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Most days when I wake up my cat Mat is on my pillow, hugging the top of my head like a hat. Then he says something cryptic, like “Nyork” or “Nyatch”.

The Yucch-meter has just had a delicious, MSG-rich ramen dinner and is in no mood to critique your entries. Instead, the Yucch-meter will proofread your first paragraphs, then declare a winner.

# 2 mak
I am not sure if I am dreaming, but all the sensations are real. (?? How can you be sure they are real if you’re not sure you’re conscious. You mean “feel real”.) The wetness, the stench and the moist are all here for me to bathe in. I cannot move my body and my hands and my feet are gone. I don’t know what is happening. All I remember was that I was drunk and I passed out on the sidewalk. When I opened my eyes I was here, standing alone in a comfort room (“Toilet” would be more appropriate under the circumstances), with my spine bonded onto the wall, my face wet and reeked in reeking of urine.

# 3 thesocialinception
Before Miranda Priestly slept that night, she felt uneasy. She had this queasy feeling (felt uneasy, felt queasy, change one) that something will would happen. She drew her curtains aside and stood looking at her flamboyantly and meticulously horticultured (Horticultured?? Botanied? Chemistried? Try synonyms for “arranged”) garden, looking for anything that might cause this anxiety whatever might have caused this anxiety (Huh? Why would the garden make one queasy? Unless some foul stench was issuing from it). But all she saw was nothing worth her attention she saw nothing worthy of her attention. She withdrew from the window and hastily clutched her mink Chanel robe (We’ll overlook the pretentiousness in case pretentiousness is the intended effect) and laid her body in on her precious curly maple Parnian Furniture bed (Oy vey) and drifted off.

# 4 rice_cooker
There’s nothing worse than money problems. (How insightful! We would never have guessed.) Emotional pain may be agony and sickness can kill you but nothing gets you down like a dollar pinch. When you get hit by a financial crisis, you become worse than dirt. Those struggling with their job deadlines can always hope for an unannounced storm and if you’re sick, everybody else starts treating you with pity as a prelude to the deference the living bestows on the dead. But when it comes to being broke? Tsk, tsk, tsk…you become the appendix in the human body, the sand in the food chain (Unless sand is eaten and digested it is not in the food chain), the kitschy decorative flower pot a tourist bought in some godforsaken place. You become worthless once your dollars slip away from you. Worse off, you’re a worthless piece of shit with no without a dime to your name. This is why people call the penniless broke. Do you want to see a man broken? Strip him of all his financial assets, then you can break his spirit. (You just said the same thing ten times. Repetition has many wonderful uses, but here it is employed to make us go away.)

# 5 cbs
METAMORPOSER

Ako si Gregorio Samsam, kilabot ng mga sampayan. Walang sampayan akong pinalampas, basta may nakasabit na panampay, sya kong sinasamsam. Sa aming lugar, kilala ako sa palayaw na Kit, kapag may nagtanong kasing maybahay kung nasaan ang mga damit na sinampay, ang sagot lagi ay

Kinuha ni Kit
Sinong Kit?
Exactly!

(Good beginning. We will read to the end.)

# 6 Momelia
How to Offend the Christians, the Filipinos, and a Minority With Fiction

On the eighth day, God created the Ego.

But He left that project alone, neglected if you may, because it was an utter waste of Divine energies. (Then why did he make it? You just negated the opening.) There is no advantage in the Ego. There is no benefit in owning one. An ivory elephant in all its beauty and grandiose upkeep grandeur, will still have its share of beholders and admirers. Meanwhile, the Ego will have a steady fan base of one (No, the Ego will be a multitude, being built into every human, and when you spell it in caps you mean the big idea and not the individual item, viz. your ego), and it will be just as expensive to maintain. Furthermore, God found out, because He is all-knowing and all-seeing and all that wonderful Goddishness, that the Ego is a devilish catalyst to unbelievable feats of pride and shamelessness that he completely abandoned that insidious undertaking altogether. (If he is all-knowing and all-seeing you just made him look like an idiot. Also this sentence is unwieldy, too many adverbs, too thesaurus-y.)

# 7 iamdirtybit
“Food on the counter. Heat it up. Be back at 9.
Xoxo”

I left you this note a while ago. The last line – I never meant that. I’ve packed my things with a heavy heart. I’m leaving you I say as ripples gush (Ripples by definition ripple, they do not gush) down my cheeks. You and I both know what we have doesn’t make sense. I have fortune awaiting My fortune waits somewhere, you have runways to walk on. What lies ahead we both know won’t make us happy yet neither this does. We both know that what lies ahead won’t make us happy, yet neither does this. For the nth time, I’m tired of goodbyes. Better off this way. (Argh, another one: Ten ways to say the same thing.)

# 8 Evan
Raha’s alarm clock rang at exactly 9 A.M., his preferred time of waking. (Given that alarm clocks do not set themselves we may assume that.) Superficially, the day started with a predictable normalcy that was to be expected of his middle-aged life, except that that morning, he woke up with a nagging feeling that there was something quite off. He stood up, yawned, and wore put on his slippers as he went to proceed proceeded with his daily routine – a schedule which he has followed robotically for years.

