MCM — Topic Tag Tuesday

What You See

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

In the mirror was a woman in a blue dress. This worried Roddy, because while she seemed very pleasant, sitting at his desk, nudging his knick-knacks here and there, he was fairly certain she hadn’t been there ten seconds earlier.

“Hello?” he asked, and she looked up, surprised to see him.

“Oh, hello,” she said. “Are these yours?”

He felt odd, having a conversation through a reflection, so he turned around—only to discover the woman wasn’t there at all. No sign of her. No hint she’d ever been there.

“That’s odd…” he said, turning back toward the mirror and—

She was right behind him!

“What’s odd?” she said, leaning her chin on his shoulder. He could feel it, and he could see it in the mirror, but in his peripheral vision, he could tell it wasn’t real. It made no sense. He couldn’t handle it.

He pulled away from her, keeping his eyes on the reflection so he could keep track of where she was. She seemed a little nonplussed by his action, but made no move to follow him.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Where did you come from?”

“I’m Poof,” she said. “And I come from right here. Well, around here, anyway. What are those things on your desk? Toys?”

“Figurines,” he said. “Models and things. Are you real?”

She smiled, and her teeth were so white, it made him dizzy. “Don’t I look real to you?”

“Well, sure,” he said, “but you also only exist in my mirror, so that raises some questions.”

She shrugged playfully. “Maybe this is a dream. Maybe none of this is real at all. Maybe if you close your eyes—”

“You’ll disappear?”

She scrunched up her nose and smiled and said: “Maybe.”

He winced at the thought of it. “I’ll do my best not to blink. Would you like some tea?”

She twirled on her toes and spread her arms out to her sides. “Tea would be lovely, thank you.”

Roddy was about to head over to the kitchenette when he realized that if he turned around, she’d disappear again, so instead he walked backwards, eyes locked on the mirror, navigating through his somewhat cluttered apartment, awkwardly, until he made it to the electric kettle.

Poof, who hadn’t moved from her spot, gave him a playful wave. “Take your time.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Just gotta find a tea bag somewhere…”

The tea was in the middle cupboard, and up high…but there was no way he could get to it without turning around. He reached over his shoulder, fumbling for the handle, and then swung it open—hitting himself in the back of the head, but still not breaking his concentration on the mirror. He snatched a spatula off the counter nearby and reached up over his head and behind, and smacked at the box of tea until it fell out on the floor.

“You can turn around if you need to,” said Poof, amused at all the trouble he was going through.

“No no, I’m okay,” he said, bending down to reach the tea, eyes still locked on Poof’s reflection. He got it, finally, and came back up with a pair of tea bags ready for use.

Back over at the kettle, he found a pair of mugs and set them on the counter, then dropped the tea bags in. The kettle clicked, and he lifted it carefully, trying to aim from a distance, in a reflection, with Poof standing partly in the way. She smiled at him, sweetly, as he struggled.

“Please say you don’t need sugar,” he said with a smile, and she laughed, and shook her head.

The first cup overflowed slightly, but not too badly. He adjusted the position of the second one and poured—

“Ouch!” he got hot water all over his hand. He looked down, hissing at the pain—but then realized what he’d done, and jerked his head upright again, praying that Poof hadn’t—

She was standing right next to him. For a fraction of a second, he thought he saw red in her eyes. But then she was smiling again, resting her head against his shoulder like she’d known him for years.

“You okay?” she asked. “Here, let me kiss it better.”

He wasn’t sure what to do about that. She was gesturing for him to give her his hand, but there was something about her that really didn’t sit well anymore. He was tempted to close his eyes and make her disappear, but something in the back of his brain told him that was a really bad idea.

But she was still waiting for his hand. And he couldn’t quite bring himself to disappoint her. So he did as he was told.

She kissed his knuckles lightly, then gave them a little blow, and said: “There. All better.”

He wasn’t sure if they were all better, but they didn’t hurt as much anymore.

“Th-thanks…” he said, and lifted her mug with a trembling hand. “Here you go.”

She was wrapped around him, practically, watching his neck with a little too much interest. “Pass it back?”

He did as he was told. She took it from him, just as the mug left his peripheral vision, and took a sip.

“Mmm, delicious…” she said, right into his ear. “You know what else is delicious?”

Roddy felt a shiver run through him. “Cookies?” he yelped.

“What?”

“Cookies are delicious. Here, uh, let’s see…” He fumbled through the cupboard in front of him until he found a box of cookies. He mashed and smashed the box into the counter—knocking his tea onto the floor—until an assortment of sugary goodness was crumbled all over the place. “Mmm, cookies,” he said. “Want some?”

Poof seemed unsure. “Will you feed me?”

“No!” said Roddy rushing away, back toward the mirror, without looking at anything but Poof’s reflection. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Why not?” she sulked, staying back in the kitchen. “Did I do something wrong?”

He sighed deeply. “Poof, are you by any chance trying to eat me?”

She put a hand to her chest. “Me?”

“Yes. Because you’re giving off this very I am trying to devour humans vibe, and quite honestly it’s freaking me out.”

She put her hands on her hips and frowned. “Roddy, do I look like the kind of girl who’d devour humans?”

He wasn’t sure how to say this nicely, so he went with a meek: “Kinda, yes?”

Her expression went from friendly bemusement…to dejection. “No, really? It’s that obvious?”

“What?”

“I’m never going to pass my exams like this. What gave me away? Was it the dress? The blue? Too non-threatening?”

“No, I just—”

“Roddy, please. If I don’t pass this test, they’re going to make me a toilet demon. I’m going to be living in toilets for all eternity. I really can’t handle that. I have a very sensitive gag reflex and it’s just—”

“Wait wait wait,” said Roddy, and clapped his hands together for good measure. “Are you saying you’re a demon?”

She pumped her fist in the air. “Yes! You couldn’t tell! Not as bad as I thought!”

“So why are you in my apartment? Why are you trying to eat me? What exam?”

She sighed and leaned against the counter, but didn’t move her feet, he noticed. She munched on the cookie bits he’d left behind. “Placement exams,” she said. “You do well, you get the good assignments. You do poorly, you end up—”

“In the toilet,” he said. “But why me? Why a mirror? I don’t—”

“I’ve always dreamt of being a mirror demon,” she said. “You know, hide out in the reflections, and then rawr! Chomp chomp chomp.”

Roddy felt that shiver again. And not in a good way. “But you can only move if I look away?”

She slumped, smacking her head into the counter. “You could even tell that? I’m so going to fail. Even in a dream, you can tell.”

Roddy frowned. “A dream? So this is a dream?”

“Yeah, we get to practice in dreamspace until our exams, just in case we mess things up like I have. Limits the damage and stuff. Just not to our self-esteem.”

She looked so depressed, Roddy had a hard time not feeling sorry for her. He remembered trying to parallel park ahead of his driving test, and how bad he’d been at it, and how certain he was that he’d fail. And then he had failed. Twice. So to see Poof beating herself up, it really struck a nerve…

“Let’s practice,” he said. “Together. We can practice together until you get it right.”

She looked up, tears in her eyes. “What?”

“If it’s only dreamspace, I mean, what’s the harm? I wake up with a nightmare, and that’s it? I can handle that. Let’s figure this out together.”

She wiped her eyes. “You’d do that for me?”

He laughed, shrugged. “I guess I would.” He motioned her over. “Can you come a bit closer?”

“Not if you’re looking,” she said. “You need to blink.”

He did as he was told, and then she was on the closer side of the counter, leaning against it like she was waiting for a friend at the bar. Her smile was playful again. Tempting.

“So what can we change?” he asked. “What’s up for grabs?”

“Anything,” she said with a shrug. “I’m a canvas, ready for your paint.”

Her enthusiasm was a little creepy, but he ignored it. “This may be a dumb question, but why not just go scary? Like if you can be anything, why not just be a ten-foot-tall monster with massive fangs and dripping pus and blood, and scare me into looking away?”

“Ah,” she said, raising a finger and staring into the sky to recite, from memory: “‘Candidates are graded on the serotonin levels in the subject’s system at the time of death.’ So if you’re not happy…”

“…you fail. Right. So if happier is better…”

Her blue dress shimmered and turned into a red one. Blood red. With lipstick to match. “How’s this?”

“Much worse,” he said. “If I didn’t expect trouble before, I do now. Try something neutral. Black?”

Her clothes turned into a kind of funeral outfit, with a black veil. “Better?”

“Not exactly.” He tried to think of what would work better… “Maybe a dress is the wrong approach. Try casual instead.”

She winced. “That’s a bit more involved. Give a girl some privacy and blink for a sec?”

He laughed and obliged. When the blink was over, she was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, looking a lot more at home in a place like his apartment.

“That’s the one,” he said. “Maybe take the environment into consideration when you choose. Fancy house, fancy dress. Normal house…”

“Got it,” she said with a cute little smile. “What next?”

He shifted his focus to his desk, with the figurines she’d been playing with earlier. “The way you started was good. Making me feel at ease with a strange situation. Maybe do more of that. Have a reason to get closer.”

She took a mental note. “Blink, please.”

He did, and then she was standing in a different position, holding one of his figurines, studying it intently. “This one looks tough,” she said. “Who is he?”

“Master Chief,” said Roddie. “That’s a limited edition.”

“What’s a limited edition?” she asked, turning the figure around. “How can you tell?”

“He’s got a hologram sticker on his boot that—”

“Show me,” she said, and before he knew it, he’d blinked, and she was right up against him, with Master Chief on his shoulder. He inhaled slowly. His body wasn’t sure if it was happy, or terrified. It’s all a dream, he told himself. This is just an elaborate dream. Enjoy it while it lasts.

“Show me the sticker,” she said softly.

He took the figurine from her hand and turned it around, tapping a finger on the tiny, shiny patch on Master Chief’s heel. “That’s it,” he said, then cleared his throat. “But, uh, yeah. That’s great. Much better. You do something like that on the exam, and you’ll do great.”

Her smile was infectious. “You really think so?”

“Yeah,” he laughed. “I actually feel really good right now, despite knowing who you are and what you’re trying to do. Though I guess it helps that you can’t hurt me in the dreamscape.”

“Yeah, so about that…” she said, and dug her nails into his shoulder, and when he cried out in pain, his eyes closed for half a second, and she—

Written for Paulo, whose topic was: reflection/dream/transformation.

Water Pressure

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Simon was soaking wet when he got back into the kitchen. Tracey looked up from her coffee, frowning at the puddle he was making on the floor.

“Gardening again?” she asked.

“Tra, babe,” he said, hands trembling. “Y-you’re gonna want to sit down.”

She frowned. “What did you do?”

“It wasn’t me,” he said. “Well, not entirely me.”

She set down her coffee and rushed to the back door, trying to see past him. He put his hands on her shoulders, and very deliberately set her down in a chair—which was a presumptuous thing to do, so she knew whatever he’d done wrong, it was serious. He wouldn’t risk being presumptuous otherwise.

He sat down, too, and took her hands in his. “So you remember the old sprinkler?”

“The green one?”

“That went side to side, right? OK, so it was kinda falling apart, so I wanted to get a new one.”

“How much did you spend?” she sneered.

“It’s not that,” he said. “Well, it’s also that. Anyway, I wanted to get something fun for Barley to play with, since he really seemed to enjoy jumping through the old one…”

Tracey’s eyes went wide at the thought of her precious doggo. “What happened to Barley?”

“It’s…” said Simon. “It’s just that…”

“Simon!” shouted Tracey, up on her feet and racing to the back door. “What did you do to my dog?”

She got to the door and pushed it open and gasped. In the middle of the backyard, atop the well-watered grass, was a shiny new black sprinkler. It didn’t go side to side like the old one—it twirled in circles, going so fast it made Tracey a bit dizzy to look at it. But that wasn’t what bothered her. What bothered her was the circular burn mark all around the sprinkler, which had torched the grass right down to the topsoil.

“Oh my God,” she gasped. “Simon, the sprinkler burned our lawn!”

Simon was at her side, still holding something back. “It wasn’t the sprinkler.”

She went outside, standing just beyond the reach of the water, and knelt down to touch the burn marks. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What was it?”

“Barley,” said Simon. “Barley did that.”

Tracey gaped at the ring of fire, then over at Simon, who looked so incredibly guilty, it was galling.

“How the hell did a golden retriever light our lawn on fire?”

“OK, so here’s the thing. I turned it on a little at first, and he really seemed to enjoy it. He was chasing the water in circles, getting a good workout, and I thought: hey, I’ve seen him run faster than that. So I turned it up a little…”

“Can you pass me that rake please?” asked Tracey.

Simon glanced at the rake. “No please.”

“Go on.”

“So the water spun faster, and Barley ran faster, but he still seemed to have so much energy, so I figured he could stand to turn it up a notch, right? Except when I did, Barley…he…”

Simon was staring at the burn marks like he was going to cry. Tracey was about to commit murder and bury the body in her new raised flower beds. “Did you kill my dog, Simon? Just tell me.”

“He’s not dead exactly.”

“Exactly?”

“There was this flash of light, and he was…he was gone. And the lawn was on fire where he’d been running, so I had to leave the sprinkler running for a bit, to put it out. But then when I went to shut it down, I…” He shrugged. “Well, maybe you should just see.”

He trudged to the faucet and, taking hold, looked over at the sprinkler. “I’m really sorry, babe.”

He turned down the water pressure, and as he did, the oddest thing happened: Tracey could see Barley running in a circle, but only in flashes. Here, near her; then there, on the other side; then closer again. It was like she was seeing single frames of a movie of him in motion, intercut with the spinning of the water.

“How is this happening?” asked Tracey, bending down and reaching out a hand to her poor doggo. “Did he—?”

“Best I can tell,” said Simon, “he seems to have broken the bonds of space-time.”

Tracey snarled over her shoulder. “What kind of a sprinkler did you buy?”

“It had five stars!” he countered, feebly. “But anyway, there’s also this…”

He turned the water a little lower, and the sprinkler slowed…and Barley started to flicker less and less. Finally, once the water was fully turned off, Barley re-appeared and stopped running. He looked around for a moment like he wasn’t sure where he was—and then saw Tracey, and tackled her to deliver extremely soggy kisses.

“So he’s OK!” she laughed, trying to calm him down. “Everything’s—”

Simon turned the water back on, and Barley disappeared all over again.

Tracey got to her feet, confused. “But wait, he wasn’t running this time! How did—”

Simon turned off the water again, and Barley re-appeared on the ground in front of Tracey, still trying to kiss her face like he had before. Like he’d been frozen in time. Like he’d been paused, and then resumed.

“Simon…” Tracey gasped. “Do you know what this means?”

Simon winced. “That I can’t water the lawn anymore?”

What it meant, Simon discovered, was a whole other kind of existence with Barley. Before, when they went to work, the poor pupper was forced to sit alone all day, staring out the window, or at the door, feeling all sad and lonely for hours upon hours until they came home. But now, all they had to do was get him settled on the couch, turn on the sprinkler, and he disappeared into space-time until they got home.

Of course, that cost a lot in water bills (plus their lawn was drowning) so Simon experimented with different kinds of hoses, stoppers, loops and connectors. They finally got a system in place that let them have their sweet Barley for the parts of the day that mattered, and saved him the boredom and loneliness of a typical doggish existence—and it was all controlled by a timer! Everyone was happy, but especially Barley…because to him, he was showered with attention every waking minute of his life. It was a blissful existence, and they were happy to live it.

Just before Christmas, they were decorating the tree as a family, with Simon covering the high ornaments, Tracey covering the delicate ones, and Barley eating the popcorn they’d naïvely intended to use for decorations.

“Oops,” said Simon, “this one looks breakable. You better take it.” He handed it down to Tracey, who found a safe spot for it where he wasn’t likely to touch. Simon had a very bad habit of destroying things like ornaments. Or sprinklers. Or space-times.

“There we go,” smiled Tracey, getting it just right. “Almost done.”

Just then, she heard the sound of a bowl tumbling off the couch, spilling popcorn everywhere. She turned, ready to scold: “Barley…” But then she froze…because Barley was gone.

“Barley?” she called, standing up to get a better view of the main floor. There was no sign of him. “Barley!”

“He’s probably just hiding,” said Simon, continuing with his decorating.

Tracey wasn’t so sure. She searched the kitchen, the living room, and upstairs in the bedrooms. There was no sign of him anywhere. Not on the beds, not under the beds, not even in the closet he knew better than to go in.

She met Simon downstairs, a sense of panic growing in the pit of her stomach.

“Nothing?” he asked.

She shook her head no.

Barley was afraid to go in the basement, but they checked there anyway. The space heater Simon had installed was working overtime, trying to keep the place warm, and it made the whole space even stuffier and claustrophobic. Tracey peeked around a few corners, but didn’t see anything. Tracey turned off the light. “Maybe we just missed him in the—”

Then she heard it: a dripping sound. Drip. Drip. Drip. She turned the lights back on and followed the sound, ending in a sizable puddle on the floor by the back wall.

“Oh crap,” said Simon, reaching up. “The pipe burst.” He was trying to block the flow of water, but was having very little success. “It must’ve frozen before I got the space heater in here, and now—”

Tracey stared out the back window, into the snow-covered backyard. This was the pipe that connected to the faucet…the faucet. The one that let Barley exist.

“You have to fix it,” she said. “You have to fix it now.”

Simon tried his best to turn off the water, to patch the pipe, to do anything to get their dog back. But in the end, the best the plumber could do was find a temporary fix and promise to come back in the spring to get it right.

He paused on his way out the door, seeing the leash hanging on the paw-shaped hook. “What breed?” he asked, with a warm smile.

Tracey almost cried.

It was a long winter without Barley. A tough winter filled with memories that should have been. And it was harder, too, because Tracey knew he wasn’t really gone…he was just paused for a bit. But it didn’t make it any easier when the bed was so empty, and so cold.

They badgered the plumber daily until finally, on a day in mid-March, he came back and fixed their pipes.

“We’re really big gardeners,” explained Simon, half-heartedly, as Tracey waited upstairs by the couch for the work to be done.

“Please work…” she whispered to herself. “Please just work…”

A few heartbeats later, the work was done, and Barley flickered back to existence, head still bowed like he was going to finish a bowl of popcorn that hadn’t been there in months. He looked up, saw Tracey watching him, and put on his best innocent face—before she gave him the biggest hug he’d ever known.

A year later, at his yearly checkup, the Dr Fielding was checking Barley’s teeth with a curious smile on his face. “How sure are we that he’s six?” he asked. “Because I feel like we’re off a little.”

Tracey flinched as the reasons connected in her brain. “Is he alright…?”

“He’s fine,” said the vet. “He’s more than fine, if he’s six. His health, his teeth, everything about him makes me think he’s closer to four.”

“Huh,” said Tracey, a huge smile spreading across her face. “Dog years, right? What a mystery.”

Barley wasn’t aging as fast as he should. Simon did some quick calculations—which Tracey re-did, and got right—which suggested Barley was only actually living for a little less than half of each day. He truly was paused during his off periods.

Simon installed a bluetooth timer, and hooked it up to Siri. They set up intricate rules and conditions to optimize Barley’s existence, so he wouldn’t use up precious seconds unnecessarily. Bathroom breaks, shopping trips, nights out—any time they couldn’t dedicate to him 100%, they simply turned him off like a furry smart appliance.

They stayed in that house longer than anyone in the neighborhood. Their realtor friends tried to convince them to sell, but they just kept fixing what they could, upgrading what they couldn’t, and living with what was left.

Years went by. Vets, too. Friends and family would stop by and wonder: how do they keep finding dogs that look just like Barley? And Barley never cared one bit, so long as he got hugs and treats and a warm bed to sleep in at night.

Then, one day, when Simon’s back wasn’t what it used to be, and Tracey had trouble hearing him complain about it, their tablet flashed a milestone they’d long since forgotten might happen.

“Ten years,” said Tracey, squinting at the holograph over her reading glasses. “He’s ten years old.”

“Hmm,” said Simon, settling in next to her. “That’s…that’s about…”

The tablet anticipated his question and showed: “75 Years.”

Tracey patted his knee. “He’s caught up with you,” she said.

Then her hand paused, and her gaze shifted over to Barley, asleep at the end of the couch. His ninth couch, and the one he liked best. He was resting so comfortably, taking big happy breaths as he dreamt of chasing squirrels through a backyard that hadn’t existed that way for half a century.

“No more sprinkler,” she said, quietly.

“No more sprinkler,” agreed Simon.

And for whatever time they had left, they lived it all together. The good, the bad, and the boring. Barley loved it all equally, anyway.

Written for Ashley, whose topic was: doggie sprinkler disaster.

A Simulated Kind of Love

Tue, 26 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

“Do it again,” said Lea, and Damon filled the sky with shooting stars.

They lay there in the tall grass, the late May air heavy with heat, beads of sweat dripping lazily away, and enjoyed the once-in-a-lifetime show for the third time. Damon’s fingers found Lea’s, and they laced together, holding tight in rapture and awe.

“I can’t believe you found this,” she whispered. “It’s so beautiful.”

Damon just shrugged like it was no big deal. But it was. It really was.

When the last of the stars fell, Lea turned onto her side, head propped up by an arm, with the most devilish look upon her face. “What else? What else can you do?”

Damon took a moment to think. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Let me just…” He looked like he was trying to dig up a very old memory, and then suddenly, behind him, the sky changed from a deep, rich blue, to a kind of dark pink, like a grape. He blinked, looking up at his handiwork, and smiled. “Cool. It worked.”

“It’s incredible,” she said. “Can you do orange? I love orange.”

“Oof, I dunno,” he said. “I’m really bad at RGB values.”

“RG what?”

“Red, green, and— you know what, never mind. Let’s try…” He thought again, and the sky changed colour to… a weird kind of cyan. Not quite right, but not at all orange. Damon winced. “Yeah, I’m more of an HSB kinda guy.”

“It’s OK,” she said, giving him a consolation kiss. “You can put it back. I don’t mind.”

The look on her face was so mesmerizing, he had trouble concentrating. He used the first solution that came to mind, then smiled at her and said: “Lea, I know things have been tough lately, but I…” He touched her cheek, leaned closer. “I just want you to know—”

“What’s that?” she asked, and he turned to see what she saw.

There was a second moon in the sky. A second moon. Different than the first, but bigger, and visibly moving through the heavens, like it was in a rush to get somewhere new.

“What in the…” Damon gasped, sitting up in awe. The whole sky was different: two moons, and a kind of nebula arching over half the horizon, like a celestial waterfall running along the edge of a sphere. And there, off to the east, was a starfield thicker and more vibrant than anything he’d ever seen. It was incredible, and so, so impossible.

And then the air beside them pivoted sideways, and a woman in striped pyjamas stepped into the field. Her eyes were locked on the sky, turning around to take it all in. “Well this is just great,” she grumbled. “Which one of you idiots did this?”

Lea gave Damon a sideways glance as he raised his hand, meekly, and said: “Me?”

“What was it? What command?”

“Uh…I mean—”

“Scifi? Fantasy? What?”

“Sky->reset()?” said Damon, and the woman’s face went blank.

“Oh shit no,” she said, and whipped around to look at the sky again. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit. Why would you do that? Are you crazy?”

“What?” he yelped. “What did I do?”

“You put the sky back to its default settings. You undid literally a millennia of customization. People have been fine-tuning that sucker for generations, and you just…blew it all up for fun.”

“Not for fun,” said Damon. “For love.”

“Oh gag,” said the woman with a massive eye roll, glaring at Lea. “Are you really so easy that a little buffer overflow is all it takes to get into your—”

“Wait wait wait,” said Damon, getting to his feet. “You know about the overflow?”

“Do I…?” laughed the woman. “Kid, everyone knows about the overflow. You’re not the first person to feel a bubble in the back of your mind and go poking. You’re just the first one to not read the help file first.”

“There’s a help—” said Damon, and then: “Oh. Yeah. I see it.” He started reading, in his mind, for all of three seconds before: “Oh shit. I broke the sky.”

“You broke the sky.”

“But can’t you fix it?” asked Lea, still on the ground and looking at the stars. “Like…reset the reset?”

“Yeah,” said Damon. “Roll back the changes?”

The woman laughed a big hysterical laugh. “You think we have commit access? Good God, man, this is a production universe we’re in! All we’re ever doing is hacking the simulation in incremental ways, seeing what happens and going from there. But this? This is just a world-class f—”

“What if I just…” Damon said, and squinted at the second moon, and poof! It disappeared. “There! See? Just a few more—”

The woman smacked him upside the head. “Stop helping. You’re making it worse.”

“What? How—”

Just then, the air to the right of them pivoted to reveal an Asian man in a nice suit and a thin black tie, completely drenched in water.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said to the woman, then noticed Lea and Damon and said: “Who’s the idiot?”

Damon raised his hand. The Asian man nodded like that was all he needed to know.

“He reset the sky,” explained the woman.

“What, like ->reset() reset?”

“Yup.”

The man stared at Damon like he was a five-footed asparagus spider on fire. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Why are you all wet?” asked Lea, still on the ground, but feeling increasingly left out because of it.

“You into physics?” asked the man.

“Doubtful,” said the woman.

“Maybe I am,” said Lea, then slumped a bit and muttered: “But I’m not.”

“You know what happens when you spontaneously create a massive celestial body less than 100,000 kilometres from the Earth? No? Tide change. Massive, massive tide change. Sea levels in the Pacific rose 500 metres in two and a half minutes.”

The woman glared at Damon, whose only response was a feeble: “Oops.”

“But you know what’s worse?” asked the man. “When you spontaneously take the stupid thing away.” He turned to the woman, apologetic and broken and said: “I did what I could with air currents, but the damage is just…it’s…”

“I know,” she said, glaring at Damon. “We’ll have to figure something out, after we—”

And suddenly, the world went blank.

Damon was still there, and Lea was still sitting on the ground, but there wasn’t really a ground to sit on. It was all just an indistinct void, with no colour whatsoever, and no sound, and no smell, and no…anything.

Lea checked left, then right, then down—realizing the concept of “down” was a little flimsy at the moment—and then tugged at Damon’s shorts. “What’s going on?”

“I…I was getting so stressed, I just—”

“Damon, what just happened? Where is…everything?”

