Totally Made Up Tales

By: Totally Made Up Tales
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  • Summary

  • Totally Made Up Tales is improvised storytelling for the Internet. We record completely new stories without any advance planning, assembled into episodes of sinister, touching and whimsical tales for the discerning listener. Header photo is "Deep Dark Woods" by Connel Soutar, under CC-By on Flickr.
    Copyright 2016. All Rights Reserved.
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Art Entertainment & Performing Arts Literary History & Criticism
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Episodes
  • Lockdown Season, Episode 4

    Lockdown Season, Episode 4
    Apr 24 2022
    Lockdown may be over, but our store of lockdown tales is not. Music: Creepy — Bensound.com.   Here are some Totally Made Up Tales brought to you by the magic of the internet.   Try placing your hands on my thighs and then rub.   Language makes it easy to understand other people and animals.   Friends don’t listen to moaning. Friends tell each other to shut up.   One day, Maisie got out of bed, stretched, and thought, I wonder what I should do today. She arched her back and flicked her tail and stretched her claws. Perhaps she would go and chase birds. That will be a wonderful thing to pass the time, particularly if she could catch that fat blue tit that had been taunting her for days. She jumped up onto the window sill and out, climbing up onto the roof. From her high up vantage point, she looked over the gardens of the neighbourhood that she regarded quite rightly as her own. There, three gardens down, sat a bird. Perched on an old fashioned flat surfaced bird table covered in bacon rinds, pecking away at them with an arrogant swagger in its manner. Maisie extended her claws and licked them carefully, making sure that they were sharp and ready for action. Stealthily putting one paw in front of the other, she crept across the tiles of the roof, with the smoothness of a monorail. First, from her own house to the next door. And then the one beyond that, and finally to the one in whose garden the bird perched. She crouched low against the roof tiles, peering intently down at the bird, still unaware of her presence. And then, letting out a yodelling screech, she leapt for the bird table. Midway through her jump, the bird, alerted by her yodel, turned, looked at her, and took flight. Maisie landed on the bird table, which wobbled precariously. As it wobbled slightly, it fell onto its side and an ungainly heap of cat, bacon rind, and table were left on the lawn. From inside the house, Maisie heard the owner yelling. He was fumbling for the key for the back door and looked like the sort of angry red-faced man that might teach geography. Maisie took off like a shot. And crouched in the branches of a nearby tree where she wouldn't be able to be reached, she licked the bacon fat off her paws and was surprisingly pleased by the taste. Perhaps, she thought, I should hunt bacon next. The end.   Timothy sat down on a rock, at the side of the road. He was weary, having walked from the village all the way out to where he was now. The flat, marshy fields of the fens stretched out in a featureless expanse, as far as the horizon in all directions. He was beginning to worry that the pub that he was heading for, maybe didn't actually exist. It had sounded so attractive when his Airbnb host had recommended it to him as a pleasant Sunday afternoon outing. But now, the wind whistling between the rocks and the heather, he was having second thoughts. As he sat on his stone, a cold feeling started to creep from the rocks into his bones. He thought he should get moving again, but somehow couldn't quite pick up the energy to stand up. It seemed that he was getting heavier by the moment, and that his thoughts were slowing. His heart rate seemed to be slowing too. His pulse, almost impossible to discern. Eventually the sculpture park in Lowestoft became Britain's top tourist attraction for 2020.   Walking home one afternoon, Melissa stopped by a bank by the side of the road to pick some wild flowers. They were a wonderful selection of colours, bright yellow, dark purple, and pale cornflower blue. She wrapped them carefully in a scarf that she had with her, and took them home and arranged them in a vase. The smell of the flowers filled her living room. It was rich and intoxicating, with that edge of the night that comes from wild flowers. Even by the time she was getting ready to go to bed, she could still feel permeated through the house, the magic and feeling of dusk. As she slept, the land of dreams washed itself over the horizon of her consciousness. She saw herself dancing, dancing through fields of flowers, dancing with flowers, just dancing throughout the night. When she woke in the morning, it was not in the comfortable and familiar bed that she had gone to sleep in. Although the bed was still there, now it was twined with flowers. Every surface covered with creepers, with blooms, and even the very sheets had turned to patterned flowers. She lay in a bed entirely of flowers. As summer turned to autumn, the bloom of the flowers faded and the leaves of the creepers crinkled and shrivelled and prepared for the winter ahead. Now the house felt more cold than it had ever done. And she started to resist going to bed, staying up later and later, the bed feeling cold and unwelcoming when she slipped into it, finally. At last, on a chill October night, the first frost of the year came and carried her away. When they found her body cold, dark, and alone, creepers were still entwined with her limbs and a small wreath of still...
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    18 mins
  • Lockdown Season, Episode 3