# 9 the chronicler of boredom
He woke up with a start (Voila, a beginning to rival “It was a dark and stormy night”.) to the sound of a bus roaring past just a few meters away from him. Everything he looked at had a grayish hue with occasional splashes of blue and green. He feared that the large amounts of alcohol he consumed last night compounded by his stumbling on something as he zigzagged his way home which caused him to hit his head on the ground and lose consciousness, had damaged his eyesight somewhat. His girlfriend had left him, he was probably going to be fired from his job and his family and friends did not think much of him. Now, he was losing his eyesight. He tried to rub his eyes but was horrified to see that he had a paw with soft pink padding and sheathed claws. Where did his hands go? (The Yucch-meter fears that with the exception of the sampayan story all the entries are variations on the Book of Job.)

# 10 berries-in-mascarpone
“Taste is the most social of the senses,” my boyfriend Jonathan says on our first date, before plopping a piece of hot bread dipped in extra virgin olive oil into his mouth. “If you de-construct the word ‘companion,’ for example, the word literally means ‘the person you have bread with.’ In Spanish, bread is ‘pan’, and in French we have ‘pain.’” His eyes are aglow as he shares this, but there is no trace of condescension in his voice. It is one of the first pieces of countless trivia I will eventually learn from him. I deliberately stare into his eyes over candlelight. I deliberately make my desire known. Across the table, my hands surrender into his. (The Yucch-meter is certain Jonathan is gay. Not a critique of the story, just pointing it out for no reason.)

# 11 tortorra
Somnambulism. For two years, I’ve wandered unknowingly. Snapping into consciousness in places I have never been. I ride a bus. Dine in a restaurant. Dance in a club. Blackmail a political figure. Sometimes wake up in the emergency room after aggressive resuscitation. One time in the surgical ICU with an ET in my epiglottis. Pretty much everything I do while I’m awake. (Aha, intriguing enough to make the Yucch-meter read it to the end.)

# 12 jake
The first person I told of my becoming a frog was my boyfriend. He laughed and said he’d have to leave me now, because we were always fighting when I could walk and talk right and do things normal anyway, and now that I’ve become -something else, that’s how he put it, he said it’s best to part. (Seeming errors are part of the style so the Yucch-meter will lay off and read the rest of this.)

# 13 angus25
Mom: Brandon! Open this door!
Lea: He’s not there, Mom. I’m telling you.
Mom: Stop covering for your good-for-nothing brother, Lea. I know he’s inside. If I could just open this.
Lea: You’re going to break the door!
Mom: I’m going to break his neck if I catch him inside. Did you hear that Brandon? Where have you been for two days, huh? Aren’t you supposed to be at school? Open this door. Now!
Lea: He might be at Christopher’s …
Brandon: Why do you always manage to get inside my room? Am I not allowed to have privacy?
(Good start. Will read on.)

# 14 dibee
Something is amiss in the land far away.
The Sleeping Beauty is insomniac and even the strongest sleeping potion was is not potent enough. A recently divorced royalty noble kissed her hoping to break the spell but he turned into a Beast.
Little Red Riding Hood dresses up in a wolf costume and gobbles up the wolf together with a flock of sheep.
Pinocchio cannot tell a lie and its nose grows shorter and shorter until it grows at out the back of its head. Geppetto who cannot handle the incessant truths eventually chops him (You started with ‘it’) up. (Intriguing, will continue reading.)

# 15 january jam
PREQUEL: a surfeit of moringay soup—saltless, fishless moringay soup! (Malunggay is moringa.)
I THOUGHT I was in hell. Because the “room” temperature was unpleasant. Darkness, everywhere! And there were hideous sounds. I thought fast: voices from newly-judged people either in elective offices, online services, or judicial halls—judged people and SATANETTES! (Fans of Satan?) This was hell. Pure acid. I was totally smothered by its power. (If it is acid as previously stated the word would be “dissolved”.) So I was judged. I had amnesia like Toni Gonzaga. (Assumes reader has watched that movie.) I was an indie Toni Gonzaga with an indie grittiness and an indie set (What the hell does that mean): I didn’t know that I met God, talked to Him about sins, bargained like tourist Pinoys in Silom district in Bangkok. Every second passed, I fell deeper in a very gingerly way (One cannot fall in a gingerly manner.) Alice in Wonderland. But unlike Alice, I didn’t see any flashing icons or interesting “circumferential” panorama: no floating piano, no familiar rodent, no yummy tart! What I saw was gobness! (With great relief the Yucch-meter quits reading.)

# 16 cochise_miz
I woke up to a smell so revolting I wanted to throw up. “Jesus Christ what is that?” I asked as I looked around. But I couldn’t see anything as it was so dark. I felt bodies wiggling, wanting to get out, cramped inside crammed into this small place. Underneath, I could feel the earth moist and reeking with the stench of urine and feces. I didn’t know what was happening and for a moment I remembered those scenes in The Wire where Greek mobs transported girls to foreign lands for prostitution. (Interesting, the Yucch-meter will go on reading.)

# 17 Cacs
Iron Oxide
Franz Kafka would have been amused if he saw had seen the eight of us. Eight Roachans, as we came to call ourselves.
Long ago we were chosen for the first manned mission to the Red Planet. It was hailed as the first interplanetary voyage of a terrestrial species this side of the galaxy.
Little did we know what we were in for. (Okay, will read on.)

* * * * *

The winner of LitWit Challenge 4.3: Metamorphoses is. . .

angus25!

Congratulations! You can pick up your prize any time at the Customer Service counter at National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore. The next LitWit Challenge is coming up.