Bulwer-Lytton Contest Inspired Story

Every year San Jose State University's Department of English & Comparative Literature holds a contest "where WWW means Wretched Writers Welcome". It is a contest in "honor" of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton who was known for writing "It was a dark and stormy night" fiction.

Thus, I have taken the "winner" of this year's contest, and expounded upon it to make a complete story. Enjoy!

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

Which was quite coincidental since his name was Sam DeLaney so his last name was DeLaney, and he was from Piscataway, N.J., but he did not have anything to do with forging manhole covers; in fact, he worked like so many other hard working people in Eden Prairie, MN at one of the many retail outlets, but this one was selling sweaters to high school girls.

Mary Ellen, who with Sam DeLaney made up the couple, purchased a sweater from him with puppies on it that she thought was quite fashionable when she was in high school but that time had long passed and in reality it was never fashionable and now it was threadbare and worn because of the intervening years but it was a memento of their first meeting so she wore it often whenever they got together.

The pair were like a Burlington Northwestern Santa Fe freight train and a Metrolink train in Placentia, CA, at the intersection of Van Buren Street and Orangethorpe Avenue, near the Atwood Junction; they were bound to run into each other eventually, and they did at a convention of sweater wearers sponsored by Sam's store.

Nonetheless, not everyone was a fan of checkered taxi ride burning rubber love; however, not because she lived approximately 1,027 miles from New York City or that she was against east coast elitism, but because she was not the recipient of such love from her husband Sam DeLaney, and that woman was named Samantha DeLaney which caused all kinds of difficulties when the someone asked for Sam DeLaney on the phone.

Just like Isaac Newton's and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's independent invention of integral calculus, Sam's and Mary Ellen's affair was bound to be discovered sooner or later, but the pair was hoping for later; however, those hopes were dashed when Sam DeLaney, Sam's wife, came home early from work on a sunny but unseasonably warm autumn afternoon in October with what could be described as a rather bad case of projectile vomiting.

Needless to say, Sam's day was going to get a great deal worse, but in actuality both Samantha's and Samuel's days were going to get worse, but Samantha's day was already going bad with the vomiting and all, where as Samuel's day was going pretty well, what with the rendezvous with his mistress, and the fact that he was not currently selling ugly sweaters to demanding teenage girls.

While the situation was quite embarrassing with the yelling and the vomiting, what made it worse for the two women was that they both had the same sweater with the puppies that they liked so much which made them realize that they had more in common than just the man in their lives, but on the other hand, it could just be that Sam the sweater salesman used the same sweater salesman technique on both women, which was clearly effective.

It was your standard love triangle, it may have been an acute, obtuse, or even a right angled triangle, but the problem is that it was not a triangle at all because there was another person involved making it a love rectangle or at the very least a love quadrangle because the definition depends on the angles, and who knows, it may have been a love pentangle or hexangle or even more people may have been involved as who can ever tell in these types of things.

Easton Leuer, which is pronounced 'lower' not in a lower and deeper voice but as in the word 'lower' such as 'lower level of the parking garage' which is where Easton worked as a parking attendant making sure the basic sports utility vehicles, like the Cadillac Escalades, were not parking in the compact spaces which happened to be a very common occurrence at this garage and was quite a parking hazard to other patrons with these big cars sticking out too far into the isles and using two spaces where the space was designed for one.

Since the early bird gets the worm, Easton believed he could get whatever he wanted because he was up earlier in the morning than just about everybody because he had to be at work before everyone else due to him working at a busy parking garage where so many parked their cars for work, but the thing that Easton never realized was that the early worm gets eaten by the bird; thus, getting what you want because you were early was not necessarily a good thing which perfectly exemplifies his relationship with Mary Ellen.

Easton and Mary Ellen's love was like an invisible six foot white rabbit named Harvey who could only be seen by one person and that person would have to be Easton because Mary Ellen had know idea who Easton was let alone that he had any type of crush upon her, but he was under the impression that they had a very serious relationship from her daily parkings in his garage despite the fact that they had never spoken.

With all of the players set up like characters in a bad detective story where everyone has a motive to kill everyone else, but not all of the motives have been expounded to the audience and not all of the details have been given but nonetheless, the audience is expected to guess the outcome of the whodunit even though no one has actually done anything wrong at this point in the story.

Nevertheless, when a headless women, who was wearing an ugly but remarkably very worn sweater with puppies on it, was found in the Mississippi river occupying a 1978 two-tone brown Chevrolet Chevette with expired New Jersey plates, authorities believed that foul play was involved, but the first order of business was to determine who the occupant of this classic vehicle was and why she was attempting to drive in the Mississippi river.