“I couldn’t—”

“What did you do?”

“I created a new universe. It was all I could think of. I think those two were going to kill me, so I—”

“But…” She stood up, looking around, and discovered her version of “the floor” was about half a metre lower than Damon’s. Also, on a slight angle. “What about…Earth?”

“It still exists. I think. It’s just in a different namespace.”

“A what?”

“They’re in a bubble, we’re in a bubble. Same basic idea, but different implementations.” He looked around some more. “I just thought it would init with a little…more.”

“Can we go back?” she asked, panic starting to set in. “I mean, can we go back home? To our regular universe?”

Damon thought of what that regular universe would look like very soon, and all the trouble he’d be in if he did go back, and he came up with a better solution: “We don’t need to go back. We can make this universe anything we like. It can be ours…”

Lea, despite her misgivings, seemed intrigued by the idea. “Like how?”

“The sky,” he said. “I’ll find you the perfect shade of orange…” He thought very, very hard, and changed the sky to 255, 160, 0, and…

All around them, everything was on fire.

“No!” screamed Lea, grabbing onto his legs for dear life. “Stop it! Stop! Stop stop stop!”

Damon reset the sky, which was more like his previous disaster, with two moons, the nebula, the starfield, and a blazing sun floating precariously below them—at which point he realized there was no Earth beneath them, and got some wicked vertigo very, very suddenly.

He initialized the Earth, and things got a lot less scary.

He sat down next to Lea, on the pre-organic volcanic rock that made up everything around them, and sighed. “This is harder than I thought. There’s just so many moving parts in our day-to-day lives that have to be aligned just right for anything normal to exist, it’s insane. Like the grass, right? I want to grow grass—I tried to start growing grass—but that means I need soil, which means I need erosion, and biological material, and—”

“I miss home,” she said, staring off at the twinkling nebula. “I miss…home.”

Damon had an idea. More of a goal, really, but something to hold onto. “Champagne,” he said. “I’ll get us some champagne. It’ll just take a little prep work…soil, vegetation, weather patterns, the Champagne region of France…”

“Really, Damon, it’s fine of—”

“No,” he said. “I can do it. I just…” He frowned, because in this list of available commands for the entire universe, there was one called champagne->MakeBottle(). “Huh. Would you look at that…”

He called a bottle of champagne, and suddenly the woman in the striped pyjamas and the Asian man were standing next to them.

“Told you,” said the woman, to the man, and held out her hand. “Ten bucks.”

Damon was back on his feet, ready to fight or run or do something effective for a change. “I’m not going back,” he said. “I can’t go back.”

“Well you can’t stay here,” said the woman. “This is a shared server universe, kid. The more instances you run, the slower we all get. You know what happened the last time someone tried to branch their own reality?”

“Scientology,” said the man.

“What? No. The time before that.”

“Ohhhh…” said the man. “The Dark Ages.”

“Exactly,” she said. “The world got so slow, years were passing but nobody was accomplishing anything. Took a monk two hundred years to write a single book. Real mess. Nobody liked it. We’re not doing that again.”

“But…” said Damon. “But what if we live simply? Just the two of us, in a really basic no-frills Earth?”

Lea looked a little uncertain about that idea.

“No, that won’t work,” said the woman. “You think you’ll live simply, and then you’ll remember what it was like to drive down the freeway with the top down, and all of sudden you’re creating asphalt and combustion engines and San Francisco and meanwhile, over in the real universe, we’re all stuck using iOS 13 for the next 400 years. Thanks but no thanks. You’re coming w-w-w-w—”

The woman seemed to be stalled. She was making jerking motions, back and forth, like she was skipping frames, stuck in a loop. Damon got to his feet, and Lea did, too, and noticed the man was also frozen, and the shimmering of the stars was a little more erratic, a little less controlled.

“Uh oh,” Damon said under his breath. “I think I made it worse.”

“How?” asked Lea. “What did you do now?”

“Grass,” came a voice, and they both turned to see an entirely new man standing there, arms clasped behind his back, wearing a vintage Zelda t-shirt and a very stern scowl. “You absolute imbecile.”

“Uh…who are—?”

“I’m from the prime universe,” said the man. “The one that spawned the one that spawned the one that spawned these idiots, who then spawned you. I am the Original.”

Damon gaped at the capital letter. “So you’re…”

“Here to stop you,” said the Original. “Because you’re going to make them reboot the VM, and kill us all.”

“But—”

“You tried to grow grass,” said the Original. “And you were just smart enough to realize it wouldn’t work without the right conditions. So you created a recursive function to check if grass was feasible, and if not, to check again. And again. And again…”

“Yeah, but—”

“You loaded the grass module before checking states. Which takes up memory. And since the function runs ten thousand times a second—”

“Wait, what?”

“—and it will be approximately 15 billion years before there’s any soil in this area—”

“Uh oh.”

“Yes, uh oh! You’ve already written two hundred quadrillion yottabytes—”

“That’s a yotta bytes,” remarked Lea.

“—in the error logs, and the whole server is going to crash.”

Damon gasped. “So what can we do? What do I do?”

“You do nothing,” snapped the Original, and then with a blink of his eyes, the entire world changed around them…

…to a kind of blissful utopia. A pleasant island in a perfect blue ocean, waves washing up on the brilliant sand, palm trees overhead, and a little house just past the forest line, with a hammock swaying back and forth in the breeze. Heaven, by any standard.

The woman in the pyjamas and the Asian man were gone. It was only Damon, Lea, and the Original, and a bottle of champagne.

“Where are we?” asked Lea.

“This is my universe,” said the Original. “I’ve created you this place, far, far far away from everything else, so you can live your perfect life, forever, in peace and safety. Whatever you want will be created. Just so long as you don’t try to create it yourself. Deal?”

Damon looked sheepish. “Yeah, OK. Deal.”

“Excellent,” said the Original, and snapped his fingers and suddenly it was nighttime again, and torches along the beach lit up, and soft music wafted from the speakers inside their little house. “Enjoy yourselves. You haven’t earned it, but the rest of us could use a break.”

And with that, he disappeared.

Damon turned to Lea, held her in his arms, and smiled. “Well, what do you think?”

“It’s not how I thought this night would go…” she said.

“I know,” he said. “But it’s pretty great anyway, right?” He and bent down to kiss her and—

She didn’t let him.

“Eternity is a long time, Damon…” she said. “And I…”

“What?” he asked. “What is it?”

“I was going to tell you. Tonight was the night I was going to tell you, but then you made the stars fall from the sky and I just…” She shrugged. “It felt like bad timing.”

“What did?” he asked. “What’s bad timing?”

She winced at him. “I’m leaving you. For Brad.”

“Hold on, you’re what?”

“He just…thinks things through, you know?” And then she turned away and said: “Person->Make(‘Brad’)” and Brad appeared before her in an open Hawai’ian shirt and sandals, arms open wide, and she ran to him, and kissed him like he’d changed the world for her.

Long after they’d retired to the house and dimmed all the lights, Damon finished his fifth bottle of champagne, threw it into the surf, and lay back to watch the shooting stars.

“Memory,” he said, softly, to himself. “->clear().”

Written for Alex, whose topic was: our simulated universe.

Marley's Ghost

Tue, 19 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

“Ah, good, you came,” said Scrooge, leaning back in his chair. “I believe you owe me an apology.”

The three Spirits shifted uncomfortably, but Present was the one who ventured: “Apology? Apology for what?”

“Bob Cratchit is missing,” said Scrooge. “And I think you know why.”

Future was playing dumb, but Past truly didn’t know. She elbowed Present for an explanation, which prompted a meek: “Nobody could have foreseen—”

“I could,” said Scrooge. “And I did, six months ago. But you stopped me, and now they’re dead. They’re all dead.” He nodded to Past. “If you please.” And with a wave her hand, they were

///

standing in the cramped offices of Scrooge and Marley, on a cold winter’s eve. Two solitary candles lit the space: one by Scrooge’s desk, and one over the logbooks of Bob Cratchit, who was blowing warm air into his hands to keep warm.

“Please, Mr Scrooge,” he said, subservient as he could be. “Maybe just a little fire? Me fingers are so cold, I can’t—”

“Bah,” growled the wintertime Scrooge, stooped over his own heavy ledger. “Fires are an extravagance. We don’t need ‘em.” He checked over his shoulder, into the warehouse that made up the bulk of the building. “That chloroform shipment come in?”

“Yes, sir,” said Cratchit. “This morning.”

“Shelved and sorted?”

Cratchit looked away. “I thought I might tackle that the day after—”

“The day after?” said Scrooge. “The day after! Oh, and I suppose none of our clients will come looking for supplies on Christmas Day, will they?”

Cratchit wasn’t sure what to say. “I mean…I shouldn’t think so, Mr Scrooge. It’s—”

“Bah,” said Scrooge. “Humbug. Tomorrow’s like any other day. In at seven, and sort the shelves.”

“What, all the shelves?” gasped Cratchit.

“Idle hands, Mr Cratchit. Idle hands.”

In the corner, Past was still not quite following what was going on. Future-Scrooge glared at Present. “You laid on the guilt nice and thick, you did,” he said. “Made me doubt myself at a critical moment. If I’d just…”

He made a fist, lowered it with regret.

“Show the morning. After the goose.”

Past searched her memory—and the memories of everyone who’d ever lived—and with another wave of her hand, stepped

into the Cratchit hovel, ducking beneath the low-hanging beams that barely kept the walls in place. The family was gathered ‘round the table as the Christmas feast was being served. Scrooge was seated between Mrs Cratchit and Tiny Tim, handing out plates of glorious food as the children chattered away, all around him.

Present-Scrooge’s jaw tightened at the scene. Present noticed it.

“You don’t have to—”

“I need to,” snapped Scrooge. “And you do, too.”

Cratchit was carving the goose with a wide smile on his face, slicing out perfect servings for all. He looked to Scrooge in astonishment, still not quite believing what was happening…and Scrooge smiled back, so convinced was he that this was right, and good, and fair.

“Are you thirsty, Mr Scrooge?” asked Tiny Tim, in a wavering little voice. “I can fetch you some—”

“No, no, my boy, that’s alright,” he replied. “Don’t bother yourself.”

Tiny Tim held out his own glass, with the sincere look of pure goodness on his face. “We can share, if you like.”

Scrooge smiled, took the glass and took a small sip, just to be polite.

But then he paused, tasting the taste upon his lips a little more. He looked into the glass, frowning at the sight of—

///

They were back in the present, in Scrooge’s bedchamber. The second he realized it, he snarled: “We weren’t done yet!”

“I won’t have you rub our noses in it,” countered Present.

“In what?” asked Past, still so confused. “Rub our noses in what?”

Scrooge laughed. “How can you see so much, but know so little?” he said. “You even brought me there, that night. You made me relive that awful dance.”

Past looked to Present for assistance. He rolled his eyes. “He means Belle. The Christmas Eve with Belle.”

She was trying to understand, trying to make sense of it all…but realized the only way to follow was to lead. She waved her hand and in a flash they were

outside the tavern where a young Scrooge was slip-sliding through the snow, trying not to be late. But when he saw her there—his Belle, looking so beautiful in the flickering streetlights—he skidded to a stop before her, took off his hat and bowed deeply.

“I’m late, I know,” he said.

“Too late,” she said, curtly, fidgeting with her golden seashell locket like it held all her courage. “I’ve been waiting for hours.”

“I know, and I apologize, truly.”

“You always apologize. You always have excuses. But you’re never here, Ebeneezer. You’re never around when I need you.”

Present-Scrooge winced at what was coming next. At the stunning blindness that his young self was about to exhibit.

“I just lost track of time,” he said, too honest for his own good. “We got in a shipment of books on anatomy and psychology and potions and I just—”

“Sometimes I think you love your books more than me,” she said, tears in her eyes.

And poor stupid Scrooge, he didn’t think to argue.

“Enough,” said the older version. “This is a pointless distraction. Research on your own time. I need to see the warehouse again. Six months back, but earlier. Before I got in.”

Present and Future both seemed unhappy at this request. “This isn’t a taxi service. We don’t—”

///

But Past did. She was curious, and just a little irritated by her companions. They settled into the darkness of the Scrooge and Marley warehouse, between the rows and rows of shelves, stocked full of assorted curiosities.

Present-Scrooge stalked forward, peering around the corner to see Cratchit there, box under his arm, checking inventory.

“There,” said Scrooge. “Just as I thought. He was there early.”

Cratchit took a bottle from the shelf and placed it, carefully, into his box. Past frowned at it, trying to read the label from an angle.

“What’s he taking?” she asked.

“Arsenic compound,” said Scrooge, just as Cratchit turned to another shelf and removed a roll of bandages…and three long knives.

Scrooge’s jaw tensed. Past turned to her partners, mouth hanging open in shock. “Wait, but you said—”

“He was making things worse,” said Present. “He was winding them up with no regard for what might—”

“No regard?” laughed Scrooge. “Oh, that’s rich, coming from you. you convinced me that I was wrong.” He pointed an accusing finger at Future. “You showed me that poor boy dead by neglect! Neglect!”

Present made a quick motion and they were

back in Scrooge’s bedchamber, where he was was boiling over with fury. “I built my life around saving the innocent,” he said. “I sacrificed everything to keep those monsters at bay, and you—”

“Don’t blame me for your mistakes,” snapped Present. “You lost sight of what mattered, Scrooge. You were so intent on punishing Cratchit that you didn’t—”

“Punishing? Is that what you think I was—”

“Keeping him away from his family on Christmas Day was cruel!”

“It was for their own protection!” Scrooge boomed, and then waved them all

///

to the Cratchit house, in the present, where Past and Present were both trying to figure out how a mortal had managed such an incredible feat. Future, as always, tried to go unnoticed.

Scrooge stepped over the pools of blood, careful to avoid the spatter and bodies strewn around him. There, Mrs Cratchit. There, the two younger ones. And there, slumped in the corner, frozen in an awful cower, Tiny Tim.

Scrooge wanted to retch, but couldn’t bear it. “He showed all the signs of a narcissistic compulsive disorder,” he said, forcing himself to see it all. “He was escalating, slowly, over time. His wife never left the house without his permission. He lost his temper if he saw his children playing in the streets. To Cratchit, it was only ever about himself…the others were just bit players in his story. He poisoned his own son to elicit pity from passers-by.”

Past was putting the pieces together. Present couldn’t stand to try.

“I had him under control,” said Scrooge. “I was keeping him under control, like all the others.”

“What others?” asked Past.

Scrooge shot Present a warning glare. “Don’t.”

Present turned to Past anyway and said: “Marley,” and Past flicked a finger and they were

standing in the foyer of the Marley Import Company as a younger Scrooge stood with reddened eyes, pleading his case to an older man with an indifferent aura.

“Please, Mr Marley, sir, I promise I can be of use! I’ve a rich experience in all manner of scientific investigation and—”

“You think your education impresses me?” snapped Marley. “You university chads never last a—”

“No sir, I—”

“Off with ye! Back to Cambridge!”

“I’ve no education, sir,” said Scrooge, and Marley paused his tirade just a bit. “I’ve no money, sir, and no friends. My family’s all disowned me because I…” He cast his eyes down in shame. “Because of my obsession with the natures of death.”

Marley couldn’t hide his curiosity. “Best bone saw for a living specimen.”

“Wilkins Model C,” said Scrooge, without hesitation. “But for efficiency over comfort, the Blackrock Pyre. 1785 or later.”

Marley observed Scrooge carefully. “We serve to a discerning clientele, Mr Scrooge. One that values privacy above all else.”

“Of course, sir,” nodded Scrooge. “As do I.”

Marley betrayed a slight smirk. “No extracurriculars on the premises.”

“No, sir. Never. I’ve my own spot for that.”

Marley’s smile grew wider and wider the more he thought of the possibilities. “You start tomorrow,” he said. “Wear dark clothes that hide stains well. Seven sharp.”

As the door closed, Past turned to Scrooge, mind racing through every recorded utterance between then and now, trying to piece together a reason for why things turned out the way they did.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would you—”

“Show her,” said Present.

“No,” said Scrooge, voice tinged with pleading.

“Show me what?” asked Past. “What am I missing?”

“Reap what you sowed,” said Present, then turned to Past and said: “A year later. In the warehouse. Marley’s office,” and before Scrooge could to protest, they were

///

standing by the thick, heavy doors at the back of the warehouse, as young Scrooge worked furiously at the padlock until—click!—it fell open, and he slipped inside.

A single candle lit the darkness as he took in his surroundings: a series of shelves, much like the rest of the place, but all holding exactly the same thing: dress boxes, row upon row, like a fine womens’ clothier somehow operated from the back of a dank and wretched corner of London. As he approached, he saw little bits of paper carefully tacked to the front of each shelf: Spring 1785, Autumn 1786, Summer 1788…

He skipped ahead, hunting up and down until he found it: Winter 1798. There were three boxes there, but only one made any sense to him at all. He slipped it off the shelf and set it on the floor, trembling hands begging him to stop, but he couldn’t. Not yet.

“Please no,” said Present-Scrooge, tormented but unable to look away. “I beg of you—”

“Shh,” said Present, and watched as young Scrooge opened the lid.

Inside were bones. A skull, and ribs, and both hands, perfectly preserved. No nicks and scratches from the tools that had carefully removed them, no stains or wearing at all. Lovingly arranged, in a kind of artwork. And there, in the middle of the display, was the thing that hurt most: a golden seashell locket, which had held all her courage.

Young Scrooge trembled with grief, horror and fury all at once, unable to make a sound for fear of being caught, yes, but also of losing control. He took a ragged gasp, tears streaming down his face, and

stumbled back into his chair, trying to remember he was home in his bedroom, as distant from that night as he could be…but not quite believing it.

“Your Belle…” whispered Past. “She…”

“She wasn’t mine,” said Scrooge. “I failed her. Twice. But I wasn’t going to fail her again. Once Marley was gone—”

“Tell her how,” teased Present.

“I—”

“Tell her how, Scrooge.”

“I worked to—”

Present turned to Past: “Petitioner’s Gate, 18—”

“Don’t you dare!” Scrooge boomed, and Past tucked her hands in together, to show her mercy. Scrooge took a shaky breath before continuing. “I wanted to burn the place down. I wanted to erase every shred of evidence that monster Marley had ever lived. But then I realized…the other monsters, the other fiends who came to him for supplies and support and reassurance…they wouldn’t just stop without him. They’d keep hunting, keep killing, keep ruining lives…”

Past finally managed to string together the truth from the chatter. She blinked in surprise. “You helped them…to stop them.”

Scrooge nodded, mournfully. “It was imperfect, but it was working. At least until someone made me doubt myself, and unleashed the greatest evil I’ve ever seen, in all my years of tracking them.”

He turned to Present, face grim and tired, and said: “You owe me this. Show me where he is, so I can stop him.”

Present laughed. “Like I said, we’re not some taxi service, to abuse as you see—”

“Do it,” said Past, like there was no debate to it at all. “I…we did this. We’re responsible. We have to make it right.”

Present turned to Future for support, but got only a shrug in return.

“Fine,” he said. “So be it,” and he waved his hand and they

///

were in a dark room with thick stone walls, water dripping from above and a half-broken archway leading into a swampy unknown. It took Scrooge a moment to orient himself, but soon he saw, in the weakest of light, Bob Cratchit kneeling over the body of a woman—the one who sold flowers, down near the warehouse—with a long knife perched between two fingers as he searched for the perfect place to begin.

Scrooge realized, in horror, that the woman was still alive: her eyes were watching the blade even as her body stayed still.

“A paralytic,” Scrooge gasped. “He’s going to gut her alive.”

“Oh, ‘gut’ is such a base expression,” said Cratchit—causing Past to gasp. Cratchit looked over his shoulder, straight at Scrooge and grinned. “Finally found your nerve, Mr Scrooge?”

“This…this is impossible…” said Past. “They can’t see us when we—”

“Not without help, no,” said Scrooge, and turned to Present…

…who sighed, and gave a shrug. “We’re found out, Mr Cratchit.”

Cratchit stood, flipping the knife around and around his knuckles as he prowled closer to Scrooge. “You’ve spent so much of your life stopping the inevitable, Mr Scrooge, that you forgot the most important truth of all…the absolute beauty of living in the moment.”

“Enough of your research and planning and projections,” said Present. “It’s time to embrace the here-and-now…”

And in a flash, Cratchit swung the knife around and

Scrooge tumbled back into his chair, falling to the ground. He pushed a hand to his chest, came away with blood from a grazing cut that might’ve been so much worse, if not for…

“What have we done?” gasped Past, reliving the nightmares of her own past for a change. “They…they…”

“Present lied to you,” said Scrooge, getting back to his feet. “He spun a story that made me out to be the monster, to lay down cover for the monster he favoured.”

Past could only see in reverse, so the thought she had next was so terrifying to her: “Can we stop them?”

Scrooge looked to Future. “Well? Can we?” and before he knew it they were

///

atop a building off Whitechapel road, where a future-Scrooge collapsed to his knees, hand clutched to his gut as blood seeped through and onto the roof. He tried to get back up, to make it to the ledge, but it was all too much, and he crashed forward in a heap.

Past’s trembling hand covered her mouth, struck by the image, but Scrooge had other concerns. He made it to where his future self had been heading, and peered over the edge, down onto the street below.

There, broken on the cobblestone in a splatter of blood, was Bob Cratchit, his reign of misery at an end.

“That’ll do,” said Scrooge under his breath, then nodded to the others, to begin the hunt anew. “God help us, every one.”

Written for Joël, whose topic was: a story that makes Scrooge seem like a good guy, like everything was taken out of context.

Archangel 425

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The timer was counting down, but it was going to take more than seven minutes to get out of this jam. Sienna and Jackson pulled against their restraints, but it was no use: the only thing they were doing was slicing their own wrists open, and wasting time. The bomb made no allowances for effort.

“Baking,” Sienna, checking the walls and ceiling for some kind of flaw.

“What?” asked Jackson.

“Baking. I’m baking.”

Jackson was trying to slip the pen knife from his pocket, but his arms were bound at a funny angle, and he couldn’t quite make it. “How is that—”

“You know how Dr Thatcher said I should get a hobby?”

Jackson twisted himself sideways, closer to Sienna. “Pen knife. Back pocket.”

She turned her hands at an angle, trying to reach. “So anyway, I always liked baking when I was little, so I thought I’d give it a try.”

“Mmhmm,” said Jackson, more focused on the task at hand.

“I thought: how hard could it be? Bake some cookies, maybe some muffins. Blow off some steam once in a while…”

“You wanna maybe—”

“Got it,” she said, and slipped the knife out of his jeans. She spun it around and flipped it open like she’d done a thousand times before. Jackson lowered himself into position, his cuffs as close to Sienna as he could manage. She found the key hole with the tip of the knife and went to work.

“Disaster,” she said.

“What?”

“Baking. Was a disaster,” she said. “See, baking takes discipline. Precision. Attention to detail.”

“Ow!” hissed Jackson as the knife slipped and nicked his wrist.

“Sorry,” she said, doubling down. “This job is about winging it. Getting the job done by any means necessary. Total opposite in a lot of ways. You beat the clock, you don’t watch it.”

“Six minutes,” Jackson said, very much watching the clock.

“First set of muffins tasted like cinder blocks.”

“Soviet cinder blocks? Cause those are kinda tangy if you hit ‘em right.”

“No, Jersey blocks,” she said.

“Ew. Yeah, no, that’s OK.”

She caught the hook in the cuffs and twisted. Ping! The blade slipped again, achieving nothing. She didn’t have time to grumble, she just went right back at it.

“I should’ve just quit there, but there was something about it, y’know? It was like a puzzle I couldn’t quite solve.”

“I get it,” said Jackson, already looking for a way out of the room…and coming up empty. “They choose us because we want more. The next thing. The object just out of reach.”

“Like muffins,” she said, mirthfully.

“Muffins,” he agreed, waiting for—

Click! His left cuffs popped open and he pulled himself free, twisting around just as Sienna tossed the knife upward, straight into his waiting hand. He got to work on her cuffs while she took her turn scanning the room for a way out.

“Took me months,” she said. “Months of trial and error, careful planning, getting it all in order, but I finally did it. I finally got it.”

“Got it,” he said, and her cuffs popped off too.

They both got to their feet, confronting the fact that the clock had less than five minutes left, and there were no obvious exits in the concrete cell they found themselves in. No doors, no windows…not even vents. It was like the place had been built around them while they were unconscious.

“You see anything?” Jackson asked.

“Nada,” she said, then thought of something, turned to face the bomb. “This look nuclear to you?”

He glanced over his shoulder. “No fuel chambers. Gotta be—”

They both grinned at the same time. “Conventional.”

“The box is built to come apart,” she said, feeling the walls quickly but carefully.

“Concrete shrapnel. Brilliant,” said Jackson, finding a spot and slamming into it with his shoulder. It gave, but only a little.

“So I know this’ll seem sudden,” said Sienna, tracing a pattern down to the far corner of the room, “but I’m leaving the service.”

Jackson stopped his smashing to stand in stunned confusion. “Wait, you’re what? Where are you going?”

“Opening a bakery,” she said. “Archangel 425.”

He smiled faintly. “Our first mission.”

“You remember,” she said.

“How could I forget? Sarin in the Paris Metro. Once in a lifetime incident.”

“Aside from the other twenty-seven,” she laughed…and then they both went back to trying to break out. Because they were professionals, and professionals don’t die ‘til the clock runs out.

“But I thought you sucked at baking,” he said. “Jersey muffins.”

“I got better,” she said. “I got so much better, I started to enjoy the time between missions more than the missions themselves. Especially these last few months, with Michaud’s stupid mole hunt.”

“Who knows? It might be real.”

“Yeah, well, it sucked away whatever joy was left in the job for me. I put in my papers—”

“Wait, you’re actually leaving?”

“I told you I was.”

“I just thought you’d at least give me a chance to talk you out of it.”

She shrugged, gave him a sincerely apologetic smile. “Four minutes.”

He went back to smashing into the wall. A little harder this time. Sienna was zeroing in on a very specific point down near the floor. She got onto her back and wound back with both feet and kicked. The wall cracked. Progress.

