(This is a story I submitted to the Aspiring Writers Short Story Challenge on LinkedIn. The challenge is you have to craft a very short story about the subject of the month. This month the subject is The Fall. The story has to fit in one LinkedIn comment. That means it has to be fewer than 1250 characters … not words, characters! Characters are letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation and spaces. However, it doesn’t seem to count spaces from the end of a line to the beginning of the next line – weird. So the story is usually about 200 to 250 words. This exercise certainly gets you in tuned with unnecessary words and shorter character names (which I hate) and can be fun. You usually don't get the story until the end. By the way, this one was a winner.)
"Damn it Phillip! You flew me to a villa in Italy to propose I become part of this group, this fraternity?" "John, the ‘FALL' is only one chapter. There are affiliated chapters with their own monikers in all races throughout the world.
These groups authored the Bible, the Koran, basically the path, well being and future of man." "You know how ridiculous this sounds? How do you explain the ruler of Germany and … England?" "They're not a threat. But the person you are backing in the U.S. is. And we all know how successful the people you chose to back have been."
“No, Phillip, sorry. Can you have someone take me back to the airport?”
“I’m sorry too John. Russo, Mr. Systo wishes to leave.”
A huge man appeared on the veranda. Without hesitation he walked over to John and threw him off the balcony. As John fell to the asphalt, he visualized the ‘Fraternity Against Lady Leadership’ as a bunch of octogenarians in dark robes hiked up to their waists, no pants, sitting at a circular table. Then an image … Brando sitting in the dark, rubbing his bald head uttering “The horror…”
Phillip phoned, after the distant thump. “Your holiness, it’s done … no … I trust the Guardia Svizzera will handle the clean up.”