end, the steaks were just too high. Donald J. Hicks, Manchester NJ
The day I lost my tractor was the same day I found out my wife was moonlighting as a hooker when she gave me a wad of cash and told me, “It’s from a John, dear.”
G. Andrew Lundberg, Los Angeles CA
“My laddies may not be the fastest sugar cane harvesters,” Fergus confessed, “but they’re not as slow as my lasses…” Mark Meiches, Dallas TX
Fighting injustice in the Southwest Italian dairy cow farming region fell to the cheese-rind masked man of mystery, the Provolone Ranger. Mark Meiches, Dallas TX
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and it was precisely this questionable choice of paving material, combined with the ongoing flight of middle-class demons from the urban center of Pandaemonium proper to more spacious brimstone-lakefront homes in its suburbs, that had produced the mess of closures, detours, and gridlock that were making Azazel’s commute this morning a living . . . well, you know. Alexandro Strauss, New York NY
As we unrolled our sleeping bags, the sickly-sweet notes of the old torch song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” played in my mind and the smell of burning chocolate and liqueur wafted in a treacly cloud of smoke from the next campsite, where a vacationing confectioner had lit a smoldering bonbon-fire. Bart King, Silverton OR
There were shadowy conspiracists behind every smoking volcano, and in all the dark corners of Washington, and hiding from the harsh glaring sunlight of the High Desert of California, but they were laughably easy prey when the Martian lizard people, the subterranean Vril-empowered mole-men, and the globalist pedophile Commies finally did show up. David S Nelson, Falls Church VA