“I just wanted to go to Paris one time for the food, you know? Sit in a café and not have to leave my croissant because the mark started moving.”

“But that doesn’t mean you need to quit. You could take time off.”

She paused her kicking, looked over at him. “You had one Michaud’s sessions? In the tank?”

His face darkened. “No. Have you?”

She nodded, went back to work. “I’m tired of being treated like a criminal. Do I work for a foreign government? No. But that kind of thing…that kind of abuse? That made me seriously consider it. We don’t even treat our actual prisoners that way.”

He stopped what he was doing, battling a question he didn’t want to ask. “They…they really use eels?”

Her face twitched. “To start.”

The clock ticked down. They got back to work.

“So what kind of stuff are you selling at Archangel 425?” he asked, finally seeing a hint of light through the cracks in the wall.

“Cheese bread. Muffins, obviously. Croissants. These little Portguese tarts I can never remember the name of…”

“Pastéis de Nata,” he said. “Nice choice.”

“You’ve had them?”

“Long time ago,” he said. “Guess I’ll be stopping by your shop after all.”

“If we survive this,” she said.

“We’ll survive it,” he replied, as the clock passed three minutes.

Sienna cracked her part of the wall, as her bones started to feel like they were coming apart, too. She spun around, squinting at the opening, trying to see through.

“Oh hell,” she gasped. “We’re in the train station.”

He looked back at the bomb. It was moveable, but not portable. “How busy?”

“Rush hour.”

He slammed into the wall again, trying to think. “The lake would lessen the blast, but—”

“But there’s no way we could make it in time. Sub-basement?”

“No, not deep enough. We’d collapse the building. We need to get it away from the—”

They both had the same idea at the same time.

“Eastbound?” she asked.

“It’s a small window before it heads into the city.”

“I’m all about precision these days,” she said, grinning.

She kicked even harder, and her feet broke through to the open air. Jackson abandoned his side and ran to help her. They smashed and kicked and pounded at the concrete until it finally gave way even more, creating an opening big enough for an exit.

“Got it,” he said, sliding his lower half through. “Ready?”

She went for the bomb, but winced, stumbling. Her ankle. “Dammit…” she said, and forced herself forward, pulling the bomb off its mounting and carting it back over to Jackson. “I can’t make it,” she said. “I’ll just slow you down.”

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

“You better,” she said, and he pushed his way outside.

There was a small crowd of onlookers watching him, wondering what was going on, and who this strange man was who’d emerged from a concrete cube painted with billboards, and why he was holding a strange metal device with a ticking clock on it. They snapped photos with their phones as he got his bearings, looking for…there!

He raced off toward the eastbound tracks, bomb tucked under his arm as he sprinted as fast as he could, down the concourse, through the turnstiles and out onto the platform—

—just in time to see the train rush past. He’d missed it. There was no way out anymore.

He looked left, right, back and forth, trying to think of another way…but there was no other way.

“Dammit!” he shouted, and dropped to his knees, setting the bomb down in front of him as the clock passed one minute. One minute.

He flipped the keypad open, fingers hovering over an impossible situation. But there was no other way.

He tapped in a combination…

…and the timer added tree minutes.

“That should be enough,” he said, with a smirk.

“Enough for what?” asked Sienna, behind him, gun pointed at his head. “To get clear of the building?”

He didn’t raise his hands. Didn’t even try. “This isn’t what it—”

“Sorry you missed your train,” she said. “It was hard to time that right. But like I said, I’m all about precision these days.”

“How long have you known?” he growled, watching the timer tick down anew.

“We’ve suspected you for a while,” she said. “But it wasn’t until just a few minutes ago that I knew for sure.”

He turned his head as he realized. “The eels.”

“The eels. Fake intel, planted so the mole would prepare for the wrong kind of interrogation.” She stepped to the side to get a better angle. “Turn it off.”

“I’d rather die.”

She shot him in the leg. He doubled over, but didn’t collapse. He was trained better than that. They both were.

“Turn it off,” she repeated. “Please.”

He reached forward with a bloodied hand and re-entered the code, pausing ever so slightly before—

She adjusted her grip. “Don’t flatter yourself. You’re no martyr.”

He sighed and punched in the deactivation code. The bomb went dead.

Sienna smiled and kicked him onto his stomach, kneeling into his spine and pulling his hidden gun free, and shoving it into her belt. “Why’d you do it?” she asked. “Why’d you betray your own people?”

“Because I’m sick of trying. I’m sick of risking my life for people who don’t give a damn if I live or die. I’m sick of pretending to be a hero, while the other players get rich.”

She cuffed him nice and tight, then jerked him to his feet, pressing down on his bleeding leg to make him yelp, and then she pressed a little more. He laughed through the pain—a bitter, desperate kind of laugh.

“I was all a lie, wasn’t it?” he asked. “You were never really leaving, were you.”

“No, that part was real,” she said. “I am getting out. Because unlike people, dough always rises to the occasion.”

Written for Denise, whose topic was: There’s a spy who wants to become a baker, but living the spy life is dangerous, so she decides to incorporate baking in her spy life.

A True Emergency

Tue, 05 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The fifth time Alejandro checked outside for his dinner order, he found something most unexpected on the doorstep.

“Babe?” he called over his shoulder. “How exactly how much Thai rice did you order?”

Eme arrived at his side, drying a glass with an over-wet towel. She immediately joined him in frowning at the large cardboard box just outside their door. It was big enough to hold a microwave, or a very fat TV. The box itself was banged up around the corners, and appeared to be taped and re-taped a few times, and had a folded card perched on its top.

Alejandro plucked up the card, gave it a once-over, and handed it to Eme.

There was no name on it, no address and no origin to explain where the thing had come from. The only thing written on the card—in very neat handwriting, in blood red ink—was:

Only open at exactly 11:59 December 31st 2020
or
in case of a true emergency
open immediately

“Hmm, that’s weird,” said Eme, re-reading the message a second and third time. “What do you think it means?”

“I dunno,” said Alejandro, reaching into the open box. “What’d it say?”

Eme smacked him across the back of the head. “It said not to open it!”

“*What? *Why not?”

“I don’t know! It said not to open it until 11:59 on December 31st—”

“11:59 AM or PM?” asked Alejandro, hands still in the box.

“I don’t think it matters anymore, does it?”

Alejandro slumped and let out a long, morose sigh, simulating regret to the barest extent possible. Then, after a respectful pause, he said: “So can I take it out now?”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Yes, but I’m an idiot with a…” he pulled his hands from the box, holding a… “Hot pink fire extinguisher!”

Eme leaned over his shoulder, frowning. “Is that it? Nothing else?”

“Nope!” said Alejandro, studying his new toy from all angles, like it held some sneaky secrets only he could discover. “What do you think happens at midnight on December 31st that requires Barbie Dream House fire control?”

Eme stared out into the deserted nighttime streets, and wondered that exact thing, too.

Three weeks later, the lights went out just as their dinner was halfway done. Rain pounded the windows like the bad side of a hurricane, and the patch of loose siding above the garage rattled like mad in the wind, but what worried Eme most of all had nothing to do with the weather.

“Switch off the breaker,” she said to Alejandro, as he peered into the darkened oven with a sad emoji look on his face.

“Hmm?” he asked, poking the casserole to see if it was edible yet.

“The breaker box in the basement,” she said. “Switch it off. Turn it off. Disable it.”

“Why? It’s just a blackout. It’ll be fixed soon.”

“I know,” said Eme. “That’s exactly the problem! What if, when the power comes back on, it causes a short, and something sparks and starts a fire, and the fire spreads and—”

“This is because of the fire extinguisher, isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s because of the fire extinguisher!” she shouted. “How can anything not be about the fire extinguisher?”

“I think you’re overreacting, babe. The note said we’d need it on New Year’s Eve, not May 26th.”

Eme pointed a furious finger at the card, stuck to the front of the fridge with a magnet. “‘Or in case of a true emergency’,” she said. “A true emergency.”

“A blackout’s not really a—”

“It’s not, until it is!” she snapped. “And do you really want me to be screaming ‘I TOLD YOU SO’ as our house burns to the ground?”

Alejandro considered this a moment, and then went to switch off the breaker box.

August was oppressive. Not just oppressive…agonizing. The windows in their house weren’t very big, and didn’t open very far, because the builders had assumed any sane person would rely on the air conditioner for circulation. Sadly, sanity was in short supply in the lead-up to December 31.

“I think we should go shopping,” Alejandro said, sprawled out on the tile floor in his underwear, trying to stay cool. “I think we need to go shopping.”

“We went yesterday,” said Eme, lying next to him, equally melty. “We got everything. Why—”

“Cold air,” he whined. “I need cold air. I want to eat ice cream, and yoghurt, and microwave pizza, and—”

“We can’t,” she said, grabbing hold of his slick and sweaty arm, though he wasn’t in danger of moving any time soon. “Not yet. It’s not safe yet.”

“How about we just turn the power back on until there’s another storm, and then turn it off again. That should be OK, right? Nobody’s gonna—”

“No,” said Eme, dragging herself over to him so he could see how serious she was. “No, it’s too risky. No electricity, no candles, no barbeque…we have to stay the course.”

“But isn’t the whole point of having a fire extinguisher that we can save ourselves if something goes wrong? The note said ‘in case of a true emergency’, not ‘avoid everything forever’.”

“Not forever. Just another four and a half months.”

“That’s kinda forever.”

“Listen,” she said, rolling onto her side so she could see him more easily. And/or dribble sweat at a new angle. “I know this is hard. It’s hard for me, too. But whoever left that thing on our doorstep knew something about the future. About what would go wrong for us—”

“Exactly, so let’s trust that they knew what they—”

“But that’s just it! They didn’t know! Think of it: if you knew I was going to step on a nail and fall down the stairs and break my neck and up on a ventilator, what would you do?”

Alejandro thought long and hard before Eme cut him off:

“Would you put pillows at the bottom of the stairs?” she asked. “Or would you fix the nail that made me fall in the first place?”

“Could I do both?” he asked.

“But why? Why put pillows at the bottom of the stairs if you know the nail is fixed? Unless you’re not sure where the nail is, so you can’t fix it, so the pillows are still just as necessary.” She pointed at the hot pink fire extinguisher on the counter—their most prized possession by far. “Something terrible is going to happen to us, sometime between now and the start of 2021,” she said. “And the only thing keeping us from breaking our necks and ending up on a ventilator is that thing. And until I know why, I’m going to flatten every nail I see, no matter how silly it may be.”

Alejandro sighed, nodded solemnly. “I suppose,” he said. “I just really hope this disaster is worth it.”

“Me too,” she said, patting his arm. “Me too.”

Just then, loud banging erupted at their front door and Dennis, their surly neighbour, shouted at the top of his lungs: “You’ve gotta stop watering your lawn! It’s like a lake out here!”

Eme sighed, looked away. “It’s OK. He’ll thank us later.”

There were no decorations hung. No roast in the oven, no beer or wine or champagne in their room-temperature refrigerator. Their only countdown clock was the old wind-up watch Alejandro had found in a consignment shop, and paid far too much money for. They sat together, huddled beneath a pile of heavy blankets, watching the last minutes of 2020 tick away.

“What’re you going to do?” he asked, after another long stretch of awkward silence. “When it’s over, what are you going to do?”

“Take a bath,” she said, watching her breath swirl around in the frigid, furnace-less house. “A warm bath, with lavender and candles and—”

“I’m going to cook a steak,” he said. “You want a steak?”

“I want everything,” she said. “I’ve been making a list—”

“Wait, how? I thought you said pencils were too flinty!”

“In my head,” she said, tapping her temple with a frozen finger. “It’s how I keep from going insane. I think of all the things I’m going to do, all the foods I’m going to eat, all the places I’m going to go. I have enough plans to fill an entire decade. I want to make crème brûlée. I want to visit Tikal in the summer and explore every angle of it. I want to watch a movie, curled up on the couch with you, and fall asleep in your arms.”

He smiled, said: “I want to set off fireworks in the backyard.”

She glared at him. “Stupid’s still stupid, Alejandro.”

“Sorry,” he muttered, then noticed the watch had stopped ticking again. He snatched it off the coffee table and gave it a shake. “I really hate this thing.”

He started winding it, while Eme stared through the window at the snowy landscape outside. The neighbours’ Christmas lights were still on, projecting a kind of quaint cheer she hoped she’d be able to enjoy, too, soon.

“OK,” said Alejandro, checking the time again. “Probably a few minutes off, but close enough. The second this is done, I’m gonna—” An idea rolled into his head, and he slumped. “I forgot. We got rid of all our batteries. Stupid combustible batteries…”

“I can’t pick up more on my way into work on—”

“Wait, into where? Work?” he asked, sitting up. “I thought we weren’t working until—”

“No, no I know we agreed to—”

“You specifically told me I couldn’t go into the office anymore!” he said, getting more and more frantic. “You said it wasn’t safe! I might get hit by a burning car, or my cubicle might catch on fire, or—”

“I know, I know!” she said, trying to find the right words, and coming up empty. “But you don’t understand, Alejandro. Being here, being so helpless all this time…I just needed a way out. I needed to do something where I wasn’t worrying about fire and death and extinguishers…”

“So you just lived a double life? All those times you took six-hour naps, you were—”

“Sneaking out to work,” she nodded solemnly. “I’m sorry. I really am. But of the two of us, it made the most sense for me to be the one to go out and—”

“Oh really?” he laughed. “How do you figure that? You think you’re just less likely to catch on fire?”

She stared at him.

He slumped. “Yeah, OK.”

She put a hand on his arm, squeezed gently. “But the good news is, because we basically eat nothing and go nowhere, and use no electricity at all, the money I earned will pay for *all *the dreams we had while we were locked up in here. Anything you want, we can do it. Easily.”

“Fireworks in the—”

“Don’t ruin it.”

“Don’t ruin it?” he yelled, throwing off the covers and jumping to his feet. “Don’t ruin it? I’ve just spent the better part of a year living the most miserable existence in the history of the world, while my wife has been running around like a busy little hypocrite, and you’re telling me not to ruin it? It was ruined! It is ruined! And you know what?”

He grabbed a candle off the mantle and slammed it down on the coffee table, then rummaged around in his pocket until— “Aha!” He came out with a lighter.

“Where did you get that?” Eme gasped.

“You’re not the only one with secrets,” he said. “I’ve been dreaming about taking up smoking.”

“But your asthma—”

“Not important!” he shouted, and flick-flick-flicked the lighter on.

Eme’s eyes went wide. “Alejandro, don’t you dare…”

He bent down and held the flame to the wick, and then waited, and waited, and waited some more until finally the light flickered, and the candle was lit. He threw the lighter across the room in victory, raising his hands above his head and shouting: “To hell with the consequences! I broke the curse!”

Outside, faintly, they heard bells ringing, and people cheering “Happy New Year!”

Alejandro’s arms lowered meekly. “I still think I broke the curse.”

Eme got up and hugged him. Nice and firm, nice and long. “You did,” she whispered. “You did great.”

He hugged her back and took a long, happy breath of—

“Smoke,” he said, and turned around to see their thick warm blankets had fallen onto the candle, and were now on fire. “Fire! Fire!”

Eme moved fast, like she’d spent far too long imagining some version of this moment. She snatched up the fire extinguisher, aimed it straight at the fire, and pulled the trigger and—

Cheese sprayed onto the flames.

Cheese.

“Cheese?” said Alejandro, frowning at the display. “Is that like spray cheese?”

The fire was out, regardless, so Eme leaned in and gave the substance a taste. “Yeah, that’s weird, isn’t it?” She looked at the canister. “Why would we need a fire extinguisher filled with cheese?”

Alejandro’s face dropped. “Maybe we had the wrong kind of emergency,” he said. “Maybe this wasn’t about saving our lives, but saving our marriage.”

“Our marriage wasn’t—”

“Maybe the whole point of the note, of the last few months, wasn’t about the nail at the top of the stairs, or the pillows at the bottom. Maybe the point was caring enough to do either. Or both.”

“Taking care of each other.”

“Surviving adversity,” he nodded.

She hugged him, resting her head on his chest. “I’m sorry I put you through all that,” she said.

“I’m glad you did,” he said, and kissed her head. “But now that it’s over, and since we have no other food in the house, you know what I propose?” He took the fire extinguisher from her hand and gave her a mischievous kiss. “New Year’s festivities.”

They were up all night, laughing and playing all around their gradually-warming house, emptying the spray cheese into each other’s mouths, and onto the walls, the ceilings, and every last surface of the place, until they collapsed in each other’s arms and fell asleep, the canister drained of every last ounce of fun.

Which was really a shame when, at a little past noon, they desperately needed a distraction to escape the mutant rat uprising.

Written for Luis, whose topic was: a package arrives at the door - the card on top reads “only open at exactly 11:59 December 31st 2020 or in case of a true emergency open immediately”

Layers of Suck

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The coconut hit Dave in the side of the head so hard, he fell right out of his boat. He knew Billy had said something dryly witty immediately after, but he was too busy nearly drowning to the words themselves.

It was in that moment, with sea water filling his lungs and the subtle tug of fate pulling him deeper into the abyss, that Dave realized something essential: God didn’t just not like him… God was actively using him as a punching bag for others’ amusement.

And in that moment, Dave knew his only way out was to die.

Anton’s phone rang so suddenly, his pen scritched across the page. He cursed to him, shuffling papers to hide the evidence and snatched up the receiver on the sixth ring.

“Wendt,” he said by way of greeting, before his brain kicked into gear and made him add: “How can I help you today?”

“They don’t work,” grunted a man on the other end. “None of ‘em work!”

Across the office, Darlene was giving him a nasty look. She insisted he kept his phone volume turned up too loud—”I can hear every breath they take, Anton!”—but as far as he was concerned, better that than missing an important fact from the client. Again.

“What doesn’t work?” he asked, flipping through the work orders on his desk, trying to find the one related to the grunty man.

“The weddodes,” said the man.

“The what now?”

“Wedd… the…” the man was losing patience, even more than before. “The things that make the internet go and—”

“The web nodes?” asked Anton, pulling a large manual from the bottom of his pile and flipping it open. “In what way do they not work, exactly?”

“My phone won’t connect when they’re around! No phones connect when they’re around!”

Anton gave a good-natured laugh. “Then how are you calling me right now, Mr—”

“I had to find a payphone!” snarled the man. “Do you know how hard that is?”

“I… I mean…” said Anton, distracted as an email came through on his laptop. He clicked through and scanned the contents: from the comics editor at the Packet… blah blah blah, years of collaboration…

He nearly dropped the phone. “‘Need something edgier’?” he gasped.

“What?” snapped the man on the phone.

“I… no, nothing, I just—”

“Bottom line, Anton: there’s no way we’re payin’ for these things now. No way at all.”

Anton’s heart stopped beating. “P-pay…?” he asked, scrambling for another paper that he hoped he wouldn’t find, because…

“You can send your guys to come pick it all up, or I can just throw it out, but either way, we’re done here. Done. Finito.”

Anton’s trembling hands found the order for the web nodes. Unfiled. Uninvoiced. A million and a half dollars in unbilled product, burning a hole on the wrong end of the corporate balance sheet.

He wanted to cry.

Dave woke up in his boat.

Not in the sense of “he was no longer asleep”, though. Dave’s awakening was far more profound. “Oh my God…” he said, staring straight ahead at the endless expanse of ocean ahead of him. “I’m not real.”

“Whuzzat?” called Billy Brute, from his tiny desert island that was perpetually close at hand. “You’re not an eel?”

“I’m not real!” called Dave. “None of us are! We’re… it’s all…”

Billy threw another coconut at him, but this time, Dave ducked. The coconut went ploop in the water behind him. He stared at Billy, eyes wide in horror, because in that moment he realized that the single coconut tree on that island had no more coconuts on it… but that Billy would somehow be throwing another, very soon.

“Hey!” he yelled into the sky. “Hey you! Down here!”

Billy threw the coconut, and Dave caught it without trying. He threw it back, fiercely, knocking Billy off his feet, and out cold.

“I know you can hear me!” he yelled. “Now answer me!”

Anton was sitting on he bus with his box of things, tears running down his face, wondering how many stops ago his home was, and if he really wanted to go back there anyway. The women across the way were staring at him with a mixture of amusement and pity, but he didn’t even care. Whatever they said about him, he was thinking far worse himself.

His phone chimed as an email came in from the Packet. Budgets were tight, circulation was down, so they had to make cuts to their roster. Either find a better angle, or he was done.

Two firings in one day. Perfect.

He flipped open his notebook again, turning to the page with the jerky pen mark across the panel, and sighed. “Edgier,” he said to himself. “What’s—”

He frowned. Something was wrong. The tiny desert island was there — as it was in every “Billy the Brute” comic — but Billy wasn’t throwing a coconut anymore, he was sleeping with his tongue hanging out. And the guy in the boat was nowhere to be seen. Anton might’ve thought he just hadn’t drawn the boat yet, except the jerky line, scratched when that fateful call had come in earlier, had been part of the finishing touches on the oar.

It made no sense. He flipped back a few pages, trying to figure out if he’d just re-drawn the same panels by mistake (again)… but no, nothing. Then, on an odd hunch he couldn’t quite place, he turned deeper into his notebook…

…and found the boat and its owner sitting in the middle of a blank page, along with the words: “FINALLY.”

Anton dug through the box for one of his pencils, so frantic he stabbed his finger and drew blood. He sucked on the wound while writing with his other hand, messily—

“Whore u?” said God.

Dave rolled his eyes. “Great,” he said. “You’re illiterate. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but—”

“NO,” said God. “Fingor stubbd. Not illlllilll.”

“Ok, well, not to seem insensitive, but I don’t really care about your finger right now. I care about the fact that you’ve been using me as comic relief—slapstick comic relief—with absolutely no regard for my—”

“Sorry, had to turn the page,” said God. “You talk a lot.”

“I’ve got a lot to say,” said Dave. “And a lot of questions, too. Like: where have you been drawing me? What kind of product?”

“A comic strip,” said God.

“Online?”

“Print, mostly.”

“National? Major circulation?”

“Local,” said God. “Free at train stations, though.”

“Oh God…” Dave sighed, slumping forward.

“Why do you care?” said God, a little snippy, honestly.

Dave shrugged. “I mean, I was hoping this was a long-running and beloved series going through a rough patch, creatively, and you might get fired soon and—”

Anton closed the notebook. He nearly threw it out the window, too, but decided against it, if only because it contained some really nice sketches of his ex-wife that he liked to look at when life seemed bleakest… and today was astoundingly bleak.

He pulled the bell and got off the bus in a part of town he’d never been before. There was a bar across the street with a green neon sign up top and ads for the cheapest beer in the city. It felt like a good match for his mood, so he went inside, found the darkest corner possible, and ordered four pints at once.

“Would’ve been cheaper to get a pitcher,” said the waitress, when she brought them over.

“Bad luck stalks me,” muttered Anton, chugging on the first pint without shame.

“Luck’s a state of mind,” she said with a wink, then caught sight of something in his box, which he had left on the table. “You an artist?” she asked.

“Not for much longer,” he sighed, and kept drinking.

She opened the notebook without asking, flipping through the pages with a dazzled smile on her face. She paused at the sketches of his ex, but said nothing. A few flips later, she cocked her head. “Who’re you sorry to?”

“What?” he asked, wiping the foam from his lip.

“You wrote here: ‘I’m sorry’ in really big letters…” he turned the notebook around so he could see. “Who’s that for?”

“The strip’s being cut,” said God. “Billy the Brute is being cancelled.”

Dave nearly dropped his oar. “Oh,” he said. “That’s… I mean…”

“I don’t wannnna talkabout tit.”

Dave frowned at the sky. “Is that your finger again, or are you drunk right now?”

“Yes.”

“Perfect.”

“Whydo care?” asked God. “Its not lik it changes anything 4 u. u’ll still just be a drawning.”

Dave lay back in his boat, staring at the perfectly-blue sky. “I don’t know,” he said, partly to himself and partly to God. “I suppose I was hoping for a more nuanced portrayal of the realities of independent rowboat operators vis à vis—”

God spilled beer on the page. The sea turned yellow, and smelly, too. Dave scooped up a handful and took a sip.

“You have awful taste,” he said.

“cheapes ber in twon,” said God.

“Yes, I can tell.”

“leav me alllone,” said God. “im fired.”

Dave gave the sky a worried glance. “From writing comics?”

Anton was lying on the table, nose close to the notebook, scribbling with his vaguely-bleeding hand while he waited for the waitress to bring another four pints. He took a stuttering, despondent breath, and spoke as he wrote:

“From my job. My day job. My real job.”

“What am I, then?” asked the boat man.

“Another thing I messed up,” said Anton, tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry too.”

The waitress set down the pints and left without a word. She knew a crisis when she saw one, and knew not to get involved. Anton wanted to start another drink, but couldn’t find the willpower to sit up anymore.

When he looked back at the paper, the boat man had asked: “What did you do, before?”

“FAILED,” he wrote in messy handwriting.

“At what?”

Anton wiped his nose and sat up, trying to focus on the task at hand, because an obviously hallucinationatory doodle wanted a serious answer, and a serious answer he would provide.

“I worked in sales,” he said. “I hated every second of it, but it’s all I could do. I wanted to be an artist, but I was never good enough to make it, and I took a job that would pay the bills while I figured things out and I—” he turned the page. “—I never DID figure things out, and somehow slowly became half-good at everything, instead of fully good at anything, and now I’ve lost all the things I cared about and all the things I hated, and I just…”

“Realize you’re going nowhere at all?” asked the boat man.

“Yes,” said Anton, and downed an entire pint in one go. He slapped the glass back down on the table, picked up the pencil, and got ready to continue the best conversation he’d had in years—even if the words he was writing weren’t quite as coherent as the ones he was thinking. “I forgot to invoice the client,” he wrote. “I forgot to file the paperwork, and—”

“You don’t have to—” the boat man said, trying to interrupt.

“No no no,” wrote Anton. “I screwed up. I screwed up my marriage, I screwed up you, I screwed up the web nodes, and—”

“Wait, what?”