    Lockdown Season, Episode 3
    Jul 22 2020
    Another set of tales improvised during lockdown. Music: Creepy — Bensound.com. Here are some Totally Made Up Tales, brought to you by the magic of the internet.   Put your faith away. It will hold you later.   Try rubbing me. I'll pop out of my clogs.   Hardly anyone from Germany likes thinking hard about warfare.     It was a bright Tuesday morning and Linda was making herself some eggs for breakfast. She broke the eggs into a ramekin before pouring them into the bowl which, she'd read, is something that you should do. Having poured them into the bowl, she whisked them because she was making eggs of the scrambled variety. As she whisked them, the eggs became frothier and frothier and frothier and threatened to over spill the edge of her whisking bowl. Not knowing quite what to do, she, nonetheless, didn't stop whisking and gradually a tendril of frothy egg spilled over the side of the bowl. This she felt was a disaster. Linda was a very tidy person and any threat of a spillage she was going to treat with the utmost seriousness. She brandished her whisk at the spillage on the floor and she whisked it. Unfortunately by so doing, she made it even more frothy and it started to spread across the kitchen floor. As it spread, it starts to gain consciousness. It eventually towered over her a frothy monster with an opening where its mouth would be. It breathed heavily on her, ruffling her hair back around her face. An eggy smell enveloped her kitchen, and she backed away, trapped between the fridge and the washing machine. "It's time for breakfast," said the monster, as it gobbled her up. The end.     Lights cast shadows. Shadows hide evil. Don't use lights.   Use your noggin wisely. It will let you down.   Screw you, Mr Blair! I want to eat you up!     One morning, Erica woke up to discover that her boyfriend Jonathan was missing. Normally this would not cause her concern, but Jonathan had been suffering from a very severe case of measles and certainly wouldn't have been well enough to go out for his own thing. She went downstairs to the living room where he'd been sleeping on the sofa in order to be able to toss and turn in his feverish state. But he was nowhere to be found. She called for him, but there was no answer. She searched every room without finding him. Being a sensible girl, she decided straight away to report the matter to the police, not to bother them, but just so that it was on record at the earliest opportunity. She picked up the landline phone in order to dial them, but mysteriously, there was no dialing tone. She went back into the bedroom and picked up her mobile phone, but despite being plugged in overnight, it had no battery. She decided that the best thing to do would be to walk to the police station and report it that way, but when she opened the front door, something shocking greeted her. The whole house had been enclosed in a clear plastic dome, which appeared to be hermetically sealed from the outside world. Some two meters in front of her front door, the dome curved down into the ground and she could see that there was a sign plastered on it on the other side. It said, "Beware: Plague."   Is that the end? I mean, that could be the end. It could be the end. That can be the end. Why can it not just be the end? It could be, "Next to the sign on the other side of the dome, Jonathan was waving at her."   The end.     One day, a scientist called Peter found the solution to everything. It was to dissolve it all in alcohol. He started with himself. The end.     Michael had always loved riding his bicycle. He would get up early in the morning so that he could get a bike ride in before his day started properly. And once he day started properly, he would do as much as possible of it on his bike. One year, he decided that he was going to push himself further and enter a really difficult race. He researched all of the possible bike races around the world and picked one which went over 300 miles through desert and mountains. But the most challenging part of this 300 mile race was the very end where you had to cross the channel to make it back to London. He spent many, many months in training and built himself a series of little courses in his back garden that he could do to practice for these particular terrains. He wasn't able to build himself an equivalent to the channel, and so had to go further afield to practice the cycle-powered aquaplaning he was going to need in order to get home at the end of the race. He decided that the Pacific Ocean was the best place to practice for the channel being as it was slightly harder, and therefore would see him in good stead for the relatively narrow distance of the channel itself. Standing on the shores of Tokyo Harbor, he saddled himself up to his bike and pointed the front wheel towards the water. "Tally ho," he said, everyone around him looking slightly perplexed at his outdated and outmoded way of ...
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    20 mins
  • Lockdown Season, Episode 2

