Publisher: 100 Word Stories
Weekly Challenge: 181
Topic: Fourty
Submitted: October 10, 2009
Published: October 10, 2009
Participants: 20 total
Recommended Topic: Marmalade
Each day the programmer goes for a walk around a pond to relax. He sees a man playing a flute. It echoes over the water and fills his ears with musical joy. A gathering of large fish are often seen swimming close to the man playing the flute.
Ideas fill his head about a fairy from the woods that turned his wife into a fish, and that he plays only to lure his lost love back to him.
It is a silly story without an end or a purpose.
After forty minutes, the programmer returns to a life of stress.
About the 100 Word Stories Weekly Challenge
About the 100 Word Stories Weekly Challenge
100 Word Stories
…And, as always, keep it brief!
The 100 Word Stories Weekly Challenge was (and still is) hosted by Laurence Simon—better known in Second Life as Crap Mariner—who built a wonderfully strange, tight-knit community around storytelling discipline.
Originally, he started a daily random theme on ScriberOptics via 100words on May 13, 2005, based on a photo, using a combination of everyone’s submitted words rather than posting a single topic. He would write short 100-word stories featuring recurring characters, such as Abraham Lincoln and the Mustard Man.
In June 2005, he then spun the stories into their own subdomain from his personal blog at podcasting.isfullofcrap.com, featuring multiple authors and guest entries. Rather than daily challenges, he settled for weekly challenges, which were due on April 21, 2006, for the topic “Bunnies!” It was published on April 22, 2006. He continued each week posting a topic and invited people to write a story of 100 or [sic]Less Nessman 2.0 words long. Most participants went for exactly 100. It was a form of microfiction—a subset of flash fiction—where the limitation wasn’t restrictive but creatively freeing. Within those 100 words, stories could be funny, heartfelt, surreal, absurd, reflective, or unexpectedly powerful.
Laurence encouraged contributors not just to write but to perform. He always invited people to record themselves reading their stories and send in the audio so their voices could be part of the experience. If someone didn’t—or couldn’t—he gladly read their story for them. Sometimes he even used software to alter his voice, adding character variety, humor, or dramatic flair, so every episode felt like a small production rather than just a reading.
The project chose to respond to the creative emptiness of podcasts at the time not with cynicism, but with creativity. Laurence filled the internet with humor, storytelling, discipline, and imagination. Eventually, the project continued under his broader creative umbrella, “One A Day Until I Die,” where he continues to celebrate the joy of storytelling in all its weird and wonderful forms.
Episodes usually feature everyone’s submissions together in one podcast, and listeners vote on their favorites. The weekly winner not only gets bragging rights but also the honor of choosing the next topic—meaning the community itself shaped what came next. Many participants came from overlapping creative spaces: writers, musicians, podcasters, and especially people in Second Life, where the challenge became something of a shared cultural experience. It wasn’t just a writing exercise; it was friendship, collaboration, creative play, and a small but meaningful part of internet history.
I even had the chance to meet Laurence once at the Second Life Community Convention, where he was handing out refrigerator magnets promoting the podcast — including one I still have today on my fridge. It’s a little artifact from a wonderfully weird, wonderfully human creative era.
This project mattered. It still does.
Paper/Wood Floor Theme from an old version of 100 Word Stories Circa 2009
Reflection
December 28, 2025
This story was submitted for Weekly Challenge #181: “Forty.” I sent it in at 2:11 a.m. my time, hoping desperately that the deadline worked in Second Life’s Pacific Time so I’d still make it. My email literally opened with:
“Not sure which timezone to consider for midnight. I’m hoping it is PDT, since I would still have 50 minutes to get this in.
Oh, and since you are in Texas, Happy Birthday already.”
That was just how this community worked—creative chaos, frantic deadlines, friendly teasing, and a whole lot of humanity.
The story itself came from real life. At the time, I worked in Annandale, Virginia, in an office park with a pond near Fairview Park Drive. I often walked there to clear my head. There was an older man who regularly stood at the water’s edge playing a flute. The echoes across the water were strangely calming, and the fish always clustered near him. That image alone was enough to let imagination take over.
Instead of treating it literally, I leaned into quiet fantasy: a man who might be calling out to a lost love while the world barely notices. But like life so often is, nothing magical happens in the end. The spell breaks. The walk ends. The programmer returns to stress. Sometimes imagination is the only magic we get.
For this challenge, I recorded my reading of the story, added background music with Microsoft Songsmith, and submitted it as a 48-second audio clip. The episode featured 20 participants.
One response to “100 Word Stories: Legend at the Water’s Edge”
[…] One notable feature was a large pond in front of the building, with a walkway around it. In some parts of the path, the grass would grow up taller than me. We often had geese, and each year, a man and a dog would come by after a week or two and chase them off. The pond was a great way to destress from what was going on in the office. Sometimes an older gentleman with an old bicycle would be practicing tai chi or playing a flute. My imagination would run wild, filling in stories about why he was playing the flute. I submitted it as a 100-word story titled “Legend at the Water’s Edge.” […]