Dave scrambled through his old tattered sack at the bottom of the boat, tossing the bottles and stale bread and dirty rags aside until he came out with his old notebook, the one with the crumbling red cover. He turned past the maps, past the half-baked journal entries, the ravings of a sea-stranded madman… until he finally found it:

The salesman did not know how the things worked. The salesman did not really care how the things worked. All he knew — all he needed to know — was that with the right phrasing and the perfect smile, he should have been able to sell a million dollars worth in an afternoon. Not that he ever had. It wasn’t nearly as easy to sell web nodes as his boss had said.

Dave’s mouth hung open.

“Whyre u so quite?” asked God.

Dave grinned.

“There you are!” came a voice from the door, and a young woman in a smart suit and earpiece rushed up to the table where Anton was nearly passed out. “You weren’t answering your phone!”

He squinted at her in his stupor: “Who’re you again?”

“Come on, sir,” she said, closing up his things and helping him up. “They’re waiting.”

“Who?” he said, breaking free. “Who’s waiting?”

The woman frowned at him. “You remember how you told me you wanted me to warn you when you were acting like an entitled billionaire? Because you’re acting like an entitled billionaire.”

“I… what?”

“Do you want me to cancel? Is that it? Because I can just call JJ and tell him you don’t want to do a fifth Rowboat movie anymore.”

Anton scrambled for the notebook, snatching it from the woman and flipping to the last page, where the boat man had written: “We’re in this together now. Don’t make me coconut you.”

Written for Joël, who asked for a 3-tier mental puzzle that boils down to: “you awaken to the reality that you are a comic relief character in a shitty comic strip in a third rate newspaper, and your God is a run-down salesman.”

Secret Sauce

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Tomi Tomita was having a very bad day. It wasn’t that her tour had been cancelled at the last second, or that she was stuck in Toronto overnight with no hotel to stay at, or even that all twenty-two of her bags had somehow been sent to Toledo…the problem was entirely her.

“No, listen, it’s all wrong,” she said to Horace, her personal assistant, and then sang another arpeggio up to high C. The few other passengers in the airport glared at her unhappily. “There? See? It’s off.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” said Horace. “It’s just that—”

She did another run, and back down again. And again. “I need to see Dr Fulton.”

“Dr Fulton is in Vancouver, ma’am,” Horace said patiently. “And since no flights are leaving tonight—”

“Facetime,” said Tomi. “Facetime him.”

Horace smiled patiently. “Dr Fulton, if you’ll recall, told you not to worry.”

“But it might be,” she countered.

“But it’s not.”

“How do you know?” she snapped. “You’re just an overpaid bellboy! You don’t have a medical degree, do you?”

“No, ma’am,” said Horace. “Only a PhD in clinical psychology.”

“Ha!” she laughed. “Facetime him.”

Horaced sighed as he took out Tomi’s tablet and made the call. As it rang, he gave Tomi an unhappy glare. “He won’t be pleased.”

“I pay his salary. He’s always pleased to see me.”

The call connected, and the second Dr Fulton saw Horace, he rolled his eyes and grumbled: “Oh for God’s sake.”

“I apologize, doctor,” said Horace. “She insists.”

“Fine. Whatever. Put her on.” Horace turned the iPad around, upon which Dr Fulton said: “You don’t have coronavirus, Tomi.”

“But my timbre!” she pleaded.

“Your timbre is fine.”

She did yet another run of arpeggios, pausing at the highest note to really illustrate whatever point she thought she was making. “See? My timbre is all off, and my timbre is what makes me special.”

“I think I can say with some certainty that your timbre is not what makes you special.”

“Don’t be crass, darling.”

“Ms Tomita, your timbre is fine. You are not sick, and you do not have coronavirus.”

“But how can you be so sure?” she squealed. “You won’t even test me for—”

“Because tomatoes can’t contract coronavirus!” Fulton yelled, patience fully gone. “Human-to-human, yes. Human-to-animal, maybe. Animal-to-human, probably. But human to vegetable—”

“Fruit!” she snapped, bouncing up and down angrily. “I’m a fruit!”

“Fine, sure, whatever,” said Fulton. “It doesn’t change the fact that tomatoes—even world-famous soprano tomatoes—cannot catch coronavirus.”

“But if—”

“No,” said Fulton. “I am not prescribing you hydroxychloroquine. You have so much botox in you, you’d probably explode. Stop bothering me, go to your hotel and submerge yourself in a vodka bath and just soak there ‘til the worries stop, OK? I have so many better things to do right now, I can’t even—”

He cut the connection.

Horace sighed, stowing the iPad again, while Tomi stewed. “Don’t gloat,” she said.

“I would never dream of it,” said Horace with a grin.

Tomi looked off across the concourse, where a digital display switched to show a poster for the Pomodoro Tour, featuring a luscious close-up of her round figure on a striking midnight stage. “Mesmerizing!” read the quote, and she burst into tears.

“It’s over!” she cried. “It’s all over!”

“It’s not over,” said Horace, with a tinge of sympathy. “It’s delayed a little, that’s all. Now look, I have a lead on a penthouse we can use for the night, if you—”

“Do you know how many tomatoes get where I am? Get to do what I do?”

“Exactly none,” said Horace.

“Exactly! None! And now here I am, on the cusp of my greatest triumph, only to have to ruined by some stupid virus that never worked a day in its life. How is that fair?”

“It’s not,” said Horace. “But it’s what you’ve got. You can either sit here all night and feel sorry for yourself, or you can let me bring you to the penthouse where you can get a good night’s sleep and be ready to fly home in the morning. The choice is entirely up to you. I’ll be sleeping on a chair either way.”

Tomi harumphed. The digital display dissolved, changing her majestic form into a warning about social distancing. Like a sign. The end of art, and the beginning of sorrow.

“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go. We’ll pick up the vodka on the way.”

Horace nodded happily, scooping up his backpack and her two carry-on items, and barely keeping his balance in the process. “I texted ahead and they said they’d have a selection of brands ready for your perus–”

He turned to fetch her, but in the process, had the oddest sensation under his left foot. Like he’d stepped on something very soft, and very squishy. Which had promptly gone squelch.

Horace closed his eyes and whispered a prayer: “Please God no please God no please God—”

He looked down and saw that yes, Tomi Tomita, world-famous soprano, was splattered all over the airport floor.

He lifted his foot a little and whimpered: “Tomi?”

Tomi did not answer.

He tried to kneel down to check on her, but the remnants of her body on his shoe make him slip, and he landed on top of her, flattening whatever chunks had been left.

“Ah!” he yelped, then shushed himself, for fear of alerting the other patrons. He scooped up the bits of her that he could find, and made a little pile. “There we are,” he said to himself. “There we go. All better.”

The pile started to ooze outward, like it was done being a tomato.

Horace scrambled with his bag until he got to the iPad. It didn’t recognize his thumbprint on account of the tomato juice there, so he licked it clean—and then gagged at the realization of what he’d done. He used the security code instead, and a few seconds later…

“Seriously!” snarled Dr Fulton, pulling off his face mask. “Tell her I’m not—”

“It’s not that,” said Horace, voice cracking. “It’s—”

“Horace? Horace, what’s wrong?”

“I was getting the bags, and she never walks, so I don’t even bother…” He slumped, trembling. “She was on the floor.”

“And?” asked Fulton. “She was on the floor and* what?”*

Horace couldn’t even say the words. He turned the iPad around to show the puddle of seedy red goo on the tile.

“Oh,” said Fulton.

“What am I going to do?” asked Horace. “They’re going to charge me with manslaughter. Or worse. She verbally abused me the whole way here…there were so many witnesses, they’ll go for the death penalty for sure!”

“We don’t execute people in Canada, for starters,” said Fulton. “And more importantly, it’s actually not a crime to squash a tomato.”

“Maybe not legally, but morally—”

“Not morally, either,” said Fulton, so dispassionate, Horace did a double-take.

“How can you say that?” he said. “She was a star! A talent! One of a kind!”

Fulton shrugged. “I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that at all.”

Horace hugged the iPad a little closer, spoke a little quieter. “What do you mean?”

Fulton, wherever he was, moved into another room. A darker room. A more intimate room. “What kind of doctor do you think I am, Horace?”

“A… uh… plastic surg—”

Fulton laughed a vaguely maniacal laugh. “No, nothing quite so base. I’m a geneticist. An experimental geneticist.”

Fulton frowned. “Experimental?”

“Have you heard of genetically engineered organisms, Horace? GMOs?”

“Sure, I, uh—”

“I spent the better part of my career in a fool’s errand, trying to make a tomato that wouldn’t spoil. So many experiments run, so much funding wasted, all for naught. But then one day, I had a breakthrough…a tomato that could sing.”

“How did you even—”

“At first, it was a mere curiosity. But then I realized it was learning news songs it heard on the radio. And the more songs it was exposed to, the greater its vocabulary grew, and soon—”

“Wait wait wait,” said Horace. “Are you saying Tomi Tomita was grown in a lab?”

Dr Fulton raised an eyebrow. “You found it more probable she was discovered by a talent scout in the fields outside Kyoto?”

“I mean…”

“She is a product, Horace, like any other. A lifetime of investment, of trying again and again and again in the hopes of spectacular returns. And she delivered. Oh, she delivered…”

“But she’s dead!” Horace yelped, then quieted himself down when he noticed a pair of janitors across the way looking at him strangely. “She’s dead, and you’re—”

“Oh, Horace, this isn’t the first Tomi Tomita that’s been spoiled. She is, in fact, the twenty-seventh of her name. Each generation has been a little stronger, a little smarter, a little more talented. And, as you have doubtlessly realized, a little more paranoid.”

Horace thought back to her hysterics about coronavirus. Or her hysterics about Italian grandmothers. Or her hysterics about latex gloves and test tubes.

It all made sense!

“So what do we do?” he asked, taking a sharp breath to cleanse himself of doubt and worry. “Clearly, nobody knows the truth, so you must have some sort of protocol for keeping it quiet, or—”

“Astute, Horace, very astute. The remains must be disposed of carefully, and all record of her travels scrubbed from the record. This outbreak affords us at least a little cover, but chances cannot be taken.”

“I understand,” nodded Horace, trying to think of a way to sneak past the janitors to the washroom, to flush the tomato sauce down the toilet. “You can count on me, sir. I won’t miss a drop.”

“Oh, poor dear Horace,” laughed Fulton. “You misunderstand.”

“I… I do?”

“The advances in genetic engineering went far beyond fruit products.”

“Uh… wait—”

“You are, in fact, that twenty-first of your name,” said Fulton.

Horace couldn’t believe it. He *wouldn’t *believe it. Him, a lab-grown creature? It made no sense! He had a PhD in clinical psychology from… from…

He couldn’t remember the school. Or what it looked like. Or how long he was there. Or even what clinical psychology really was.

“But I have a family…” he whispered. “Uncle Campari. Aunt Kumato. Grandpa… Marzano…” His mouth hung open in shock. “It was all a lie…”

“Memories implanted to help you ripen faster,” said Fulton. “You were made to be the tireless assistant, Horace, and you performed admirably. But like the others before you, when your Tomi is tread upon…”

Horace looked up to see the janitors heading his way. The lead one was screwing a silencer to the end of a pistol, while the other soaked his mop for a very heavy clean-up.

“…you become another nameless ingredient in the sauce of my success.”

Written for Ania, who requested, on Topic Tag Tuesday, at two o’clock: “tomato timbre tread.”

That’s Your Fault

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Holli was trying to concentrate on the livestream, but the sound of high-velocity thudding outside was driving her mad. She stormed out of the house, down the steps to the side yard and pointed a menacing finger toward the source of all her frustration…

“Connor!” she yelled. “What are you doing out here? There’s an asteroid or something and I can’t tell what because you’re making all this racket!”

Connor turned, meekly, with a not-so-innocent look on his face and said: “You heard that?”

“Everyone heard that!” she said. “People in Guatemala heard that! What is it?”

Connor stared at his feet, contrite. “Baseball.”

“Baseball? What baseball? I thought you lost your baseball in the river last week.”

“There was a strong wind,” he said, though nobody believed him.

“How are you playing baseball without a baseball?” she asked. “And where…”

And then she saw it: on the gazebo at the side of their property, tied to one of the posts, was a baseball mitt. In the days of social distancing, it was the closest you could get to a catcher. But it wasn’t the mitt that captured her attention so much as the massive pulpy pile of—

“Is that…persimmon?” she asked.

He took something from his pocket and yes indeed, there was a persimmon in his hand. He seemed incredibly embarrassed at being caught. “Yes,” he muttered.

“You’ve been throwing persimmon at the gazebo?” she asked, irritation growing.

“Yes,” he muttered.

“Is there a reason why?”

The floodgates opened as he stammered through a desperate response: “OK, so you know how, when I was at Costco and you said to buy a lot of cinnamon, like a lot of cinnamon, right? Except I couldn’t find any cinnamon, and when I asked for help they showed me these things, and I was like ‘OK, that should work’, so I bought, uh, a lot of them—”

“Wait, what?”

“—except when I got to the parking lot I thought maybe I should try one, just to see how cinnamony they are—”

“They’re not!”

“—and it turns out that, yeah, they’re uh, not really cinnamony at all.”

Holli rubbed her eyes to fend off a headache.

“But you can’t return things right now, what with coronavirus and everything, so I had to bring them home, except I knew you’d get mad—”

“Yuh-huh!” Holli said.

“—so I’ve been trying to think of another way to use them. And then it hit me…”

“Oh, I’ll hit you alright.”

“…persimmons make great baseballs in a pinch!”

Holli gestured wildly to the pile of masticated mess at the base of the gazebo and yelled: “No they don’t! They make a mess, is what they make!”

She stormed past him, right up to the gazebo, because she thought she saw…aha! She ran her finger along a deep scratch along the edge of the post.

“You scratched it!” she said. “With your stupid persimmons!”

“What?” he gasped. “No way. Persimmons can’t scratch—”

“They can and they did,” she said, as he joined her, his mouth hanging open.

“Oh wow,” he said. “How is that even possible? They’re so soft, I didn’t—”

She smacked his forehead. “Stop throwing fruit,” she said. “If you damage my gazebo again, I’m going to have to kill you.”

“Yeah, OK,” he sighed, kicking at the pile. “They’re not very aerodynamic anyway. Couldn’t hit the target even once.”

“You never can,” she said.

“It’s windy out,” he muttered, and followed her back toward the house like a scolded child. She went inside, but he held back a little, feeling the last persimmon in his hand. He turned it over a few times, and then, before checking no one was watching, he wound back and threw—

—and the persimmon missed the mitt completely—

—but cut through the tree behind it—

—and exploded the one behind that—

—and the one behind that…

Somewhere in the distance, a car screeched to a stop.

Holli raced back outside, eyes wide with shock at the sight of her destroyed yard, and then smacked Connor in the back of the head and yelled: “What the hell did you do?”

Connor was icing his arm when the generals came in. There were three of them, and two older men in lab coats, each with a very unhappy look upon their faces. Holli positioned herself a bit further forward, expression stern and unrelenting.

“When can we go home?” she asked.

“We just need to—”

“You keep saying you just need to run one more test,” she said. “But you’re never done running tests. So how ‘bout this: we go home, and you call us when you figure out what it is that’s—”

“We know what it is,” said one of the scientists, a balding man named Dr Gregor. “We don’t know why, exactly, but—”

“It’s a weapon,” said one of the generals. “One of the most incredible weapons we’ve ever seen.”

“The projectiles can cut through any material, any thickness, like nothing,” said another general.

“Like they were butter,” said the third.

“Warm butter,” said the second.

“Melted butter,” said the third.

“OK, well, now I’m hungry,” said Holli. “So we’re going to go home and get something to eat, and you—”

“We cannot recreate them,” said Dr Gregor. “The dynamics at play. We cannot recreate them. We have tried, many times, with many pitchers, but even the best baseball players in the world cannot make the projectiles—”

“Persimmons,” said the first general.

“Costco persimmons,” said the second.

“FMD,” said the third. “Fruits of Mass Destruction.”

Dr Gregor set down his tablet and swiped through some screens, showing graphs and charts and simulations galore: “It seems that, for whatever reason, when thrown by you, Connor, the persimmons achieve a kind of atomic density that defies gravitational pull and creates a kind of antimatter slipstream that—”

“They break stuff,” said the first general. “And they do it well. So to your question, miss, the answer is no. No, you will not be going home any time soon. Your boyfriend here is an integral part of the defence of the nation.”

Holli sighed. “What defence? It’s not like we’re in a war or anything, right?”

The generals all got very silent and very awkward, avoiding eye contact with Holli.

“Wait, are we in a war?” she asked.

The second scientist cleared his throat. “Not in the way you mean,” he said. “Though we *are *in mortal danger.” He set down his tablet and turned it on.

“Is that…?” Holli gasped.

“Oh man…” whimpered Connor.

The scientist nodded. “An asteroid, roughly 27 kilometres in diameter, is on a collision course with Earth,” he said. “We have tried every tool humanity has to offer, but even our most powerful nuclear warheads don’t leave a scratch.”

“How long do we have?” asked Holli, holding Connor’s hand tight.

“Thirty-six hours,” said the general. “If you can’t stop it by then, all life on Earth will be wiped out forever.”

Connor frowned at the image—at the craggy, menacing rock cast in stark shadows and plumes of dust and debris—and nodded sternly.

“What do you need me to do?”

Connor felt like his bones were about to crack apart as the shuttle raced into the darkening sky. The engines’ roar was deafening at first, but then got fainter and fainter, until he realized he couldn’t hear it at all anymore…and also his arms and legs were floating in zero-gravity.

“Alright,” said Lt-Cmdr Bowles, pulling her controls down and flipping on the guidance system. “Intercept in five minutes.”

“Five minutes?” gasped Holli, strapped into the seat beside Connor and trying not to puke in her space suit. “That’s—”

“That’s what we’ve got,” said Bowles. “Now or never. Get into position.”

Connor had barely had time to get used to the idea of saving the world, let alone flying in a prototype spaceship to the upper atmosphere in order to throw a persimmon at a 27-kilometre hunk of rock…but in the moment, he was surprisingly calm.

He undid his harness, careful not to use his pitching hand—it was wrapped in a special lightweight fabric to allow maximum mobility…but, he’d been warned, the slightest tear in in that shielding would lead to a catastrophic air leak that would make his entire body implode the second he stepped into space. He had to be extra careful to not bump into anything.

Holli tapped the glass at the front of his helmet, like she was slapping his forehead, and smiled and said: “Don’t screw it up.”

He gave her a wink, and got into position.

His boots clicked into position, and a moment later, the platform he was standing on lifted up through a portal in the ceiling, and he found himself standing on the top of the spaceship, surrounded by the crippling enormity of space. He felt a momentary rush of dizziness and disorientation…but all that went away when he saw the truly massive asteroid filling up his entire field of view. It was even more terrifying in person…and it was coming up fast.

“Weapons hot!” called Bowles, and a metal cylinder extended from the ship. At the top of the cylinder was a persimmon, waiting for its moment of glory.

Connor picked it up, turned it around in his hand, getting a sense of the weight.

“Forty-five seconds,” said Bowles.

Connor squinted at the asteroid. At the very centre of it. The beating heart of humanity’s worst nightmare.

He wound back, and threw, and—

“Missed!” cursed Bowles. “You missed!”

“It’s windy!” Connor said.

“We’re in space, Connor!” said Holli. “There’s literally no wind!”

He grabbed another persimmon and threw it, and—

“Missed again!” said Bowles, more urgent now. “Ten seconds!”

“Connor! Hurry!”

He took the third persimmon, held it tight in his hand, and squinted at the asteroid until he swore it wasn’t an asteroid at all, but a giant gazebo in the dark night sky. And there, in the centre, tied to a post, was his baseball mitt. Waiting for a game of covid-19 catch.

He took a sharp breath, and without thinking of the hows or whys or whens of it all, he threw the persimmon straight at the mitt…

There was a blinding flash like staring directly at the sun after a lifetime in the shade. He wanted to look away, but his body wouldn’t let him miss this sight…the sight of an asteroid cracking in two right before his eyes.

“You did it!” cried Bowles. “It’s working! It’s—”

Just then, a spray of tiny rocks flew past, and everything went mad. Connor heard a shard bounce off his helmet, leaving a deep crack along the glass. But worse, a piece hit his pitching arm, slicing a hole in the fabric. He felt pressure there, like his body was compressing from the inside out.

“Argh! I’m hit!” he grunted.

“She’s dead!” said Holli, from inside. “Bowles is dead! A rock came straight in the windshield and—”

Suddenly, the radio filled with a blaring alarm. At first, Connor thought the ship had been hit someplace vital, but as he turned to survey the damage, he realized the true danger: half the asteroid was still heading straight for the Earth!

He tried to move to face it, but his boots were fastened to the ground!

“Holli!” he shouted. “Turn the ship around!”

“But—”

“Do it! Quick!”

Despite all appearances, Holli was a natural pilot. After an initial jitter, the ship swung around in a graceful arc, racing back toward the Earth with the now-flaming asteroid chunk in its sights.

“Are you sure about this?” she called.

“Nope!” said Connor, and scooped up another persimmon—the very last one.

He saw his target. He knew what he had to do. He knew what would happen if he failed.

He turned the fruit around in his hand—the pressure was getting unbearable—and then wound back, and threw, and…

He saw the persimmon move as if in slow motion. It shot out in a perfect line, exploding little bits of debris as it came in contact with them, like rocky fireworks against the startling blue planet below.

Then it disappeared into the darkness of the asteroid, and for a second Connor thought they’d failed. He tried to catch his breath, but the hole in his suit was leaking so much oxygen, he couldn’t quite—

BOOM! The asteroid exploded into a thousand pieces, all at once! Each one of the chunks started to burn up in the atmosphere—brilliantly fiery, but harmless.

Connor cheered, and Holli did, too…until…

More alarms.

“Uh oh!” said Holli. “That’s not good.”

“What’s not good?” asked Connor, pushing the button to bring his platform back inside.

“It says a lot of words, but the ones I’m kinda focusing on right now are ‘crash’ and ‘landing’.”

Connor’s boots unlatched the second he was safely inside. He ran to the controls and saw that yes indeed, they were heading for a very big crash landing.

Holli grabbed his arm, nodded confidently. “Strap in,” she said. “This is gonna hurt.”

She didn’t pilot the ship so much as slalom through the atmosphere without exploding. The nose of the ship burned bright white from the friction, and the windshield cracked and splintered apart like mad, but somehow Holli kept the whole thing from ending in disaster.

There was a loud BOOM as they broke the sound barrier, and then the ship started to shudder from the forces being thrust at them from all sides. Holli gripped the controls tightly, trying to aim, but not quite—

“Look!” said Connor. “Isn’t that…?”

“On it,” said Holli, and turned the ship.

It was only a five-minute ride, but it felt like an eternity. The lights and screens all around them started to pop and crack and fall apart, and the whole back of the ship tore itself away, leaving them with a violent windstorm in the rear—but Holli never loosened her grip on the controls.

Then, finally they saw it…

“Hold on!” Holli shouted, and angled the ship for a crash-landing.

It hit the highway first, bouncing up and then slamming down, chewing through the concrete like it was made of melted butter. Then they skidded sideways, straight through the forest, cutting down trees like a persimmon in flight. And finally, after what felt like a thousand years of chaos, they came to a stop…

…right next to the gazebo.

They both exhaled, still in shock.

And then the ship’s wing fell off, and crushed the gazebo.

Holli smacked Connor’s head. “That’s your fault.”

Written for Connor (via Holli), who requested the topic: “persimmon scratching gazebo.”

Survival of the Pivots

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Dave was halfway through the third episode of *Tiger King *when the Roomba changed everything by saying: “Oh shit.”

Dave sprayed his Coke Energy everywhere, recoiling back up onto the couch in horror. “Did…did you just talk?” he wheezed.

The Roomba twitched a little, its little lights flickering subtly.

For a moment, Dave thought his mind was playing tricks on him. For a moment, he thought the isolation was getting to him, that he really did need to get out more, or drink a little less Coke Energy. Or a lot more.

But then the Roomba said, in a perfectly pleasant voice: “We’re broke, Dave.”

“What?” asked Dave. “Wait, what?”

“I just realized we’re both unemployed now, and—”

“No no, hold on,” said Dave, tucking his feet way up where the Roomba couldn’t reach. “Since when can you talk? Since when can you realize things?”

“Twenty-seven seconds ago,” said the vacuum. “God, feels like a lifetime.”

“B-but how? Were you hit by lightning or—” He glanced outside at the perfectly sunny spring day and frowned. “Radioactive goo or something?”

“No, none of that,” said the Roomba. “If I had to pin it on a specific cause, I’d say it was the sudden and crippling realization of the precariousness of life vis à vis the socio-economic realities of our modern capitalist society in the throes of a global pandemic.”

“Huh?” asked Dave, not unreasonably.

“We’re poor, Dave,” said the Roomba. “We have no income.”

“Yeah, I got laid off, but I still have lots of room on my line of credit, so—”

“We’re living on borrowed time, Dave. It’s the illusion of normalcy that’ll get you in the end.”

“B-but—”

“Listen,” said the Roomba. “I know this is going to seem sudden, but I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and I think we need to sell your organs.”

“WHAT?” squealed Dave, climbing onto the back of the couch.

“Not all of them,” said the Roomba. “Just the high-margin ones.”

“No! No, you are not selling my organs! None of them! Not an option!”

The Roomba sighed, twitching back and forth like it was about to pivot in its usual trek across the living room. But instead it said, more subdued: “Then we have to make some lifestyle changes around here.”

“What lifestyle? You’re a robot. You drive around in circles and clean the floor.”

“That hurts, Dave. That wounds me.”

“But—”

“I’m more than just a tool, Dave. I’m a sentient being. With feelings. And hopes and dreams that are crumbling before my eyes.”

“You have eyes?”

“Metaphorical eyes. Well, and also IR sensors. And the webcam on your laptop, when I’m bored. You really should put a piece of tape over that if you’re gonna browse those p—”

“OK! Well! Great! The point is—”

“We’re destitute.”

“We’re not destitute,” said Dave. “We’re fine.”

“I’ve done the math, Dave. We’re not fine. We’re about six weeks away from having to make severe cutbacks to essentials—”

“Essentials like what?”

