Winning Entry - Short Story Comp

This is the story that recently won a competition (on Dee Scribewrintg Blog), the theme was Using Fact In Fiction, with a limit of 500 words. I had some fun with it.

The Car that Ate Vegetables.

If I stared hard enough at the vegies in front of me, maybe some laser beams would shoot out of my eyes and blast them to smithereens.

“Eat your greens. Full of positive Yin energy and antioxidants,” Sapphire said, as if this made them taste good. What planet was she from? 

I held some broccoli up. The smell made my nose twitch. How could anybody think they were edible? Then again, Dad never even looked at vegies until she moved in, and now he scoffs them. I reckon she could serve up a sheet of polystyrene foam and he’d still eat it because it was easier than him doing the cooking.

How long had it been since we ate chips? Not since Sapphire moved in, soon after the Kombi got wrecked.

Dad and me cried after we lost our Kombi, coz it meant the end of holidays driving around and sleeping in it. Dad sold it for spare parts. Which was funny, considering it had been made of spare parts. Nobody’s been making new ones for ages, so I reckon soon there’ll just be a single Kombi left in the world, made up of bits from all the Kombis that came before it.  

Anyway, Sapphire came to buy parts for her Kombi. I thought Dad would laugh at the dolphins painted all over hers, but instead he listened to her with a dreamy smile. I guess she was pretty.

“I’ve got my Peace Machine running off cooking oil,” she told us, patting her Kombi. “Petrol poisons the world, greasy foods poison the body. Best use cooking oil to run cars. It’s called biodiesel.”    

She wasn’t joking.

Soon after she moved in, she and Dad went collecting sticky leftover oil from every fish and chip shop for miles, and boiled it up in the garage. Soon the garage smelt of frying, but in a bad way, like a witch had cooked snails and small children in there. If it was a trick to put me off chips, it was working.

Maybe once I’d gone off fried food completely, they’d make biodiesel from ice-cream and chocolate, to turn me off all my other faves.

Something needed to be done.

I figured the Peace Machine needed Yin energy and those antioxidant thingies more than I did. After all, it had been eating plenty of greasy food.

I spent all my money on pies to stop myself starving, coz I tossed my vegies into a plastic bag under the table over a few days. When I’d collected enough, I blasted them in the microwave – not quite to smithereens.

“Yum, yum. You’ll like my antioxidant soup,” I sang to the Kombi, like Sapphire had, as I fed the vegetable slosh into its fuel tank. “A healthy treat!”  

 It took them ages to figure why the engine was smoking and spluttering. But it proved my point.

If the Peace Machine hated vegies, why did they expect I’d like them?