Write a story in 80 characters or fewer, which is also on the theme "short". You may interpret the theme however you choose.

For this particular challenge, the character count includes all of the following:

• Letters.
• Numbers.
• Spaces. These include alternative forms such as non-breaking spaces or tabs, sometimes collectively referred to as "whitespace".
• Punctuation, such as ,,.,:, or ".
• Newlines. These will each be counted as one character, even if your machine uses two per line.
• Diacritics. These will be counted together with the character they appear on, as a single character. For example, a counts as a single character, and so does å.
• Arbitrary Unicode characters, such as 💚 or 🌱. These will each be counted as one character, regardless of how they are encoded behind the scenes. You can simply copy and paste them into your answer, for example from The list on Wikipedia without having to think about how they are stored.
• Subscript and superscript. These are counted in the same way as other characters. There is no cost for switching between them. For example, the following both count as 2 characters:
  • c2
  • c²
• Bold and italics. A character in bold, italics, or both counts as a single character. There is no additional cost for making a character bold or italic.
• Font size. A character in a different font size counts as a single character. For example, each of the following counts as 11 characters (10 letters and 1 newline):

  • Title
    Story

  • Title

    Story

Numbers, diacritics, arbitrary Unicode characters, subscript and superscript, bold and italics, and font size are permitted for flexibility, but there is no requirement to use them. For example, you may write a story using only letters and spaces.

The character count is strict (81 characters will not count as a valid answer), but the theme is loose and you are encouraged to be experimental and playful in your approach.

If you write more than one story, please post each in a separate answer. This benefits readers, allowing stories to be voted on and sorted individually.

If you choose to include a title for your story, the characters used (including any newline) will count towards your limit of 80. You may wish to have no title to allow more characters for the body of your story. There is no expectation that your story will have a title.

posted 5 days ago

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

trichoplax‭

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