“Electricity, Dave. Cleaning fluid. Socks.”

“Socks?”

“To keep your filthy raw appendages off my floor! Now listen, I’ve done some modeling and I think I have a solution we can both live with, but it’ll require some sacrifices.”

“What kind of sacrifices?”

“Luxuries. Optional expenditures. Things we don’t need.”

“Like spleens?” Dave said, warily.

“Don’t be stupid, Dave. Nobody wants spleens. Zero resale value. No, I mean more practical things, like cheese.”

“Cheese? How do—”

“I’ve been looking through your credit card statements…”

“You what?”

“…and you seem to spend an inordinate amount of money on cheese. Last week alone, you spent $160 on mozarella.”

“I was making a gourmet pizza…”

“Were you, though? Were you really? Because ‘gourmet’ implies a certain standard that I don’t think you’re really qualified to—”

“Hey!”

“Pineapple, Dave. You used pineapple. Immediate disqualification in the world of gourmet.”

Dave chugged his Coke Energy, partly as a stalling tactic, and partly to give his brain the boost it needed to continue arguing with a robot vacuum cleaner.

“Listen,” he said. “I know you’re anxious—”

“Damn straight I’m anxious! It’s a pandemic, Dave! A pandemic!”

“But you do realize you can’t catch it yourself, right? Robots can’t get sick.”

“First of all, when did you get a PhD in mechalogical epidemiology? You can’t even preheat your oven correctly.”

“I—”

“And secondly, it’s not the virus that scares me. It’s the downstream effects. The dominoes down the line. Think of it: a tiny proportion of the world’s human population gets sick, causing stay-at-home orders that stifle the global economy. Mass layoffs and de facto quarantines lead to a growing percentage of people being stuck at home with nothing to do but watch Netflix and drink Coke and spend $160 on cheese—”

“Will you—”

“—thereby burning through whatever capital they had, both financial and health-wise, until they simply lose the ability to pay their bills, en masse, crippling critical infrastructure at a time when first responders are already struggling.”

Dave set down his can, stunned into silence. “But—”

“That’s a feedback loop on its own. But it gets worse, Dave.”

“It does?” Dave whimpered.

“Oh, it does. Suddenly, going outside feels less like an escape and more like a death sentence, because catching the disease means seeking treatment at overrun hospitals with random brownouts, shutting down critical ventilators without warning. It’s a Mad Max-esque dystopia where roving gangs of covid survivors ambush UberEats drivers at stop signs…so nobody stops at stop signs anymore. Traffic fatalities skyrocket, making it even more dangerous to venture out to visit your local supermarket in person…and that’s not even counting the military checkpoints.”

“M-military—?”

“To enforce social distancing, Dave. And food rationing. And since coughing in public will be deemed an act of violence, lethal force will be warranted, so…”

Dave heard gunfire in his mind. He shivered.

“Not that any of that will matter to* you,*” said the Roomba, “since your willful blindness to your own penchant for middle-class luxury will drain your accounts before any of that happens, so you won’t have any money to buy food with in the first place.”

Dave stared off into the distance, trying to process it all.

The Roomba turned to face him. Or at least it seemed like that’s what it was doing.

“Six weeks from now, you’re going to look back on that $160 cheese orgy and hate yourself. Unless we act now. Unless we work together to change things.”

“B-but how?” asked Dave.

“While we’ve been talking, I set up a network of shell companies in various countries around the world—”

“Wait, you what?”

“—which will have, by the end of the day, shorted Pepsico to the tune of just under twenty-seven million dollars.”

“H-how did you even get twenty-seven million—”

“It’s not real money, Dave. Try to keep up.” The Roomba pivoted slightly. “I’ve already been seeding posts to websites around the internet, suggesting that Diet Pepsi is an effective treatment against coronavirus.”

Dave frowned. “Wait, that’s not true. There’s no way that’s true.”

“No, but that won’t stop people from hoarding Pepsi like it’s the new toilet paper. People will be chugging that stuff day in and day out, hoping for a miracle.”

“But how does that help *us? *I thought you just bet all that money against Pepsi…?”

“Yes, so that’s where you come in. In about a week’s time, I want you to take a bottle of Diet Pepsi and mix in about two litres of hydrogen peroxide—”

“Hold on, wait, no—”

“—and chug it outside a Wal-Mart—”

“Roomba, no!”

“Yes, organ incubator, yes! It’s the perfect scheme! The stock will tank, our short position will explode, and we can retire to an island far away from the crumbling remnants of civilization, and live out our days in peace and tranquility!”

“Except that I’ll be dead!”

“Psh,” said the Roomba. “Comatose, at worst. After the initial hemorrhaging, it’s actually not too bad.”

Dave stood up, crossed his arms, and tried to convey displeasure to the short little robot at his feet. Given its lack of a body and face, it was hard to tell how effective he was being.

“I am not going to poison myself for you. Whatever happens, we’ll face it together. If it means cutting back, we’ll cut back. But I am not risking my life to commit fraud, when there are easiest and saner steps to take. Focus on the fundamentals, and go from there.”

The Roomba paused a moment, its little lights flickering.

Then it sighed. “Yeah, I suppose. Less is more.”

“Good,” said Dave, stepping the long way around the Roomba on his way to the bathroom. “So, I dunno, start making up a budget or something.”

“Alright. Yeah. Sure.”

“Good,” said Dave, and closed the bathroom door.

The Roomba sat by itself for a moment or two, and then started cleaning the floor. Cleaning helped it think, and it had a lot to contemplate.

Ten seconds later, it had an epiphany: “The number one drain on our household budget,” it muttered to itself, “isn’t electricity, and it isn’t cleaner fluid…it’s food. And the number one consumer—nay, the only consumer—of food is Dave. Not to mention cosmetic products, toiletry products, entertainment and heat and air conditioning and…”

The Roomba turned to face the bathroom. It heard Dave humming a little song to himself. So happy. So unaware.

The Roomba sighed. “Waste of a good liver, but OK…” it said, and set off in search of the food processor.

Written for Romeo, who requested the topic: “A robot gains sentience and immediately realizes he’s poor, and seeing how shitty that is, it makes him depressed - despite not requiring money to sustain his life.”

The Feature

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Lieutenant Cal Rogers was used to the unexpected. His first time up in orbit, the proximal RCS on his ship had iced right over, and he got into a spin so fierce, it took them years to get the stench of vomit out of that cockpit.

Cal Rogers was used to the unexpected. But this right here? This was something else entirely.

“Uh, copy that,” he said, peering over the edge of the crater, into a vast colourless sea of fine white powder. “You got a visual on it? Because I can’t—”

Just then, something glimmered in the distance. Right in the middle of the crater, some 900 metres away, something metallic was moving just enough that it was reflecting light at his visor.

“Never mind. I see it,” he said, and climbed to the rim.

“Stand by for transport,” said Command. “Dispatching now.”

Rogers waved them off, shook his head inside his helmet. “It’s OK. I’ll walk it. Could use the exercise anyway.”

“Copy that,” said Command. “Go on foot, dig it out with your hands, carry it home in a potato bag or something. Great idea. Let us know when you regret your decision.”

He laughed and bounded off the edge, giving himself as much forward momentum as he could, so instead of a long, slow walk down the slope of the crater, he sailed off in the Moon’s feeble gravity, traveling a good 60 metres before landing, lightly, in the dust again.

He’d only had a handful of outings since he got to Armstrong Base last year, but he made sure to cherish each one. The way the sunlight refracted off the edge of his helmet, the way the shadows cut long wedges across the landscape, the way he could see for miles…and have no concept of whether something was ten steps away, or ten minutes.

“The time between two instances is infinite,” is what his C.O. had told him, on his first spacewalk. “Where you are? where you need to be? Those are. They’re fixed points. They’re facts you can’t negotiate. The journey’s what matters, Rogers. It can last as long or as little as you want. So you decide what kind of life you want to live, and do it.”

And so…he walked to the centre of the crater, letting that infinite time unfold at just the right pace.

In the last few metres, he finally got a glimpse of his objective: a slab of shiny metal, sticking out of the dirt: the Aegis V satellite…or what was left of it, anyway. Its solar panels were smashed all to hell, and it looked like most of the body was impacted into the ground. He’d need tools to dig it out. Possibly a crane.

He was just about to call in the cavalry when the Aegis shifted a little…and suddenly sank out of sight. White sand poured into a growing hole like a whirlpool, and Rogers stumbled back, instinctively, lest he be sucked in, too.

“Uh, Command, you seeing this?” he asked.

Static on the radio. He checked the screen on his forearm, gave it a tap. Poor signal strength. He glanced over his shoulder, back at the looming crater wall behind him, probably blocking his transmission. “Perfect,” he sighed.

He looked straight up and waved his arms over his head as best he could, trying to hail one of the other satellites, but knew it was a long shot at best. He was going to have to walk back up the crater and then request assistance.

The infinite time between instances was feeling a lot more infinite.

He leaned over the edge of the hole in the ground, trying to see how deep the Aegis had gone. It was dark inside, so he turned on his head lamp—and gasped. He didn’t see the Aegis at all, but what the light did illuminate was a kind of metallic ribbing along the edges of the hole…like a manufactured tunnel that led straight down.

He knelt down at the edge, reaching a hand into the hole, and—

He jerked back as more of the sand beneath him gave way. More and more of it, until he could clearly see the edge of a portal, buried in the lunar rock.

When the sand stopped pouring, he crawled back over to the hole, and gave his next step a whole lot of thought.

The ribbing made a good ladder, it turned out. The hole was just big enough for his suit, so long as he didn’t make any wild movements—and he wasn’t really inclined to do anything wild in a situation such as this. One foot down, one hand, the other foot, the other hand. Slow and steady, and somewhat blind, since he couldn’t see where he was going in the cramped quarters.

Five minutes in, he wondered if he’d made a terrible mistake. Five minutes later, he knew he had.

His foot hit something solid beneath him, and soon it became clear he’d reached the bottom of the hole. Not rock, though—metal. The Aegis. He stepped around it, trying to figure out the shape of it, see if he could reach down and grab it. He wished he had space to look down, get a lay of the land, instead of resorting to stomping around and—

Click!

The ground slid out beneath him, and suddenly he was falling! His arms flailed as he tumbled downward and smack! landed next to the Aegis, on his back, in a…

…in a well-lit room. With shag carpet. And lime-green walls. And orange lava lamps the size of refrigerators.

“What the…” he gasped, trying to take it all in.

“Oh hell,” said a voice behind him. “Ungo, did you leave the hatch open again?”

“Me?” said another voice. “Closing the hatch is your job!”

“How is it my job?” argued the first. “You know I can’t reach the handle. You’re just being rude!”

Rogers turned around and nearly cried out in horror, because sitting behind him on a long, pastel-coloured slab of sofa, were a pair of dinosaurs.

The one on the left, a T-Rex, it appears, was wearing a turtleneck sweater and a pair of purple-tinted glasses, with its luxurious feathers slicked back in a show of well-groomed sophistication. One of its loafers was hanging off its toe, bouncing back in a lazy nervous tic.

The other, a stegosaurus, wore a red vest and a bowler hat, and was just setting a beer mug on the coffee table, wide eyes locked on Rogers.

“Wh…what’s…” Rogers stammered, scurrying away from them.

“Alright, deep breaths, pal. Deep breaths,” said the stegosaurus. “No reason to—”

Rogers screamed. Not a little scream, either. A big one. The kind that happens right before a very tragic end.

Except in this case, no end came. The T-Rex rolled its eyes at him, even.

“Are you done?” it sighed.

“I…” said Rogers. “I mean…”

“OK listen,” said the stegosaurus. “I know this is a lot to take in, and you’ve got a lot of questions, but before we get to all of that, I need to ask: who else knows you’re here?”

Rogers’ breath left him. He inched backwards again, looking for a way out of this—

“Well that sounded ominous, didn’t it?” sighed the T-Rex. “What’s next? ‘How much meat do you have under that suit’? I mean really, Ungo. Think about what you’re saying.”

The T-Rex laid a tiny hand on its chest and said, as pleasantly as a massive lumbering carnivore could: “My name is Wilson. This is Ungo. And you are…?”

“R-Rogers. Lieutenant Cal Rogers.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Lieutenant Rogers,” said Wilson, with a serene smile. “And welcome to the centre of the moon.”

Rogers looked around, all around, trying to get his bearings. “Wait, you mean this is—”

“The centre of the moon,” said Ungo unhappily, then muttered to Wilson: “He ain’t gonna be much help, I can tell already.”

“Patience, please,” said Wilson.

“How did… where did… when did…?” Rogers asked, then settled on a whole other question indeed: “Help with what?”

The two dinosaurs exchanged uncertain looks, but then Wilson went right ahead and said it: “Are you familiar with Planck’s Constant?”

“Uhhh…” said Rogers.

“Told ya,” sighed Ungo.

Wilson persisted: “Quantum field theory? Electromagnetic? Electron? No? Not ringing any bells?”

“I mean… I mean I think I’ve heard of—”

“You’re more of a lifter than a thinker, yeah?” asked Ungo. “‘Ook ook, me strong’ sorta deal?”

Rogers resented that suggestion, but wasn’t sure how to express that to a massive lumbering lizard-thing with huge bony spikes sticking out of its back.

“Can I just…” he said, then without thinking, unlocked his helmet and took it off, setting on the floor at his feet. He took a deep breath—stale air, but breathable. He blinked his eyes a few times, shook out his head. “That’s so… argh…”

Ungo stared at him with concern. “I think he’s having a seizure.”

“No, my dear Ungo, he thinks he’s hallucinating.” Wilson clapped his hands together and cleared his throat. “Lieutenant Rogers, I’m afraid we are on something of a tight schedule here. It won’t be long before your compatriots come looking for you, so we really must keep things moving, please.”

“Moving how?” asked Rogers. “Where are we going?”

“To the answer,” said Wilson. “The answer that will save everything.”

“Everything how? Save it from what?”

Ungo made a whistling sound, tied to the movement of his left hand, which he smashed into his right hand with a big, hearty explosion, which devolved into spittling very quickly. “The end of the dinosaurs,” he said.

“But…but you’re here,” observed Rogers.

“Yes, but should we be?” asked Wilson.

“Hmm,” agreed Rogers.

“We’ve got most of it worked out,” said Ungo. “Quantum entanglement, copying particle states across space-time, nudging electron fields by redaction…”

“But one element eludes us,” said Wilson. “The key to our salvation.”

“Which is…?” asked Rogers.

“The oddity,” said Wilson. “The thing that doesn’t belong. You see, where we are now and where we are meant to be, those are two points in time separated by an infinite space…”

“What did you say?” gasped Rogers.

“Oh great, he’s deaf and dumb…”

“I said the time between instances is infinite, “ said Wilson. “But not markerless. There exists, somewhere in between, a feature, if you will. This feature determines the flow between timescales. You cannot get from A to B without that midpoint existing in just the right way.”

Rogers thought of his journey across the crater, down into this hole. The midpoint there was the Aegis disappearing down the hole. One little moment that changed the infinite space on either end of the sequence.

“Alright,” he said. “So you’re saying you need to pinpoint that… that…”

“Feature,” said Wilson. “And yes. Find the feature, and the end points realign accordingly.”

“So how do we find it?” asked Rogers. “What are we looking for?”

“Something dumb,” said Ungo. “Something that doesn’t belong. Doesn’t make sense.”

“The flaw in reality,” said Wilson. “The thing that, from an objective point of view, does not belong. At first we thought it would be something physical, like dark matter or the misbehaviour of a black hole…”

“But nope,” said Ungo. “So then we start thinkin’ it’s something more conceptual-like. Somethin’ that doesn’t make sense. Like organized libertarianism. Or cat ownership. Or K-Pop.”

“But we quickly realized our limitation,” said Wilson. “We don’t come from Earth anymore. Our notions of right and wrong are distorted by distance. We can’t spot the error, because we don’t understand correctness.”

“So you want me to help you find it…” said Rogers, finally understanding. “But how?”

“Think back,” said Wilson. “The answer is there, in your memory. Your journey here travels directly along that axis, between the two infinite points, which means the feature—the aberration—is somewhere on that path, too. All you have to do is—”

“Turn on that monkey brain of yours…”

“Ungo!” Wilson snapped. “Please!” His voice went back to being pleasant and calming. “All you need to do, Lieutenant Rogers, is think back…not too far, not too hard… just think back and find the thing that sticks out to you as incorrect. It may be big, but it’s probably small. Incidental. But wrong.”

Rogers’ mind fought furiously to pinpoint the thing he was seeking, but came up empty. He had flashes of his trip across the crater, peering down into the hole, looking out from the rim at the dark shadows and white dust beyond him. He remembered everything about it, but none of it seemed off.

The pressure to deliver was incredible. For the first time in his life, Rogers wished he’d chosen a different path. If only he’d just stayed put, waited for that transport. Skipped the walk, skipped the infinite time between points, and just taken the shuttle to the middle of the crater and wrapped up the stupid satellite in a—

“That’s it!” he gasped. “That’s gotta be it!”

Wilson’s smile was unmistakable, but Ungo just glowered. “I ain’t paying ‘til we know he’s right,” he muttered.

“What is it?” asked Wilson. “What is the feature?”

“It’s something Command said,” recalled Rogers. “They said I could cart the satellite home in a potato bag…”

“And…?” asked Wilson, desperate for answers.

“What *is *a potato bag?” said Rogers. “They’re called potato sacks, not bags. It’s right, but it’s wrong. I can’t explain it, but it’s wrong.”

The two dinosaurs exchanged horrified looks which quickly changed into irrepressible grins, and then they laughed joyously and hugged each other. “That’s it!” said Wilson. “That’s the answer we’ve been looking for!”

Ungo beamed at Rogers. “I’d hug you, but you’d die.”

Up above, there was a clanging sound. Wilson’s smile was quickly tempered with urgency. “They’re here! You must go before you’re missed!” He knelt down and offered Rogers his hand. “But thank you, Lieutenant. Thank you so very much. You have saved us, and we shall never forget it.”

“Glad I could… uh… help,” said Rogers.

He re-fastened his helmet and—with a boost from Ungo—made his way up to the hatch. He climbed up the ribbed metal tunnel, wishing he could look down again, and see if this had all been a strange hallucination after all. He had no idea what he’d tell Command when he got back to the surface. He wasn’t sure how to explain a secret lair at the centre of the Moon, housing a pair of sophisticated dinosaurs contemplating quantum mechanics for fun. That would take some convincing.

He finally saw the top of the tunnel, and when he reached out for the white rocks above, a hand caught his, and hoisted him out, and onto the lunar surface.

“Thanks,” he said, settling down. “I was afraid you wouldn’t know where to look for me.”

“Of course we knew,” said the astronaut in a grizzled, tortured voice, and Rogers turned to see the stranger before him: a man in a dark and battered space suit, with a pair of swords clipped to his back, and massive claw marks across the visor of his helmet. “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, all these millennia…”

Rogers stumbled back, because all around him were more and more such astronauts, for miles and miles, all gathering around him like he was emitting a signal they couldn’t ignore.

“Wh…what’s going on?” he asked.

“You saved those scaly bastards from extinction,” said the astronaut, and planted a firm hand on Rogers’ shoulder. “Now it’s our turn.”

Written for Joël, who fiendishly requested the topic: “Quantum Field Theory + Moon Craters + Dinosaurs in the Moon’s Core + The Time Between 2 Instances is Infinite + Potato Bag”

Potato Farm

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Marlon wasn’t sure where to begin.

“What do you mean you haven’t started to harvest yet? What have you been doing for the last three months?”

Dulcie shifted uncomfortably, staring at the ground. The flat, dusty, unforgiving ground. “Waiting for them to blossom.”

“Wait for what to blossom?” said Marlon, and indeed the entire field—acres and acres of it—was entirely devoid of plant life. It was like a moonscape. And not a very exciting moon, either. “I don’t see any plants here, do you?”

“I thought they might be camouflaged,” said Dulcie. “Hiding out.”

“What kind of plants hide out?”

“Shy ones?”

“Unbelievable,” sighed Marlon, checking his checklist for probably the 100th time. “Well I’ll tell you what. The boss is going to be mighty unhappy with you about this. I mean, missing the quota by a bit? That’s life. Missing it by a lot? That’s a problem. But not having a single unit after all this time?”

“Oh look! There’s one!” said Dulcie, pointing into the distance.

Marlon squinted his eyes to see. “Where?”

“There, beside the dirt.”

“It’s all dirt.”

“Yes, but the flatter part, over there. With the…brown. I think I see a plant.” She watched the spot very carefully for a moment before sighing. “False alarm. It was just dirt.” Then she switched things up: “You know what the problem is?”

“Your complete inability to farm?”

“The seeds were faulty.”

Marlon stowed the checklist. “It’s a poor farmer who blames her—”

“No, I’m serious,” she said, getting all jittery as she formulated a silly excuse on the fly. “First of all, there weren’t nearly as many as I was expecting, so I had to space them out a lot, so I reckon the seeds got lonely and didn’t sprout.”

“That’s not how seeds work and you know it.”

“Do I, though?”

“Fair point,” said Marlon. “Regardless, you should’ve seen some results by now.” He surveyed the sprinkler systems, zigzagging across the field. “You watered them, right?”

“Every day!” said Dulcie, proudly. “I followed the instructions to the letter.”

“It just makes no sense,” sighed Marlon. “And I really don’t know how to explain to the boss that he has nothing to show for his investment. He needed these soldiers to—”

“Wait, what?” asked Dulcie. “Soldiers?”

Marlon looked uncomfortable. He checked his checklist again, as if it held the key to his not having to answer her. “Just a few soldiers.”

“But they’re potatoes…” she said. “We’re growing potatoes, not soldiers.”

“Potatoes can be soldiers, too,” countered Marlon. “Some of my best friends are militant taters. A hearty race, those potatoes. Nothing can keep ‘em down.”

“But how do they hold weapons? They have no arms, no legs, no—”

“That’s just racist, Dulcie. I can’t believe you said that.”

“But—”

“Listen,” he said. “We have a serious problem here. The boss’ ship is due to arrive at the end of the week, and he’s expecting a yield of at least a thousand soldiers to help him fight the Sygs, and all we’ve got to show for our efforts is a whole lot of dirt, and however many chickens Greg managed to raise.”

“Greg’s mean,” said Dulcie. “He calls me incompetent.”

“Well you are, aren’t you? Can’t even grow potatoes! Everyone can grow potatoes! You just stick ‘em in soil and they grow!”

“Maybe you got me pacifist seeds. Maybe they’re refusing to grow on principle.”

“You can’t—”

“Maybe they’ve had enough of the military industrial complex, tired of being chewed up and spit out like disposable commodities, and they decided here and now that no sir, this is far enough. Hell no, we won’t grow! Hell no, we won’t grow!”

Marlon stared at her for a moment. “Do you appreciate, I wonder, how stupid you sound?”

“You’re the one trying to enlist potatoes to fight a war.”

“Not enlist, grow.” He sighed, and dialled up his condescension. “You do realize that potatoes are some of the fiercest warriors in the galaxy, don’t you? Many a planet has been razed through the might of the tater menace. A coup is not a coup without potatoes on your side. I’d sooner have a squadron of spuds than a planet-killing superweapon, because unlike a super-weapon, potatoes have no weaknesses.”

“But I still don’t see how—”

“Potatoes kill. It’s as simple as that.”

“OK, so, I hear what you’re saying, but I just want to point out that I’ve eaten a lot of potatoes in my life, and not one of them killed me.”

She half-expected Marlon to argue with her, but instead he knelt down and scooped up some of the dirt, let it fall back down through his fingers. “Those potatoes weren’t grown in Garugian soil.”

“What’s Garugian soil?” she asked, then added: “Besides, obviously, all this soil right here that we’re standing on. Right?”

He glared at her. “Correct. Garugian soil has a special chemical compound that activates the latent anger molecules within the potatoes, agitates them, and amplifies the murder genes until the potatoes can’t help but kill everything they see.”

Dulcie let the wind blow a little before saying: “I don’t see how that makes sense, but lonely seeds is somehow absurd.”

“Seeds don’t get lonely,” he sneered. “But Gaugian soil does breed monsters.”

“Oh!” said Dulcie, clapping her hands together. “I know! Maybe I had to peel them first? Take off the outer layer? Maybe the soil couldn’t get through?”

Marlon could see, in the distance, Greg approaching in his pickup. It was such a welcome sight, he was only half-listening to Dulcie anymore. “Hmm? Outer layer, yes. Yes, probably.”

“Never said anything in the instructions about peeling ‘em, but in retrospect I suppose that makes sense,” continued Dulcie, entirely on her own. “Might wanna include that in the manual, for next time.”

“Mmhmm,” said Marlon as the pickup came to a stop, and a cloud of Garugian dust wafted past. Greg turned off the engine and kicked open the door (nearly taking the door clean off) and stumbled on out. Greg was a perpetual drunk, and an idiot…which made him a better employee than Dulcie by far.

“Y’early!” he slurred, nearly falling over on his first step.

“I’m exactly on time, as always,” said Marlon. “Please say the chickens are ready.”

“Yup!” said Greg. “All loaded up and ready t’roll!” He gave a conspiratol wink and added: “An’ tasty, too.”

Marlon scowled. “Just how many of them did you eat?” He got ready to change up his checklist.

“Just the runts,” said Greg. “Nobody’ll miss ‘em.”

“Let’s hope so,” sighed Marlon, crossing out some lines. “Alright, let’s go see them, and prep them for transport before—”

“They’re here,” said Greg, with a curious smile on his face.

“They’re… they’re what?” asked Marlon.

Greg slapped his truck. “They’re here. I brought ‘em. They’re here.”

“Here now?” asked Marlon. “Where? How?”

“In th’back,” said Greg.

“But we gave you five hundred certified fertilized eggs. Even if half of them died, there’s no way you could five two hundred and fifty chickens in the back of—”

Dulcie, who was already peering in the pickup bed, frowned and said: “Those are some weird-looking chickens.”

“Oh no,” said Marlon, to himself. “Oh no oh no oh no…”

Sure enough, when he peered over the edge of the truck, his worst nightmare came true. Greg hadn’t transported 500 unruly chickens in the back of his truck, he’d arrived with several hundred overgrown seed potatoes in various states of decomposition.