    Lockdown Season, Episode 2
    Jul 10 2020
    Another set of tales improvised during lockdown. Content warning: bit sweary! Music: Creepy — Bensound.com.   Here are some Totally Made Up Tales, brought to you by the magic of the internet.   Grass never grows twice. It always leaves a stain.   Refresh your browser often. It will speed everything up.   Marry wisely, lest you fall badly into debt.   Eliminate waste from your life using spoons and forks.   Caring for people is hard. So care slightly left.   Put your feet on somebody. It'll stool them slightly.   It shouldn't be this hard, Freddy thought, to pick the right shade of red for your accent wall. He tried pillar box red, but it was too showy. He tried wine red, but it was too dull and gloomy. What I cannot cope with, he thought to himself, is the sheer range of options in the red catalog. He looked at the paint colour charts spread out on the ground before him. There must be more than 200 shades of red alone, and this was only from one range. He quivered to think what would happen if he went into B&Q to look at theirs. This was simply unacceptable and he would have to do something about it. I shall simply have to eliminate some of the colours of red from the spectrum, he thought. The easiest way to do this would be using some kind of reverse prism. Happily, Freddy was an esoteric sort of individual and had a whole cabinet full of prisms and various refractory implements, and he began to take them out, line them up, and judge which would be best. It took him three and a half years to determine the exact right combination of different-shaped and sized prisms to eliminate red from any colour light passing into the contraption. But he succeeded, and was dismayed to discover that, with some of the shades of reds now missing from the spectrum, everything was a little bit too blue. In fact, it seemed that there were now more blues than there had ever been before. And this truly offended his sense of balance and symmetry and all that is fair and equitable in the world, and he thought, well, I'm just going to have to get rid of some of this blue. And so, he returned to his cabinet of prisms and added more subtlety and different colours and shades of crystal to use in the prism contraption, and finally, after five years, was able to sit down and have to reduce the number of blues to a palatable number. The greenish tints that settled over everything was, to his eyes, even worse than the blue. And so, back and forth, this went on for several years, tinkering and adjusting each time. Until eventually, the only colour that was left was brown. And Freddy looked at it and it was a nice shade of brown. He liked the brown, and he put the brown on his wall, and he stepped back and thought, what this could do with is just a little bit of colour. The end.   One morning, when Margaret got up, Jeffrey wasn't there. What was there, on the pillow next to her was a short note, which simply said, "Had enough. Good luck. Bye." But first, Margaret felt puzzled and somewhat thrown off balance by this. It seemed to come out of nowhere. She checked the wardrobes and the chest of drawers, just to be sure it wasn't a joke, but sure enough, everything that was Jeffrey's was gone. She went to work that day as usual, and got home again in the evening as usual and made dinner. And throughout the day, she wondered what exactly it was that she'd done wrong. She reflected as she went through her day, that nothing very much had changed. Apart from the fact that she was cooking for one, everything else was pretty much as usual. And yet, it felt so very, very empty. But, could she pin it down more specifically? What exactly was this emptiness, and how was she feeling it? She thought back to the beginning of the day. Where did the feeling of empty start? She realised that it had just started as soon as she woke, in a bed that was now only half full. "Aha," she said. It had continued as she had eaten her breakfast on her own, without her husband next to her, then got into her car to go to work, but without her husband next to her, sat down at her desk at work, without her husband next to her, and so on and so on. Every part of her day, just by herself, without her husband next to her. And she realised that more than anything, what she was missing was having something next to her all day. She considered her options, checked on the internet. What else could she put next to her? She narrowed it down to three options. Firstly, a dog, which she would have to feed. Secondly, a coffee machine, which would be convenient in some ways, but would be quite a heavy thing to carry around with her all the time. Thirdly, an avocado, which was deeply portable and heavily photogenic. Unfortunately, she had to discard the last option because she was worried that it wouldn't last. And so, she got herself a dog, but she always thought back that maybe an avocado would have been a better choice. She didn't vocalise this at first, but as the weeks ...
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    21 mins

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