Check Off! is a series of stories inspired by the short stories of Anton Chekhov. Within each story, I write a sentence that identifies exactly which short story my story was inspired by. So you can compare and contrast and find me coming up quite short of the master. These stories are entirely original works; not merely rewrites, just in case you were wondering. A good place to check out Chekhov's writing is onlineliterature.com. Although rightly acknowledged as a master of the short story, he is probably more famous as a playwright, having written Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters among other plays. Is he the best writer who ever lived? Not in my opinion. That distinction clearly belongs to Leo Tolstoy, in my opinion. …show more content…
He continued to argue with me and I with him for a while, but it was more of one of those "passing time" conversations that an actual discussion. Or so I thought. Being a friend of a friend, I did not see him much until the school year was almost finished. He told me he now had no shot at becoming valedictorian and it would be a coin toss if he even finished in the top ten per cent of the graduating class. He said he had gotten a job at an accountant's office and was learning a lot about the way the "real world" worked. He further said he did not know when he would be going to college, or even IF he would. I did not see him again, until I saw him on television. His fame came from inventing a game called Penguin Panic. His fortune had been estimated at 600 million dollars. The news report said that he went to Stanford University for only two semesters. The twist to the story is that he had just underwent a sex change operation. Damn, I thought to myself, it was just A