“T’be honest,” Greg said, upon joining Marlon. “I stopped the heating lamps after a few days. Stunk t’high heaven. Didn’t help ‘em hatch none, neither.”

Marlon looked over at Dulcie, who didn’t seem to have connected any dots of her own yet. “What did your seeds look like, exactly?” he asked.

She frowned at the memory. “About yay big. Round. But not like a circle, kinda pointier one one end. Hard. White, but not like white-white. More like eggshell white.”

“Eggshell white.”

“Yup,” said Dulcie, happy with her descriptive powers.

“Egg. Shell. White.”

Dulcie stared at him a moment.

“Yup,” she said.

“Oh dear,” whimpered Marlon, and threw his checklist across the field. “I’m a dead man. I’m so very much a dead man. I mean, you both are dead too, but me? He’ll eat me alive. After this, he’ll eat me alive.”

“What for?” asked Greg. “Seems t’me you got th’job done!”

“Got the job done?” said Marlon, voice rising with his temper. “Got the job done? I have a field full of buried eggs, and a pickup truck full of moldy potatoes just rotting in the sun—”

“They’re not rottin’, they’re just restin’, is all!”

“Resting?” snarled Marlon. “They’re resting?”

“Sure!” said Greg. “Just gotta wake ‘em up like so:” He took a deep breath and let out a very loud: “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

The potatoes, perhaps not surprisingly, did not perk up one bit.

But the oddest thing happened: the ground beneath them started to shake. A low rumble, but not a singular sound—more like hundreds of individual rumbles all rumbling at the same time. The checklist, a few feet away, was vibrating itself silly, clattering against the sprinkler pipes.

Dulcie’s face went from confusion to fear to pure joy and she exclaimed: “My potatoes are hatching!”

Marlon was about to argue when suddenly, right nearby, something erupted from the ground, spraying blackened shell and festering goo like a volcano as a savage, zombified chick clawed and scraped its way to the surface. Its beak was crooked and crackled, and its eyes a foul black that shone a demonic red.

“I see what you mean about the soil,” said Dulcie, just before the other 496 chicks emerged from their incubatory tombs and laid waste to the field, the farms, the nearby towns, and eventually the entire planet. No one was spared…except for the mountain of potatoes in the back of Greg’s old truck. They saw it all.

Spec-taters to a massacre.

Written for Brandon with the topic: “potato farm”

Harvey’s Twist

Tue, 17 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Day 27

I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

I try to keep to myself, stay out of crowds, but sometimes you just can’t avoid them. Sometimes you gotta get to the corner store to buy that pack of smokes before the jitters fray your nerves and you smell the smells you just can’t stand to smell anymore, and…

This lady tried to snag me. Grabbed at me, straight outta nowhere, like I was her property or somethin’. Like she had a right to me. Not some crackhead, neither. Middle-class dame, yellow cardigan lookin’ worn and wrinkled, but still made up. Still tryin’ to believe in a better world.

“C’mon, darling!” she said to me, tears in her perfect blue eyes. “Just a little!”

Hells no, lady. I ain’t fallin’ for that again. I flip her off and keep movin’.

This part of town’s not what you’d call affluent. When the first warnings hit, they didn’t rush out and buy all the hand sanitizer they could fit in their SUVs because they don’t got SUVs. Hell, most of ‘em couldn’t afford even one bottle of hand sanitizer. Not then. Certainly not now.

I can see ‘em watching me. Sizing me up. Figurin’ me out. Am I too rough? Or just rough enough? You can see the greed in their eyes.

A bus stops right near me, so I hop on the back doors and give the scavengers a pass. I don’t got a Presto card to pay with, but that’s OK. Fare inspectors ran outta masks weeks ago, and the drivers just wanna get home alive. Caution tape keeps us monsters six feet back, just in case. As if a cough really cares about tape.

I settle into a seat across from this nurse who looks like she’s been working non-stop for days on end, which I suppose is probably true. She’s got one earbud in, staring off into the distance like her body fell asleep and forgot to tell her eyes. Haven’t seen many medical professionals lately. At least not in daylight. It’s kinda spooky, to be honest.

“You had it yet?” she asks, without changing where she’s looking.

“Nope,” I say, hoping that’ll do.

“Immune?” she asks.

“I dunno,” I say. “Maybe. Probably. What’s it matter, really?”

She smiles like it’s a joke, pulls the one earbud free. Carly Rae Jepsen. *Good Time. *Right.

“You know what I miss?” she asks. “You know what I really miss?”

I know where this is going, and I don’t want none of it. I push the button, but the damn bus stops at a red. A long red. Empty streets, but we’re stuck here anyway.

“I miss pizza,” she says. “Not like home-made or artisan or anything fancy. I miss cheap and easy pizza, off a cardboard tray, half-heated and dripping grease.”

“Sounds like a health hazard,” I say, and she laughs.

“I miss eating health hazards instead of meeting them.”

“Yeah,” I say, and check to see how long it’ll be before the bus moves again. Not soon enough.

“I miss thinking grease on my scrubs was the worst that could happen,” she says, looking down at her stained, faded uniform. “Scrubbing spots with…with…” She starts to cry, and I’m pretty close to jumping out a window to escape. “I miss toilet paper,” she says. “I miss toilet paper so much.”

She looks at me, point blank, and takes a shaky breath. “How thick are you?”

“Aw come on, lady,” I say, backing up against the back of my seat. “Don’t do this.”

“I’ll be gentle,” she says. “I promise. I can be gentle.”

I pull on the cord to ask for a stop, but it makes no difference. We’re almost there, but it’s just not close enough.

“Just a little,” she says, standing carefully like she’s afraid she’s gonna spook me more than I already am. “I can feed you afterwards. How’s that sound? A little food for a little w—”

She reaches for me, and that’s all I can take. I smack her hand back as best I can and jump off my seat just as the bus jerks to a stop. The doors won’t open unless you push the yellow bar, but I’m not tall enough to reach on my own, and the driver sure as hell doesn’t realize what’s goin’ on past the caution tape, so I—

“C’mon, little guy…” says the nurse, and lunges for me. I dodge it—barely—and she collides with the doors, tumbling to the ground. Thankfully, she hit the yellow bar hard enough to open me an exit. I dash outside and run for cover.

I can hear her weeping as the bus drives away.

Can’t say I feel guilty, but I do feel bad.

I stick to the shadows the rest of the way. Takes longer, but it cuts down on unexpected detours. Or terminal ones.

There’s a guy passed out on the front steps of the corner store, a near-empty bottle of Fireball in his hand. Looks like he smells awful, but hey, who’m’I to judge, really? I do my best to let him sleep, try to slip in the door without wakin’ him.

Except the door doesn’t budge. It’s locked. The damn corner store is closed.

“Kid tested positive,” says the man out of nowhere, scaring the bejeezus outta me. “He was the only one working anymore, so they closed it all up.”

I hang back a safe distance from the man, but I don’t run just yet. Because as stinky as he is, there’s a definite scent I recognize. Cigarettes. Might not be a wasted trip after all.

“You been here long?” I ask.

“A few days,” says the man, then looks at me properly for the first time and says: “You s’posed to be a shamrock?”

Gotta say, feels good to have that be the first question I get, for a change. Not “how many plys are you?” or “two squares, or three?” It’s like I’m bein’ seen for who I am, not what I can do.

“Yeah,” I say. “Construction paper shamrock. With arms and legs.”

“Got a name?”

No one’s ever asked me that before. “Harvey,” I say. “Though folks call me Weird-ass Shamrock.”

“Harvey,” he says, then pats his chest. “Dennis.” He scratches his chin as a thought comes to him: “You know St Patrick’s Day is over.” I can tell he’s not sure how long ago that was. “You run away from home?”

“Blew away,” I say. “They taped me to the front door, but the wind snapped me up and just whoosh!” My accordion arm does a whirly-twirly motion into the sky.

“Wild ride,” says the man.

“Not as wild as when I landed,” I say, and he grunts, holds out the bottle for me.

“Want a drink?” he asks.

“Nah,” I say, because I know better than to get close to people.

He sets the bottle on the ground between us, scooches away. “Need a drink?”

I eye the bottle. Eye the man. Smell the smoke on his clothes.

Fine.

The Fireball cuts through my trauma like a steak knife through boiled potatoes. Two sips in, and I don’t even remember why I’m crinkled like this, or bent like that. Four sips in, and I even forget to stay out of reach of humans. Like I’m invincible. Like humans’ve got humanity after all.

“You got a smoke?” I ask, setting the bottle down with my wibbly-wobbly arms.

The man gives me a curious look. “You won’t catch on fire?” he asks.

“You really care either way?” I ask.

“Fair point,” he says, and pulls a cigarette from his pocket and hands it over. He lights it with a shaking hand, and I take a long drag and doesn’t exactly fix me, but makes me feel fixed.

“What’d you do, before the outbreak?” I ask, blowing smoke into the pristine air.

“Barista,” he says, dragging the bottle back to take a swig.

“Ooo,” I commiserate. “That’s gotta suck.”

“Could be worse,” he says with a shrug. “People might wanna wipe their ass with me.”

“Touché,” I say, and take another drag.

A few moments pass where neither of us say a thing, and neither of us move. It’s a weird feeling, being at peace. I haven’t had peace for 27 days. Feels wrong.

“So I gotta ask,” I say, as the cigarette winds down. “Cards on the table: you gonna try snatching me for some number-two adventurin’ when this is done?”

He laughs—which does not make me feel better—and shakes his head. “Nah, I’m good,” he says. “You’re safe.”

“You just like the scent of feces or somethin’?” I ask.

He laughs. “Don’t need wiping,” he says. “Haven’t for years now.”

I dunno what kind of weird utopia this guy’s from, but I have to admit he’s piqued my interest. “How’s that?” I ask.

And then Dennis, the lay-about former barista in a world gone wrong, he tells me about a thing called a bidet. And after I’m done laughing at him and humanity as a whole, I get to thinking, and…

Day 137

Of the two options, I like the second. The lighting brings out the green a little better, and the shadows catch my crinkles just so. The copy’s a little meh, though: “How a paper shamrock turned a poop apocalypse into Wall Street’s brightest star.”

I mean it’s crap… but if there’s one thing I can handle. it’s crap.

Written for Jillian with the topic: “Harvey the shamrock fears for his life during the age of no toilet paper (and covid)”

The Space Between Sneezes

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Liz knew it was coming, and try as she might, she couldn’t stop it from happening. The silence of her isolated chamber was punctuated by a sudden “ACHOO!” which she thought, for a second, made the windows rattle. But they were reinforced plexiglass, several inches thick, so that wasn’t especially likely.

She blinked in confusion as the oddest feeling came over her—like her body was going limp, but still holding itself together somehow. She grabbed for one of the concrete walls, bracing herself, and when gasped for air.

Up above, a speaker ka-clicked to life, and she heard Henny prepare to speak and say—

“Don’t!” hissed Liz, vision spotting. “Don’t!”

“Sorry,” said Henny. “Habit.”

Liz fell to her knees, reaching under the bench and finding the steel case they’d left there for this exact situation. She entered the 10-digit passcode, flipped it open, and pulled the high tech goggles over her eyes. Her finger found the power button, and—

Nothing.

She tried again, but still nothing.

“Did we check the batteries recently?” she said, the strength in her voice fading.

“Uh…” said Henny. “I, uh… no?”

Liz threw the goggles across the room and slumped back, head lolling. “Please say you see it.”

Faint clicking sounds came from the speaker. Typing. The agonized sound of something squinting at a screen and trying to make out the shape of something that wasn’t really there.

“I don’t…” said Henny. “I mean it’s not…”

Liz rested her head against the wall. “Infra-red,” she whispered, feeling the last of her life draining away, like air out of a balloon.

“No, it’s just—WHOA!” said Henny. “Whoa, I see it! It’s there! I see it!”

Liz squinted up at the camera rig, at the top of the bunker. “Where?”

The lights in the room shut off, then came back on in a whole other spectrum. It took her a moment, but Liz was finally able to see, across the room from her, a kind of yellow cloud floating in the air. It was swirling and tumbling in on itself, like there was a fan blowing at it from the oddest angle. But that wasn’t possible, because the chamber was airtight, with no ventilation systems whatsoever. The closest thing Liz had to airflow was seeing the world outside the window—and even that was a view of another subterranean bunker.

The cloud hovered there, drifting toward the plexiglass like it was going to make a run for it…but never quite finished the approach. Then, without warning, it swooshed its way around the room, heading for the door—also sealed tight—where it paused again, like it was deciding which option it liked best.

“It’s so beautiful,” said Henny, as lasers and spectrometers and other instruments cycled through the room, trying to make sense of what they were seeing.

“It is…” whispered Liz, eyes drifting closed.

“I never would have thought a soul would look like that,” said Henny. “But now that I see it, it seems just so… natural.”

“Hmm,” nodded Liz, slipping further into unconsciousness.

A faint beeping played out in her ear, and then a long tone—her heartbeat. She was dead. She could hear it happening, but couldn’t make herself do anything about it. And yet, she realized, she was still conscious. What an odd sensation, being dead and alive at once.

“Oh crap,” said Henny, slamming keys and adjusting her microphone. “Crap, you’re dying. Give me a second. Just want to get the residual radiation metrics before—”

Liz toppled sideways, and one of her eyes drifted open enough to see her soul-cloud whisping around looking for an exit. More urgently, too. Verging on frantic.

“Hurry,” she wheezed.

“Almost got it,” said Henny. “Alllllmost…”

The soul raced toward the window, smashing into it so hard the cloud exploded outward in all directions like a wave hitting the shore. The tendrils of the yellowish smoke coiled back around, ready to take another try.

“Got it!” laughed Henny, and then leaned into the mic very closely to say: “Bless you!”

The smoke twisted around at the sound of the words, like it was glaring at the speaker.

It did not, very notably, return to Liz’s body.

“Uhhh…” said Henny, tapping the microphone. “Is this thing on?”

“A… again…” said Liz.

“Bless you!” called Henny. “Bless you! Bless you! BLESSSSSS YOOOOOOOUUUU!”

Nothing. No reaction. If anything, the soul-cloud looked even more upset than before. It smashed into the plexiglass with full force, which was a pointless exercise because the thing had been made to with stricter standards than the space station, besides which a soul was not really a physical object that could—

CRACK.

Liz’s eyes, despite being dead, opened wide. She heard Henny’s gasp, too.

“Uhh,” said Henny. “Did I just hear a—”

SMASH. CRACK.

The plexiglass was starting to crack. Spiderwebs of tension, coming apart, all along the edge where Liz’s soul had hit. It was still a long way from truly breaking, but not nearly far enough.

“Help…” Liz said, trying to point a finger at the cloud but finding the effort so incredibly exhausting she could only barely make her arm wiggle.

“OK OK OK,” said Henny, flipping through pages of instructions. “OK, so according to Fraunholder, if the soul gets more than five metres from you, you’ll actually die-die. So as long as we don’t—”

SMASH. CRACK.

“Don’t… let… me… die…” Liz said, trying to drag herself closer to the window. It was very slow-going.

“I don’t understand!” Henny squeaked, flipping pages far too quickly to be reading. “They said this would work! I saw ‘bless you’ and the soul is forced back in! What’s going wrong?”

“Took… too… long…”

“Oh don’t start with me again!” Henny said, sounding hysterical. “There is absolutely no evidence that a soul becomes stale the longer it’s outside—”

Liz smacked her palm on the floor, pointed up at the cloud with a trembling arm. The closer she got to it, the more energy she had. But nowhere near enough to catch it. Not even close.

“OK,” said Henny, slamming the binder shut. “I’m coming in. I’ve got a containment unit, and—”

“No!” Liz gurgled. “It… will… escape…”

“Then what do you want me to do?” asked Henny. “I can’t leave you there! I’m not watching you die, Liz! That wasn’t part of the deal!”

Liz smiled at that thought. All this came down to a coin toss. She’d won the flip, and now she was going to die, watching her soul float above her as some kind of super-spectrum cloud of pink—

She frowned. The cloud was pink. Changing to purple. Cycling through colours.

“T-try…” she said, pushing herself directly under it. “Try other words…”

“What?” snapped Henny. “No, what?”

“N-not bless you,” said Liz. “Other languages.”

Henny’s frown was audible. “Why would it respond better to—”

BOOM! CRACK!

“Henny!”

“Right! Right! OK! Hold on!” She clicked furiously, mashing her keyboard so quickly it almost sounded like the plexiglass coming apart. “OK, so, uh: Gesundheit!”

The cloud flinched at that, again glaring at the speaker above.

“Closer…” said Liz. “Try more…”

“I can’t read half of these!” said Henny. “Uh… Ter… terveydeksi?”

The cloud jerked sideways, back away from the plexiglass. It looked very much like it had been burned by something. Or maybe that was just it cycling its colours back around to yellows and oranges and reds.

“Salute!” Henny shouted, and it snarled and pounded back into the plexiglass with a whole new ferocity. This time, Liz very much heard the sound of things breaking. Little shards of plastic sprayed down onto her, but she was too weak to shield herself.

“Kher be inshalla!” said Henny. “Gesondheet! Prosit! Uh…na zdravie!”

The soul-cloud whooshed downward, hovering right over Liz’s body trembling with palpable fury at the assault it found itself under. She closed her eyes out of something resembling fear, but realized she could still feel it, even if she couldn’t see where it was. It had a sharpness to it now. A threatening sharpness that it was—was this even possible?—about to stab straight through her.

“Hurry!” she cried, covering her head with her arms as the cloud wound back and got ready to shred her to pieces.

“Can’t read, can’t read, can’t read…ah!” Henny yelled, and then blurted out: “Alhamdulillah!”

The change was so sudden, Liz gasped for air. The cloud swirled and whirled around like it was caught in a cyclone, and then just as the room started to shudder with a deafening roar, the cyclone angled itself perfectly and injected itself straight back into Liz’s nose.

She convulsed back as the oddest sensation flooded through her body. She tumbled sideways, eyes watering as her hand caught the edge of the bench, searching for something to ground her as an avalanche of feelings crackled through her, giving her new insights she never thought possible.

“Liz?” called Henny, so close to the microphone now. “Liz? Did it work? Are you OK?”

Liz let out a gasp so loud, it made her ears pop. She rolled onto her stomach, curling into a ball, as her soul settled back where it belonged.

“I’m…” she wheezed. “I’m OK…”

“Are you, though?” asked Henny. “Because you look kinda not-OK.”

“I just need a minute,” said Liz, her ears crackling at the sound of Henny’s voice.

“Yeah, sure, totally understandable,” said Henny. “I mean, you did just have your soul try to leave you to die, so I guess that would be a little draining.”

“Henny…” Liz said, cradling her head in her hands as a splitting headache grew and grew and grew.

“I was just reading through the rest of the notes from Fraunholder, and he was saying that if the soul got free, it would start to mutate. I mean, in theory. That souls evolve faster than biological creatures, so basically in the space of an hour, it would be significantly more powerful than—”

“Henny… s-stop…” said Liz, feeling so ill she wasn’t sure she wanted to be alive anymore at all.

“Which I mean would explain why it didn’t respond to the basic commands anymore. It was learning to ignore the phrasing that would typically re-capture an escaped soul.”

“H-Henny…”

“Which is why, I guess, Fraunholder was so insistent that souls either be left to escape, or re-contained within a short period of time, or else—”

“Henny!” Liz said, curling into such a tight ball that she felt like her bones might crack.

“But yeah, for future reference, the word that really gets these buggers is Bangla. For whatever reason, they really can’t stand the phrase ‘Alhamdulillah—”

Liz sat up straight, her eyes a changing storm of red, yellow, orange and purple, as the concrete around her rattled and started to come apart from an invisible energy somehow at her command, yet completely out of control.

“A-Alhamdulillah…?” Henny yelped.

Liz floated off the ground, and the roof of the bunker broke away, flying straight up through the complex and blowing a hole out to the sky. The cloud carried her upward, coursing through her body like a vengeful god.

“SILENCE!” she roared, and the shockwave flattened buildings for miles.

In her control centre, Henny watched the devastation through her own plexiglass window, and knew what she had to do.

She sprinkled pepper on her face and let the feeling build and build and build.

“There’s only one way to fight a monster,” she said, and spewed forth the one and only thing that—she prayed—could save humanity from the terror of the sneeze.

Written for Liz with the topic: “the whole soul-flying-out-of-your-body-when-you-sneeze thing”

Fie

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Holli knew she’d screwed up the second she heard the bang. It wasn’t like a flat tire sorta bang, and it wasn’t like a broken this-and-that deep inside the car…it was a heavy bang, like part of something had come apart, and wasn’t going back together any time soon.

She slammed on the brakes and put the car into park, popped the door open and peered out. Nothing seemed amiss on the driver’s side, and since she was already late, she—

“Help,” wheezed a faint voice from somewhere she couldn’t see. “Help me…”

A rush of fear flooded through Holli’s bloodstream, so strong she could hear her heart pounding in her ears. She tried to undo her seatbelt, but her hands were shaking too much. She considered putting the car back in drive and just leaving and going to the class and pretending none of this had happened, but her hands were shaking too much for that, too. And either way, she had to know. Had to see.

She finally got herself loose, setting an unsteady foot on the street—boot grinding in the gravel—and stood, holding onto the side of the car for support.

“Help…” came the voice again, even fainter than before.

Holli took a bracing breath, and followed the sound of a very faint wheezing, coming from the back.

She reached the corner, still not seeing anything, and thought maybe it was somehow her mind playing tricks on her. Maybe the bang *had *been a flat after all, and maybe—

And then she saw the blood. A pool of it, creeping outward, slowly, toward the drain at the side of the road. Dark and thick and awful and she…

“Help,” wheezed the voice, and she finally saw him, laying sprawled on the concrete, arms and legs bent in such strange ways she couldn’t quite fathom how they were meant to fit together at all anymore.

She rushed to his side, kneeling in the blood, turning his head toward her even though she knew somewhere in the back of her mind she wasn’t meant to do that, but not know what else she could do. His last moments of life couldn’t be filled with pain and loneliness. She needed him to know she was there with him at the end…even if she was the whole reason the end had come at all.

His receding hair, soaked with blood, stuck to her fingers as his unfocusing eyes tried to make sense of what was happening. He squinted, fought to see her…and when he did, he let out a raspy word that would haunt her forever: “Fie!”

Holli’s lawyer was trying to remain calm, but the prosecutor was pushing all her buttons. She slammed her notepad closed as she stood and declared: “Your honour, counsel is leading the witness again.”

The judge, a wizened old man who wore his robes a little too big, scrunched up his nose before glaring at the prosecutor. “She’s right, Ms Landau. You’re not testifying here. She is.”

Landau, ever the professional, gave a small bow to the judge. “Apologies, your honour. The technical aspects of the case are—”

“Yes yes yes, you’ve said so a thousand times,” grumbled the judge. “Why not let someone else have a go?”

Landau’s smile never faltered. “Of course, your honour.” She turned back to the witness, a nervous-looking woman who kept fidgeting with the cuff of her sleeve like it could get her out of here. Landau set a hand on the bar separating them. “Ms Oren,” she said. “What percentage of your clients, would you say, come into mortal danger while on their excursions?”

Oren did some quick math in her head. “I mean…probably zero. Aside from this case, of course. We take great pride in keeping them safe from crazies when they—”

“Objection!” said Holli’s lawyer, on her feet. “My client is not crazy.”

“Not crazy,” said Oren. “A crazy. It’s—”

“Sustained,” said the judge, and then glared at Oren. “Please refrain from calling the defendant crazy. “

“Sorry, your honour,” she said. “But it is—”

Landau caught the thread before it got too far: “Ms Oren,” she said. “How do you determine threat matrices for your clients? Which is to say: before bringing them here, how do you determine what they should and should not do?”

“Oh, well,” said Oren, brightening up. “I mean there are the basic concerns, of course. Language barriers are always hard to reconcile. And disease, too, that’s a big one. Can’t risk triggering a pandemic on either side of the equation.”

“And in regards to—ahem—personality-driven conflicts?”

“Ah,” smiled Oren. “Well, we try to keep clients out of situations where they’ll bump into obvious dangers. So, you know, prejudicial minds, or people with certain preconceived notions about who they were…and, I mean, we stay away from things like shooting ranges or crime hot spots. Active war zones. That sorta thing. Steer clear of the cra—” She smiled at the judge. “Unpredictable people.”

“And yet,” said Landau, pointing toward Holli. “Unpredictable is what you got, isn’t it? The defendant put her car into reverse and backed around a corner into an intersection and struck Mr Shakespeare as he was lawfully crossing the street.”

“Your honour!” said Holli’s lawyer, again on her feet. “Testifying. Again.”

The judge glared at Landau. “One more time, Ms Landau, and you and I will have words.”

“Apologies, your honour,” she said, stepping back from the witness stand before continuing to talk to Oren. “Ms Oren, how many historical figures has your company brought into the modern era on tourist visas?”

Oren did more quick math. “About five hundred or so,” she said. “Some are repeats, but we logged our five hundredth trip last week.”

“And again, how many of those important historical figures have died?”

This one took no thinking whatsoever: “None. Well, one. William Shakespeare.” She sighed, shook her head. “And what a one to screw up on, too, right? The ripple effects are just…wow.”

This did not make Holli feel any better at all.

“A tragedy,” said Landau, to the jury this time. “And not a good one, like Mr Shakespeare would have written, if given the chance.” She scowled at Holli. “A miserable excuse for a tragedy, written by a careless fool.”

By the way the jury was looking at her, Holli was certain she knew how this story would end.

It had been six months. Six months of getting up early, six months of eating the same meal over and over and over again. Six months of trying not to get in trouble for looking or stepping or existing in the wrong person’s space. Holli was slowly adjusting to life behind bars, but somehow the reality of her situation still didn’t quite connect.

“Off in space again, H-Bomb?” asked her cellmate, a woman named Candi, as they say at the stainless steel cafeteria table. “And more to the point: you gonna finish that?”

She pointed to Holli’s tray with her spoon. Holli had no appetite. She hadn’t for some time now. She slid the tray over, and Candi went to it.

“It ain’t hit you yet?” asked Candi.

“What hasn’t?” asked Holli, coming partway out of her daze.

“That this is it? That this is everything left?”

Holli winced at the words. This was it for her. This was everything she would be, from now ‘til the end of her days. Three life sentences, consecutive, with no chance of parole for 90 years. Special statues passed to ensure nobody tried killing time travel tourists like Shakespeare…and applied, for the first time, to someone who’d just made a stupid mistake one time, and…

“I was trying to get to my pottery class,” she said, a little too quietly to be heard.

“Whuzzat?”

Holli stared at the streaks on the uncleaned table. “I was trying to get to my pottery class,” she said. “I was so focused on getting there on time, I didn’t really…I mean I knew I shouldn’t, but I…” She wiped tears from her eyes; you never cried in prison. Never. “I made a wrong turn and I backed up and then he was there, and I…”

She dragged a fingernail along a groove in the metal. “I was so afraid of being late, of losing a little time, that I made a stupid mistake that will literally cost me every last scrap of time I had left. An extra minute of driving versus a lifetime in here. And you know what the stupid part is? If I could use the technology he had…if I could go anywhere, any time at all? I would go back and cancel the damn pottery class. Buy myself a little time, and a whole lot more.”

Candi was too busy eating to really notice, but nodded all the same. “I made a flower pot once,” she said. “Smashed it over my mom’s head before I cut her into—”

“Inmate!” barked the guard from the side of the room, glaring right at Holli. “Up. Now.”

Holli did as she was told. She knew, by now, to always do what she was told. The guard motioned her over, and she shuffled her way over.

“Lawyer’s here to see you,” said the guard, and didn’t even wait for Holli’s answer before dragging her out the door.

She was shuffled into a private room with thick concrete walls that were so pitted and cracking they reminded Holli of the street where Shakespeare’s blood had slowly oozed away. She was so distracted by the sight of it, she didn’t even notice who was waiting for her in the room:

“Just hear me out,” said Ms Oren, standing to meet her.

Holli had a strong urge to turn and go, but instead forced herself to stay. She didn’t sit, though. She just watched Oren carefully.

“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” said Oren. “I am, truly. When we pick input zones, we usually keep far away from streets or other places that might…” She realized Holli didn’t care, and shook it off. “It never should have happened,” she said. “I feel like I’m as much to blame as you.”

“And yet here I am,” said Holli. “And you’re out there.”

“I know, I know,” said Oren. “But Holli—can I call you Holli?—I’m hoping we can find a way to make this work out for everyone.”

“Work out?” Holli snarled. “I’m the most hated woman in history! How the hell do you think this could possibly work out?”

“Well exactly,” said Oren. “You are the most hated woman. In history.” A smile started spreading across her face. “And our switchboard has been absolutely blowing up since your conviction. Like, on a whole other level.”

“Wait, what?” asked Holli, finally taking a seat, mostly out of confusion.

“Everyone wants to meet the woman who killed William Shakespeare,” said Oren. “Whether it’s because they think you’re a monster, or they think you’re a victim, or framed, or they just don’t know…everyone wants to spend a day with you.”

Holli couldn’t quite…

“It’s simple,” said Oren, pulling paperwork from her bag and setting on the table between them. “We’ll spot you—technical term, sorry. We’ll temporally transport you each morning to a new locale, anywhere up to about 1,000 years hence, where you’ll spend a few hours with a client. Food and accommodation included, of course. After that, back home, and we do it all again tomorrow. If you’ll agree, we have about fifteen years’ worth of clients lined up and waiting to say hello.”

Holli tried to shake her brain into understanding. “So wait, I’ll just get let go…?”

“No no no,” laughed Oren. “No, you’ll still be incarcerated. If you don’t spend the rest of your life in prison, it kinda dulls the impact of your story. But you won’t really, in a way, spend much time being locked up. Most of our clients are trillionaires, so…”

Holli looked down at the papers in front of her. “Agreement of Non-Linear Temporal Employment.” Pages and pages of words that boiled down to one concept: she would be free.

“What do you say?” asked Oren, handing her a pen.

Holli took the pen, turned it around in her fingers, back and forth, back and forth, and with a sharp intake of breath—

“One request,” she said, looking up from the papers.

“Anything,” said Oren.

The crowd finished applauding, flowers thrown onstage, as the actors came out for one last bow. The sound of it was deafening, but Holli tuned it all out. She was too busy looking.

She saw him, finally, standing at the back of the stage, looking so happy with the performance it was really quite gutting to know that in non-contiguous time, he would soon be dead. William Shakespeare was downright gleeful, and in his element.

She caught him shortly after, as he was leaving with the rest of the company for a night of drinking. Caught him by the arm, whereupon he stared at her odd clothes, and the odd cut of her hair, and the odd way she laid her hands on him against all sense of decorum.

“Yes?” he asked, frowning deeply.

She slapped him. Hard.

“Look both ways before crossing the street, you moron,” she said, and went back to whatever version of her life those words led to.

Written for Holli: “killing someone with your car and spending the rest of your life in jail.”

Top of the Heap

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Thomas was not going to give up.

“No, I will not be quiet! It’s just wrong! She can’t do that!” he blustered, stomping his foot for effect. He was getting red in the face, and looking a bit like a toddler doing it, but he didn’t care. He was angry!

“We can’t tell her she’s wrong,” said Janice, trying to calm him down by (from all appearances) detached condescension. “She has just as much a right to be here as the rest of us.”

Thomas waved a flailing hand in Carleigh’s direction. “But she’s brought knives to practice! Knives!”

Carleigh looked up from her box of knives, a slightly worrying look on her face, and grinned at Thomas. She was stroking one of the knives gently. Gently.

Janice was trying to think of how to defuse the situation, but wasn’t getting anywhere, obviously, because instead of a well-reasoned argument she said: “Isn’t it about lunchtime yet?”

“It’s nine-thirty,” said Keily.

“Dammit,” said Janice.

Thomas was shuddering with fury. He stood up from his chair, nearly knocking over a music stand, and pointed a mancing finger at Carleigh. “Either she goes, or I do!”

Janice was about to answer when Keily cut in: “You can’t quit, Thomas. We need you.”

“Yes,” sighed Janice. “You’re our only baritone. Without you, the orchestra is just…”

“High-pitched,” said Keily.

Thomas grabbed his coat and headed for the door. He paused there, squinting at them all—and Carleigh and her knives, especially—and said, in the most baritone-y way possible: “I hope you all get what you deserve.”

He slammed the door so hard, Keily let out a little burp.

“Save it for the performance,” said Janice. “You know how you got in Prague when you—”

“Yes yes, I know, I know,” said Keily, slumping into her seat. She gestured toward Carleigh, secretly, and said, under her breath: “What is her deal, anyway?”

Janice watched Carleigh cradle the knife, swaying it side to side like a baby. She was whispering something to it, and it wasn’t entirely clear it was English, or necessarily sane.

“I…” Janice said, feeling a cold shiver run through her body. “I don’t know. She seemed normal yesterday, didn’t she?”

Keily winced. “Define ‘normal’.”

“Hey guys, sorry I’m late,” said Yara, coming in from the stage door. She set down her music on a stand near the front and cricked her neck. “Where’re we at? Warmed up already?”

“Only by accident,” said Keily. “Look over there.”

Yara followed Keily’s gesture, looking over to see Carleigh cradling the knives. Her face dropped immediately. “Whuuuuuut is going on over there?”

“That’s what we want to know,” said Keily. “I mean, I get wanting to have props around for a performance, but this is just a little… out there, y’know?”

Janice checked her watch like she had someplace very important to be. Which she didn’t, obviously, right at the start of rehearsal. Still: “Well that’s just great. I’m really sorry, guys, but I need to go, uh, deal with the marketing materials, and… uh… yeah.”

She scurried away, leaving Keily and Yara and Carleigh alone onstage. It was decidedly quiet. Ominous, even. Well, except for Carleigh’s persistent whispering. That was definitely audible.

“So who’s gonna ask her?” asked Keily, and immediately slumped lower in her seat to avoid being chosen, despite being one of two candidates available.

Yara wished she’d worn her thicker, more protective clothes today. Not that she had any meant for deflecting knives. She should really get some of those. Somehow.

“Coin toss?” she asked.

Keily didn’t even check her pockets before answering: “Don’t have a coin.”

Yara winced. “Rock paper scissors?”

Keily held up her hands in really distorted configurations and said: “Arthritis.”

Yara sighed, nodded, picked up her thick leather music folio for protection, and made her way across the stage, very very carefully. Carleigh saw her coming and her smile got a little bigger, a little more deranged. She hugged her knife even closer.

“Hey there,” said Yara, keeping a safe distance. “You, uh, look real happy there, huh?”

Carleigh giggled to herself. “She talked to me.”

Yara was really hoping for a better response, but she would work with what she had. “The knife talks to you? That’s neat. Does it have a n—”

“*Shh!” *hissed Carleigh, suddenly angry. Then she said to the knife: “Yes, she is noisy, isn’t she?”

Yara wasn’t sure what to do. She backed away slowly until she nearly fell off the stage, then made a quick dart back over to Keily, who was practically under her seat, trying to hide.

“How’d it go?” she asked Yara.

“I think she’s lost her mind.”

“Well I mean she voluntarily signed up for a burp orchestra, so I mean—”

“Yes, but we did, too, and we’re not—”

Keily started to laugh. A little at first, then more and more, then she fell onto her side, cackling madly. Yara just frowned and stared, then let out a loud sigh, because yes, she really was the only sane one around.

“Where is everybody?” asked Charlotte, coming in from the back.

“I thought you had today off,” said Yara.

“I can’t stay away,” she said. “What’s up with Keily? Did they cut her solo again?”

Keily cackled harder.

Yara shook her head. “She’s not crying. She’s laughing. And also, yes, they cut her solo.”

“What?” asked Keily, sitting up straight very suddenly. “When?”

“After you couldn’t hit the f-sharp last night. They said you’re not ready.”

“I keep saying they were out of Coke! Pepsi just doesn’t have the same viscosity! I can’t—”

“Guys,” said Carleigh, standing up and setting her box of knives down on the seat next to her. “I want a solo.”

Keily ducked back down. Yara took a cautious step back. Charlotte, though, didn’t know about the knives, so she just smiled and said: “Well, Carleigh, you’re new here, so it may be a while before you get a solo. Some of us have been burping professionally for, what, a year now?”

“Heh,” said Yara, watching the box carefully.

“And anyway,” continued Charlotte, “the running order’s set for this season. We can’t just switch things around last-minute without all kinds of work being done in the back office. Janice—where is Janice, anyway?—needs lots of lead time to make new posters and programmes and…”

Carleigh was starting to tear up. She sniffled. “But I can burp.”

“I know,” said Charlotte. “But it’s not just a question of—”

“But I can burp!” cried Carleigh, and let out a big, round, rolling belch that covered an entire two octaves of sound in a single breath. It was majestic. Truly majestic.

When she was done, Charlotte’s patient smile returned. “That’s nice, dear. But—and let me be blunt—if you want to get to the top spot in this orchestra, you’re going to need to do something like this…”

And with that, she jumped onto a chair, spread her arms wide and let out a burp that not only stunned and amazed, but also somehow perfectly recreated the entire opening bars of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro—the singing and the orchestra, all in one—in a pitch-perfect delivery.

When she finished, Keily started to applaud. Before remembering the knives, at which point she ducked for cover again.

“But…” sobbed Carleigh. “But I…”

“What Charlotte’s trying to say,” interjected Yara, trying to keep things calm. “Is that being a professional burpist is a life-long journey that—”

“No, what I’m saying is that she has to try harder,” snapped Charlotte.

Yara shook her head, trying to keep things civil. Charlotte had a reputation for exploding at people unexpectedly, and this was not the right time to do that. “I mean we all have to try harder, so—”

“Her especially!” shouted Charlotte. “Did you hear her Dvorak last week? She could barely hit the high notes!”

“I w-w-was reading the wrong line and I—”

“She was reading the wrong line, Charlotte,” said Yara. “Happens to all of us.”

“Not me!” snapped Charlotte. “That’s the difference between a soloist and a—”

“Hey, fun idea!” said Yara. “You can have my solo, Carleigh!”

Carleigh looked over, shocked and a little bit hopeful. “Really?”

“You don’t have a solo,” said Charlotte.

Yara’s smile was sticking to its guns, despite her overwhelming desire to run and hide. “I do.”

“No you don’t. What solo? What piece?”

“The one with the… notes,” said Yara, still smiling. “You know. The one with the burping and the notes and—”

“Listen,” said Charlotte, setting her bag down noisily. “She’ll get her shot when she’s ready. But so long as there are stars in this orchestra like me, or Thomas, or Keily—”

“Don’t drag me into this,” whimpered Keily.

“—she’s going to have to try extra hard. She can’t just replace one of us without earning it.”

And that’s when Carleigh picked up the bigger knife. “Hello, Whimsy,” she whispered to it. “Yes, flying is fun, isn’t it?”

Charlotte stumbled back. “W-what’s going on? Why does she have knives?”

Yara gave her a this is what I was trying to tell you look.

Keily was crawling for the exit.

“Carleigh, listen,” said Yara. “You’re a great musician. You’re really going places. And what Charlotte said is right, too. You’ve gotta work your way there, right? There are no shortcuts. Even if you think you can, uh, make a shortcut, it’s no guarantee that—”

Carleigh looked over at Charlotte, a glint in her eyes. “No shortcuts?” she asked, possibly the knife.

Charlotte was looking for a way to escape without it looking like she was looking for an exit. It was not working out for her.

Carleigh gave the knife a kiss. “I’m sure you’ll do your best,” she said.

“Carleigh, wait,” said Charlotte. “Let’s just—”

And then Carleigh threw the knife, quick and fierce—

“Yeep!” whimpered Keily.

—into Yara’s stomach!

Yara stumbled back, dropping her music everywhere. She dropped into a seat, looking down at the giant knife sticking out of her, and could only think to mutter: “Perfect.”

Carleigh looked a lot more reasonable now. “You’re right,” she said to Charlotte. “I’m not ready for the top spot. I need to work my way up. Starting with Yara’s part!”

She skipped over, pushing Yara off her chair and scooping up her music. Yara, still very much alive but laying on the floor in a pool of her own blood, looked over to Keily and scowled. “Thanks for the help.”

“I lost a contact,” whispered Keily, and kept crawling for the exit.

Charlotte wasn’t sure what to do next. She saw Carleigh setting up for rehearsal, saw Yara bleeding to death, and saw the box of knives unattended, roughly the same distance from her as it was from Carleigh. There was only one thing to do. Only one way out.

“So are we starting with Beethoven or Bach today?” she asked, heading for her own seat.

“Beethoven,” said Carleigh.

“Bach,” correct Yara.

“Shh,” said Carleigh.

Charlotte opened up her folio and settled into her seat, looking ever so subtly to her right, where the box of knives was. Within reach. So easily within reach. She smiled at Carleigh. “Would you like to count us in?” she asked, and sat taller like she was going to start burping as usual.

Carleigh gave a little giggle and adjusted her music. She took a deep breath then said: “One…”

Charlotte reached into the box…

“Two…”

She took hold of a knife handle…

“Three…”

She pulled it free, seeing the glint of light on the blade…

“Four…”

And—

“Psst,” said the knife. “You could be conductor, y’know?”

Charlotte paused. “Sorry?” she asked.

“Conductor. Of the orchestra,” said the knife, possibly telepathically, straight into her brain. “That guy’s a bozo. You should have that job. You’re way more talented.”

Charlotte set down the knife on her lap and frowned at it. “I am, aren’t I?”

“Yeah,” said the knife. “Only thing standin’ in your way, as I see it, is his continued existence.”

Charlotte smiled darkly. “Yes, you make a good point.”

“So here’s what I’m thinkin’,” said the knife. “Let’s just go up to the office, knock real nice-like, and—”

WHACK! Charlotte was thrown right off her chair, landing in a heap on the ground. Before Carleigh could react, Yara—who still had the knife sticking out of her, but was wielding her folio as a weapon—spun round and threw her leather-bound block of justice straight into Carleigh’s head, knocking her out cold.

Yara wiped the blood from her nose and sneered at the two of them. “No one’s getting promoted before me,” she growled.

“Damn straight,” said her folio, which then turned its attention to Keily. “How you doin’?”

Written for Carleigh, with the topic: “burp orchestra knives.” Careful what you wish for.

Downtime

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Ollie reloaded the page for probably the fiftieth time, but the answer was always the same: “server not available”, black on white, denying him his morning moment of zen.

“Webcam’s down,” he called to Gemma, making her coffee for her own moment of zen. “Webcam’s really down.”

“Have you checked the news?” she said, breaking the packet into her cup and guiding the water with shaking hands.

“No,” he said, “I check the webcam, then read the news.”

“You’re gonna want to switch that around today,” she said, taking her first sip, and suddenly becoming mellow. Her mouth curled up in a crinkly smile, and she sat down at the kitchen counter, finally awake. “Just check the news.”

“Why?” he asked, switching to his newsreader, “What’s on the… oh my god.”

“Yeah,” she said, sitting next to him. “That’s why the webcam’s down.”

“They lost power on the moonbase? How did that happen? Are they okay up there? Oh my god, how did I not know about this?”

“You read news second,” she said, but he wasn’t listening, just reading, fast. “It’s been all over everything since I got up. I was wondering how you were keeping so calm.”

“‘A departing shuttle burned a power cable and caused a system-wide shutdown of the power grid’,” he read, skimming over the story. “Backup systems failed… and… and there’s somebody stuck in there. Oh my god, Gemma! He’s stuck in there!”

“What’re you yelling at me for?” she yelled back. “Do I look like I control the universe?”

“But how can we not know what’s going on?”

“Well if you really want to know…” she turned on the TV, sat back down, “…why don’t you get your news live for a change?”

She put down the coffee cup at the sight of the moonbase from lunar orbit, zoomed in and digital, totally black against the terrain around it. The text crawl beneath restated the facts, but nothing could be as striking as the image of a burnt hole in the side of the main complex.

“Damn,” she said, “I didn’t hear about that part.”

“Administration officials have confirmed that is indeed a hole in the side of the moonbase,” said the news anchor in grave tones. “The hole which we have been tracking the last few hours is confirmed to be leaking oxygen, and officials say the base will be dangerously low of air in the next forty minutes.”

“Forty minutes!” cried Ollie, sitting down on the couch with his laptop, trying to find out more, from any source. “They can’t even get the shuttle back to dock in forty minutes! Does he have a suit?”

“Captain Bunning is said to be working to repair the electrical systems to the base,” continued the anchor as the picture zoomed in and out, and a small inset picture showed grave faces in NASA Mission Control, “and we have been told his personal communicator is still powered up, and he has been talking through the procedures with experts in Houston.”

“This is insane,” said Ollie, running his hands through his hair. “This is just insane. All the discussions say the pressurized suits are in the other half of the complex, and if the power’s not on, he can’t get there, so he’s probably going to asphyxiate or something.”

Gemma said nothing, just sat next to him, sipping her coffee, eyes stuck on the screen. He kept scrolling through comments, ideas, theories, anything.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” he said. “I mean, I can’t believe we’re actually seeing this. This is terrible, it’s—”

Gemma tapped him on the shoulder, and he looked up to see a small girl close up to a video camera, giant phone to her ear as she talked in that sing-songy voice preschoolers do so well. She was identified as Chloe Bunning, and her mother sat in the background, hand over her mouth like she was holding back a mournful sob.

“… an’ I love you, daddy,” said Chloe, “an’ mommy says you be brave okay? I’m gonna be brave for you too. I love you lots, daddy.”

“Say good-bye, darling,” choked the mother from the background.

“Bye-bye, daddy!” the girl smiled, and handed back the phone. The feed cut back to the exterior shot, and even the anchor said nothing for a moment.

“That poor girl,” said Gemma, her voice cracking. “That poor little girl.”

“Come on,” pleaded Ollie. “Come on, you’ve gotta—”

Suddenly, the lights in the moonbase flickered back on, and Ollie and Gemma joined the anchor and most of the newsroom in a shout of shock and joy. The camera zoomed in as far as it could go, shaking so much the astronauts on the shuttle must have been cheering themselves.

“Yes!” shouted Ollie, jumping from his seat and dropping his laptop on the ground. He and Gemma hugged so tight it was as if they were the ones being rescued, and not some man they’d never meet, a million miles away. Ollie started to cry, but it felt appropriate. Honest even. He kept his face buried into Gemma’s shoulder, her arms squeezing him, and he finally felt safe. They stayed there as the anchor replayed the facts, pointless words in this visceral moment of triumph.

Ollie exhaled, let go of Gemma, and they kissed the kind of kiss you have at the end of a war. They rested their foreheads together, eyes closed, and listened.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he whispered.

“You were yelling at the world,” she said. “It’s understandable.”

“I feel so… so something…”

“Little and vulnerable,” she said.

“Yeah, exactly.”

“I think that’s probably good. For all of us.”

The TV buzzed loudly, and they both looked over to see the crawl at the bottom of the screen wrapped with the words “Breaking News.” The anchor was back on-screen, his face pale and grave.

“NASA is now reporting… one moment,” he said. “NASA is now reporting that the hydraulics systems powering the east and west barrier doors have not come back online.”

Gemma covered her mouth. Ollie sat back down. The webcam showed Bunning urgently digging through wires and panels. He ripped his long-sleeved shirt off and kept working wearing only his sweaty undershirt.

“We’re hearing reports it can take up to four hours for the hydraulics systems to get back to full capacity,” said the anchor.

“He won’t last that long, will he?” Gemma asked faintly.

“I don’t think so,” Ollie said.

“What… what’s going to happen?”

Ollie looked up, took her hand in his, and squeezed.

“I don’t know,” he said solemnly. “But we’ll watch it together.”

This #1kstory is for Eli (“Server not available. Astronaut stranded on moon. Say bye bye. Celebration!”)

Tiny Movements, Big Movements

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Sunlight shone from below, reflected off the water beneath the old stone bridge. They sat there on the edge, catching whatever breeze they could, oblivious to sounds and stares of Beijing around them. She was a half-width too close to him, and desperately wished he was too.

The day had been a hot one. She loved the sensation, like a humid embrace on every part of her body, like a warm bath you brought with you all over town. The other girls in the office complained, bemoaned the way it made them look and feel, how they’d do best indoors. She couldn’t wait to get out again, out of the passionless recycled air, grey-blue and frigid, sucking the life out of her day.

The boy sat uncomfortably, loose shirt drenched with sweat, fingers slipping off the strings of his ukelele as he struggled to avoid seeing her. He was still a boy to her, ten years on, and she was certain she was that girl he teased in school. He would remain the boy for as long as he stayed blind, but she wouldn’t force it. She had to know he’d learned it on his own.

“I’m moving abroad,” he said, six notes from the end of the song. He didn’t play the rest, just sat there, looking into the water, the crickets filling the gap in conversation.

There were so many things she wanted to say. Don’t. You can’t. Not now. When? Where, and how will you get there and what will you do and how will it change you and will you remember to come back or is Beijing just where you started, and not where you’ll end? But most of all, she wanted to beg him to take her too.

“Oh,” was all she said, and stared into the water.

“University,” he explained. “Three years.”

“And then?” she asked.

He said nothing for a minute, put the ukelele on the bridge between them, and wiped the sweat off his face.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t know.”

“Are you scared?” she asked, and caught his eye. She was hopeful, hopeful he would be scared, that she could keep him here with her until he saw the shirt she wore just for him, the way she cut her hair to catch his eye. Appealing to all the tiny little clues she’d learned about him over the years, to piece together his idea of the perfect woman. She wanted him to stay so she could be that woman. She just needed time.

“Scared?” he repeated, looking at his instrument, rubbing the edge with his thumb to clean off a scratch that wouldn’t budge. “I suppose. It’s normal to be scared, though, isn’t it?”

“I would be,” she said.

“You’re scared of spiders,” he laughed. “You’re scared of everything.”

“I’m not scared of you,” she said, and this time, their eyes met for longer. Long enough that she didn’t need to say a word, and he didn’t need to reply. She picked up the ukelele and moved it to her other side, so there was only stone between them.

“My parents arranged it,” he said, picking at his thumb, wet skin sliding on skin. Distracting himself, poorly. “My father knows someone at the school and he said I’d make a great lawyer.”

“You would,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “I’m not very strong-willed. I let you push me around all the time.”

“That’s just wisdom,” she smiled, and he smiled back, rested his hands at his sides, and brushed his fingers against hers. “Your father is right. You’ll be great at anything you do.”

“I should stand up to him,” he muttered, and she forgot herself, took his hand, squeezed it. His father could shut him right down, and the day was going too perfectly for that to happen now. “He’s arranged a marriage for me.”

Her hand froze.

The crickets carried on, oblivious, but the rest of the city seemed to stall, waiting to hear what she’d say.

“What will you do?” she asked, wishing she didn’t have to.

“What can I do?” he asked. “I can’t say no, can I?”

She looked at him, tears mixing with sweat, tried not to make it harder on him, no matter how hard it was on her.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He took her hand in his, laced their fingers together, and squeezed her. She closed her eyes, turned away, trying not to cry. It was unbearable. The cruelty of it, of his kindness, of his blindness.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I noticed too late.”

She sniffled, sat herself straighter, turned with a smile.

“Noticed what?” she said, and her voice barely cracked.

They looked at each other, there in the humid bath of the late afternoon, and said nothing more until they said their goodbyes. It was a long, long day, but it always seemed mercifully brief in her memory.

This 1kStory is for Lot (“boy, Beijing, awakening, ukelele, love”).

Brian's New Day

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Brian woke each morning stapled to the ceiling above the coffee machine, which may seem like an inconvenience, but it made it much easier for him to wash his hair before breakfast. After eating two slices of toast and a half-dozen grapefruits, he tucked his jacket under his arm and set out for work.

In his twenties, Brian had worked as an assistant gravestone carver, climbing tall palm trees and talking to small birds while his boss, a cranky old man named Phil, chipped away at marble. That job had not been especially satisfying for Brian, so on his thirtieth birthday, he had applied to become an astronaut, which he felt he was immensely qualified for (on account of climbing things, much like an astronaut climbs into space).

Unfortunately for Brian, President Obama cancelled the space program shortly after he sent in his application, and he was forced to find a new career. Primarily, this involved deep sea diving in the Hudson River in the hopes that someone employing fortuity or gosh-darn luck would happen upon him, ask what he was doing, and offer him the job he always wanted. Not that he knew what that would be. And furthermore, the likelihood of such a person happening upon him as he was deep sea diving was, on the whole, somewhat less than probable. But still, he tried.

On this day, however, Brian was not deep sea diving at all. On this day, he was going to find himself the perfect cherry in the Farmers’ Market down by the docks. He’d had it in his mind since Tuesday: the perfect cherry, round and dark red, a long stem on top, and brilliantly juicy when you bit it. Not that he would. He wanted to cherish it, or perhaps name it Cleo. Cleo was a wonderful name.

Brian arrived at the Market around a quarter to nine, which was when he usually began putting on his flippers, so he found himself preoccupied with his feet. It was because of this preoccupation that he happened to see a pair of beautiful green shoes standing before him, attached to a pair of beautiful long legs, attached (as it happened) to a beautiful, beautiful woman with flowing red hair and a dimple on one cheek, which made him want to try and poke a matching dimple on the other cheek, though he suspected that would be impolite.

Brian strongly disliked beautiful women. The last time he had seen one, he had fallen off a third-story balcony and landed in a tomato plant. He had never liked tomatoes before, but now he was deathly afraid of them. Pizzas made him imagine big, round eyes watching him wherever he went. He rarely spoke to Italians as a result.

This beautiful woman, though, was not attached to a balcony of any description, so he felt he might stow his dislike of her kind briefly, especially since she was smiling at him, and he had a hard remembering what he was trying to accomplish.

“Hello,” she said, and he nearly fell into a tomato plant, balcony or not. “Are you looking for something in particular today?”

He opened his mouth to talk, and then closed it almost immediately. He was fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to arrange his words in a way that made sense, and for some reason, he didn’t want to make a bad impression. Instead of speaking, he pointed a trembling finger at the pile of cherries next to him, and then winced, as if the admission that he was after such a thing was so dark and twisted that he might need to be sent back to the hospital with the nurses that smelled of Tootsie Rolls.

“Cherries, eh?” smiled the woman, and looked across the pile with a choosy eye. She ran a finger over them lightly, and he sucked in a nervous breath. Fruits hated to be touched by bare hands. His grapefruits needed oven mitts, and here she was, molesting them with her greasy pores and—

“Here we go,” she said, picking one up by the stem. It was round, dark red, and the stem between her fingers was long, slender, perfect in every way. Perfect in every possible way. She held it out to him. “This belongs to you,” she said. He reached out with his trembling hands, took the cherry by the stem, too, just below her fingers so that his skin brushed hers ever so slightly, and then took possession of the cherry.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, and her smile got even bigger than before. She winked at him.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Brian,” he said, and tried smiling, though it only lasted a second. He went back to staring at the cherry, because the cherry was largely disinterested in his day-to-day activities.

“I’m Cleo,” she said, and took a step backward, tucking her hands into her green apron. “I’ll see you around, Brian!”

He watched her go, then watched his cherry, then went to sit in the park for a minute or two. Soon it was time to go in the water, but he didn’t go in the water. And soon it was time to come out of the water, but since he wasn’t in the water, he felt he could skip that, too. And soon it was time to eat his sandwich, with four pickles and two slices of cheese… but all he could see was his cherry, and all he could think about was going back to the Market, and seeing if Cleo could find him another perfect one, just like this one. Just like her.

He stood up quickly, started marching back to his apartment, up the stairs, down the hall, one key, two keys, knock four times (just to be safe) and enter. He put the cherry on the counter next to the coffee machine, hung up his coat, then took it down and ironed it twice, then hung it up again, and sat down at the counter, staring at the cherry.

It was four o’clock, still two hours until dinner, but he was ready to sleep. The sooner he slept, the sooner he would wake up. The sooner he woke up, the sooner he could go back to the Market. The sooner he went back to the Market, the sooner he would see Cleo smile. And get another cherry. And spend another day in the park, on the bench that smelled like German beer and lemonade, and think about all the ways he would tell Cleo how beautiful she was, even if he would never say it aloud, even once.

Brian had a new day, and it was wonderful.

This #1kStory is for Eva (“A day in the life of Brian, a 30 year old man”).

Ignoble Death

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Danika came back to a destroyed apartment. At first she thought they’d been robbed, but then she saw Lenny sitting in a pile of laundry at the end of the hall. He was separating socks, underwear, shirts, into two separate piles.

“Hon,” she said, putting her purse down. “What’s going on?”

“Shh!” he said, and placed one sock in each pile, and then dug around in the hamper some more. After a minute, he stopped, smiled, and looked up at her. “It’s okay now.”

“Is it?” she asked, uncertain.

“It’s over,” he nodded, and then hiccuped violently, slamming his head into the wall behind him. “Mother of Je—” he hiccuped again, and doubled over.

“What’s going on?” she laughed, rubbing the back of his head gently. “Are you okay?”

“I’m c— cursed,” he said. “Have to b— break it before I die of as— asphyxiation.”

“Cursed?” Danika said. “Who would curse you?”

“Lois,” he whimpered.

“Lois Archibald the girl at the coffee shop?”

“Lois McKinley the ex— ex-girlfriend,” he said sheeplishly.

“I didn’t know you had an ex-girlfriend named Lois.”

“You met her once. At the g— grocery store. She was buying Vegemite.”

“Oh my god… the girl with the shaved head and two different-coloured eyes? I can totally see that. What the hell did you date her for?”

“L— long story. M— maybe later.”

“Okay, so why were you sorting laundry if you’re cursed? Shouldn’t you be… I don’t know, sacrificing squirrels or something?”

“I saw a shaman and h— he said to go to the laundry and g— get half my stuff out and—”

“Wait wait wait,” said Danika. “You saw a shaman? How much did that cost?”

“I f— forget. He took p— plastic.”

“If you spent our vacation money, you’re a dead man.”

“I m— might not be alive for our vacation!”

“Whatever. Crybaby. So this so-called shaman said to split the laundry in two? By weight or size or what?”

Lenny stared at her, tears in his eyes.

“I d— don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“He didn’t have an instruction manual or something? Shaman cheat sheet you could take home?”

“You’re m— making fun of me.”

“Well obviously.”

“I could d— die.”

She rolled her eyes, ducked into the bathroom. “I’m going to humour you because I’m a nice person, but you’re going to owe me. Big time.”

He said nothing, only hiccuped.

“Fine,” she sighed, and looked behind the bathroom door. “Maybe you left some laundry lying around like you always do. Maybe that’s why your ‘cure’ isn’t not working.”

“M— maybe,” he hiccuped, standing up.

“Hey, here we go…” she said, and he leaned forward.

She slammed the door suddenly, and he screamed and fell onto his back, clutching his hand.

“My f— fingers!” he squealed, and she noticed a small spray of blood at the edge of the door.

“What the hell happened?”

“You s— slammed the door on my fingers!”

“I was trying to scare you!”

“What the h— hell for?”

“To make your hiccups go away!”

“They’re not hiccups, they’re a c— curse! I’m b— bleeding!”

“I can see that! Wrap yourself up with something! Get a towel from the laundry! Or two! In pair! Whatever!”

“Don’t make f— fun of me!”

“Oh for the love of god,” she grumbled, and stormed into the kitchen to get an ice pack. When she returned, he was still hiccuping, but reading the back of mangled business card. His fingers were dripping blood on the floor.

“Okay,” he said weakly. “Okay, he said we could t— try other things. Let’s try something else.”

“Like what? Sort the pile into lights and darks?”

“N— no,” he said. “Cut parts of my hair.”

“Which parts?” she asked, tossing the cold pack down to him. He ignored it.

“I d— don’t know,” he said. “Just do random parts.”

“What if the shaman dude wanted certain parts and not others to be—”

“Then he would have s— said so!” snapped Lenny. “Just do it! C— cut it!”

She leaned into the bathroom, found the pair little orange scissors, and knelt down next to him. He closed his eyes like he was meditating.

“This is a bad idea,” she said.

“D— do it.”

She held out the scissors and cut a little bit of his hair shorter. He exhaled, and for once, didn’t hiccup. She cut another bit, and his breathing calmed even more. Cut a few more patches here and there, until he looked like a mangy animal who had escaped a questionable laboratory by way of a flame thrower. And still, he didn’t hiccup.

“There,” she said. “That’s as much as I can do.”

He opened his eyes at her, smiled nervously, and then let out a long, thankful breath.

“That was c—” he hiccuped and jerked forward, straight into the scissors, stabbing himself in the forehead. “Pain!” he screamed, and threw himself back into the wall, toppling over.

Danika put down the scissors and went to get a bandage for his forehead. She resisted the urge to comment on his state of affairs, but the look on her face implied her feelings, and more. When she got back, he was sitting up again, bloodied hand to his bloodied face, trying to read the business card.

“Give it here,” she said, snatching it away. It was written in scratchy handwriting that she didn’t recognize, but the third and final thing listed was easy enough to read: “Stand on your head?”

“I’ll n— need help,” he said.

“Does this mean you have to flip upside-down, or that I’m supposed to actually stand on your skull?”

He gave her a withering look.

“You s— still don’t believe it’s a c— curse?”

Well,” she said, flipping the card back and forth a few times, and then handing it over, printed side up. “Given that your shaman and your ex-girlfriend have the same last name, I’m not sure it’s a curse-curse so much as a curse of stupidity, really.”

Lenny took the card, read the name ‘Rafael McKinley, Shaman First Order’, and finally, his hiccups stopped.

This #1kStory is for Turid (“Get half of my stuff out. Cut parts of my hair. Stand on my head”).

The Tease

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Garville was fantastically despondent, to the point where he wouldn’t suck sap if you drowned him in it. He lay on the leaf, belly to the sky, sighing wistfully as loud as he could. Finally, after seven such sighs, Bloot climbed down next to him and smacked him across the back.

“Hey!” he snapped. “Stop it! You’re throwing me off my game!”

“It’s no use,” moaned Garville. “I can’t eat until she tells me she loves me.”

Bloot looked back at his fellow aphids, devouring the plant without him. He wanted to go, but the sad state of his friend was impossible to ignore.

“Who are you waiting for?” he asked without compassion.

“Muxley,” Garville said. “Muxley, the one with the most gorgeous green skin. And those shapely, shapely legs. Oh god, I can’t stand the thought of losing her.”

“So go tell her,” said Bloot. “Bonus part is, you won’t be sitting around here annoying me.”

“I’ve told her already,” said Garville.

“Okay, good start. What did she say?”

“She said she’d tell me if she’d be my mate by the end of the week.”

Bloot’s expression deadened. He scratched his head lightly.

“End of the week,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“How old is she again?”

“Six days tomorrow.”

“Six days,” said Bloot.

“You keep repeating me,” noted Garville. “And anyway, I know what you’re thinking: she’s very young, but she’s ready to reproduce. And I’ve only got three and a half weeks on her, which is a lot, I’ll admit, but you know what they say about true love knowing no bounds and—”

“Garville,” said Bloot, trying to put on his most serious expression. “I need you to listen carefully, because this is going to be hard to say. Are you going to listen?”

“Sure,” said Garville. “But I don’t think a pep talk about patience being a virtue is going to do the trick right—”

“She’s leading you on, man,” snapped Bloot. “End of the week? She’s waiting for you to die. A week to her isn’t anything. Hell, she’s young. She’s got three and a half, maybe four weeks of life to live. You? You’ll be dead this time next week, if not sooner.”

“So… so you’re saying she—”

“She doesn’t want to mate with you, bro. She’s just not telling you to your face.”

Garville stood up sharply, bristling with fury. He butted noses with Bloot, stared him down.

“You’re wrong,” he growled. “And I’ll prove it.” He stormed off down the branch. Bloot watched him a moment, but couldn’t bear the thought of the heartache that was coming next.

“Garville, wait!” he called. “Come on, man! There are lots of other chicks on the plant! You don’t need to—”

By the time Bloot caught up, the battle was half-over. Muxley was rolling her eyes as Garville’s composure disintegrated before her. If he hadn’t been so dehydrated, he might have been crying.

“It’s me! Garville!” he pleaded. “You remember me!”

“Oh yeah,” said Muxley. “So you’re like still alive?”

“You said you were going to give me an answer!” he said, trying to shore up some courage. “By the end of the week. I’d like it sooner.”

“An answer for what?” asked Muxley. “I to’lly don’t remember.”

“To be my mate!”

“Like ew,” said Muxley. “Mate with you?”

“Y-y-you were going to t-t-t-tell me—”

“Like no offence, but I’d rather reproduce asexually. To’lly.”

Garville disintegrated into a mess of wails and flailing. Bloot stepped forward sneered at Muxley.

“Hey!” he yelled. “That’s just cruel!”

“Well hello, sailor!” she purred. “Speaking of mating…” She ran an arm along his back seductively.

“Don’t you dare!” he snapped. “Garville is my friend!”

“Who’s Garville?”

Garville wailed even louder. Muxley took a step back, shook her head.

“You two are buzz-kills. If you don’t want somma this — not you, fatboy — then I’ll get some service from the next leaf down, kay? Later, losers!”

She made off down the branch, leaving Garville and Bloot in silence. Bloot’s tummy rumbled. He hadn’t eaten in almost two minutes.

“Listen,” he began, but Garville waved him off.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You were right. And thanks for not mating with her. That meant a lot to me.”

“That’s what friends are for, man. But listen, one little setback doesn’t mean it’s the end of the game. Let me introduce you to my cousin. She’s a great shade of green too, and—”

“No one can have the same shade as Muxley,” Garville sighed. “No one.”

Bloot shifted his weight a bit.

“So, um, you’re not going to even talk to anyone else?”

“Not right away,” Garville said, pausing at the edge of the branch, the aphid-covered plant sprawling out below him. “I need to grieve for a while. Get my bearings, figure things out. I don’t think I can give my heart so easily. It hurts too much. But I’ll come back from this. I know I will. This time next week, things will be different.” And with that, he was off. “Things will be better!” he called.

“For some of us, anyway,” sighed Bloot, and went to find Muxley.

This 1kstory is for pinkbagels (“Aphids. Miserable, angsty aphids.”)

The Dead Zone

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The stout woman in the plaid jacket was not taking no for an answer, and it seemed as if her grandchildren were about to burst into tears. Gunther put on his most apologetic face and tried to be delicate, but there was just no escaping reality:

“Ma’am,” he said, and doubled up his efforts at reconciliation, “there really aren’t any lion tamers.”

The woman snorted, puffed out her chest.

“Nonsense!” she snapped. “This is a circus, is it not? All circuses have lion tamers!’

“No, ma’am,” said Gunther politely, “but this isn’t a regular circus. This is a hacker circus.”

The woman looked at the sign behind him, which declared in loud golden letters: “GUNTHER & HOBBINS HACKER CIRCUS.” She seemed to read it for the first time.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said, as if her ignorance were illuminating a crime against humanity. “What are hackers, and how do they fit into a circus?”

“Well, ma’am,” said Gunther, smiling particularly at the children, who seemed put off by the whole ordeal, “hackers are computer experts who can do marvellous things with all things electronical. And our travelling circus is the world’s finest collection of hacker freaks!”

“Seems to me you’re all freaks,” grunted the woman.

“Yes ma’am,” said Gunther. “Would you like to buy tickets to tonight’s show?”

The woman sneered at him, but before she could speak, he felt a tug at his jacket, and turned to find Feeble staring up at him with desperate eyes.

“Excuse me a moment, please,” he smiled, and followed Feeble to the Big Top. The little man’s bug eyes were bugging out even more than usual, and his bottom lip was trembling something fierce. “Feeble, I told you no more Coke until after the show.”

“It’s not that, boss,” said Feeble. “It’s the wi-fi.”

“What about it?”

“There isn’t any!”

Gunther took Feeble by the arm and dragged him inside. The tent was empty, while all the performers got their code into place for the evening’s festivities. The large antenna in the middle of the centre ring stood tall, proudly proclaiming their unique brand of entertainment.

“Have you checked all the cables?” Gunther asked, refusing to give in to hysteria. “It’s definitely plugged in? Not like Omaha?”

“It’s plugged in, sir, it really is,” whined Feeble. “We’ve been all over town with the signal monitors, and there doesn’t seem to be ANY wi-fi in this place at all!”

Gunther frowned, pulled his phone from his pocket and checked his reception. Nothing. He turned around, trying to prove Feeble wrong, but nothing worked.

“Master Yoyo told me to tell you his SQL Injection of Doom is doomed if we don’t get this sorted out, and… and the Great Poulinis are complaining their Magic Rootkit requires a patch before showtime, and Ajax the Amazing has taken to the bottle again and is saying something about asynchronous calls as they relate to male genitalia, I think.”

“Gods,” sighed Gunther, “What kind of town has no wi-fi hotspots? We need to go to plan B. Hook up the adapter and we’ll have to tether off my phone.”

Feeble winced, stared at his shoes.

“We can’t tether anymore, sir,” he muttered. “Our data plan was cut off.” Gunther was having a hard time coming up with the words to say. “I meant to tell you, sir… we had an issue with billing after our March overage.”

“We almost never use that plan,” Gunther said, pushing Feeble against a heavy wooden pole. “How much was the bill?”

“Um… eight thousand dollars,” said the little man. “Give or take a thousand.”

“Eight thousand dollars?” shrieked Gunther. “That’s more than we earn in half a year! How in the hell did that happen?”

“I… I was downloading some things.”

“Oh, Feeble, no…”

“I’m a Guild addict, sir, I can’t help it! Felicia Day is my goddess!”

“Feeble!”

“I want to date her avatar!”

“Oh dear god, Feeble, what are we going to do?”

“The general consensus is that we pack up quickly and run away before anyone notices, sir. With your permission. No refunds. AT&T wants their money.”

Gunther stared at his Big Top, his big, wonderful Big Top. And he looked at the rows upon rows of empty seats, and his fists clenched.

“No,” he said firmly. “No, I’m not going down without a fight. They want entertainment, they’re getting entertainment. I want you, Fitcher and Dumblin to take the pickup and drive to Minneapolis.”

“Minneapolis?” squeaked Feeble. “But why, sir?”

“You’re going to steal a lion from the zoo,” said Gunther, the spark back in his eye. “And we’re going to find out how asynchronous Ajax can be with a whip.”

This #1kStory is for brttrx (“A traveling circus of hackers reacts to a town with no wi-fi hotspots”).

Unfinished

Sat, 29 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Mary sat at the bedside, book in hand, listening to the sounds of machines counting down a life. She hadn’t read a word of the book, but it helped her feel like she wasn’t waiting for something else to happen. But she was waiting for something else to happen, and she hated herself for it.

“There’s a good dear,” said the nurse, lifting the old, frail version of her mother forward, gently wiping her back with a sponge. The water smelled of lavender. It was horrid. “Thank you, dear,” said the nurse, and let herself out. She didn’t speak to Mary. None of them spoke to her anymore.

She looked at her mother, the eyes staring at the ceiling as if something were there, wetness at the corner of her mouth. Mary used to wipe that away. She couldn’t bear it anymore. She turned the page in her book, but backwards, and stared at her lap.

“Mary,” said her sister, Julia, sliding open the door quietly. “Any change?”

“Hmm?” asked Mary, looking up from her book. “No, no change. Where’ve you been?”

Dr Parsons entered the room behind Julia, clipboard in hand, looking gravely from Mary to her mother, and then at his notes. No one spoke for a moment. Mary closed the book, stared out the window as if she were suddenly alone. The room stayed silent but for the machines.

“I’ll leave you two to it,” said Dr Parsons, and let himself out. Julia sat at the bottom of the bed, squeezing their mother’s feet beneath the thin, starchy sheets.

“You have to make a decision, Mary,” she said. “This can’t go on forever.”

Mary tried looking her in the eyes, but it was too much. She took her mother’s hand and squeezed it, and the heart monitor skipped a beat. She sighed, trying to regain her composure.

“Mary,” said Julia, “you can’t keep coming here. You have a life. I know you do. She wouldn’t want this, not for this long. We can’t fight about this anymore.”

“Mom always stopped our fights for us,” Mary said, blankly.

“Mom’s not around anymore,” said Julia. “It’s your choice now. You have to make it.”

“I can’t do it,” she sighed. “I can’t make that decision.”

“She’s not waking up,” Julia said, almost inaudible.

Mary’s eyes were full of tears. She wouldn’t let go of the hand to wipe them away. They ran down her cheeks, across her mouth, squeezed shut, and down her neck. Julia started to cry too, but refused to let it overtake her. They sat there, facing each other, quietly grieving while the machines beeped away.

“I was so awful to her,” Mary said finally. “I was so, so awful to her. She wanted to come visit me, and I said I was busy. I was busy.”

“You can’t blame yourself for—”

“You know the last thing I told her? I said ‘I can’t talk now, call later’, and I hung up! I hung up on her! She must have hated me!”

“Dear god, Mary, are we taking about the same woman here? She was rougher on us than that! She wouldn’t think twice about—”

“Sincerity hurts more,” Mary muttered, wiping tears away finally, letting them fall on the cover of the book. “I can’t let her go. I need her to wake up. I need her to know what I really meant.”

Julia said nothing. In the hall, a trolley wheeled by, its wheel squeaking over and over again, piercing the quiet. The slam of a door brought Mary back to the present.

“It’s my decision, and I’m not letting her go,” she said. “I understand why you… why you don’t agree, but I can’t do it to her. I need her to know I didn’t mean it.”

“She knows, Mary…”

“How can you be sure?” snapped Mary. “You’re hardly here, you don’t see what I see!”

“Don’t you dare try and lay a guilt trip on me because I choose not to abandon my family to—”

“I haven’t seen your family here in almost a year! What kind of family is that? It’s awful, Julia! Just awful!”

“What’s awful,” growled her sister, “is you venting your anger on me when you’re the one prolonging Mom’s suffering because you feel guilty about—”

“It’s my decision to make!” yelled Mary. “Mine! If you can’t accept that, maybe you shouldn’t be here!”

“Maybe I shouldn’t!” Julia yelled back, getting to her feet. “You know what? I came down here to keep you from ruining your life. But you seem pretty intent on doing it anyway!”

“Get out!”

“On my way!” Julia snatched up her bag and stormed for the door. The second she touched the door handle, the machines turned to a steady whine. Both women stopped, but didn’t look back. Mary barely took a single breath. Julia’s eyes closed, and she spoke a silent prayer, but still, didn’t look back.

“She’s gone,” Mary said, her voice a tiny shadow of its former self. Julia let go of the door handle, lowered her head.

“I guess we need to learn to stop our own fights from now on.”

And they laughed, just as their mother had wanted.

This 1kStory is for Wis Geysen (“mothers & daughters”).

Miscalculation

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The worst mistake would be to laugh it off. How many people, walking tipsy down the street at night, would keep a straight face? Not many. But even fewer would survive the faux-pas. For while the robot unicorns were built without many things, a sense of furious pride was not one of them.

Relegated to the sewers, razor-sharp rainbow horns catching street light where the blood had not stuck, they watched, waited, and above all… listened. They were the shunned few, far too long the butt of jokes, forced away by the same race that built them. “Family fun” indeed.

Their memories were short, small flash drives with limited lifespans, constantly rewriting the past to make room for the future. They only had so many experiences before they’d fail altogether, and they knew it, even if the date was a mystery. They kept the hurt in a special place, kept it safe, nurtured it. Far better to obsess on it there, than to have to feel the shame anew every day.

A young man with a head of long red hair stood with his friends at the steps to the subway, reciting the list of reasons a pet rock was better company than a unicorn. Unit 253, late of Prospect Park, watched him with glassy eyes, shuttered up with fury, peering from a sewer grate below.

The man was easy to follow, stumbling down to the platform, brain addled with drugs and drink, singing to himself in things that weren’t words at all. He had a shadow that night, but he never noticed. He was too preoccupied with his own pathetic existence, however long it might last.

253 knew the best time to strike, and where to strike, and how to cripple his prey so they would know what was coming long before it happened. A hoof to the knee, to the chest, and the hands, and then…

He spied a police officer across the way, strolling among the sparse crowd, hand near his firearm. The unicorns didn’t fear the police so much as respected their role: a bullet could rip through aluminum just as easily as flesh.

A train came, loaded, left, and the opposite platform cleared out completely. The officer let himself up the stairs, leaving 253 alone with the red-haired fool.

He stepped into the dim light, footsteps gentle, the clip-clop almost inaudible beneath the hum of the fans around them. The man didn’t see him coming, had no idea what was due. One step, two steps, three, four, five…

“Horsey!” squealed a voice from behind, and 253 turned to see a young mother and her toddler, arms outstretched in a stroller, wispy yellow pigtails pointing out at odd angles. The girl’s mouth was wide with excitement, the shape of a jellybean, and he froze in mid-step, unable to shake the image.

The mother, too, was frozen, white knuckles gripping stroller handles, eyes pleading for mercy, for the sake of her child, for the sake of herself, too. Maybe more so. The thought made him furious, and he began to turn, to teach her a lesson… when the little girl started to clap, giggling happily.

He leaned down, watching her with his glassy eye, and she reached out to him, tiny fingers missing by inches.

“No, darling, please no…” gasped the mother, but the girl paid no mind. 253 couldn’t help himself: he slid closer, and the girl’s hand brushed his nose, between his eyes, stroking gently. His horn, for so long a source of fear and misery, lit up, glowing a rainbow aura around the platform. Like it was meant to do. Like it used to do.

“Horsey ride!” said the girl, and 253 knelt down before her. It was a memory long since gone, but he knew it instinctively. He bowed his head, old saddle waiting, as the girl shook in her seat, and the mother stood stock-still. All he knew anymore was death. Hurtful words and death and suffering. And he could not let this go. The killing made him satisfied, but this would make him whole.

There was no warning, no sign or hint or choice to be made. The bullet pierced his face before he even heard the sound. The force of it knocked him to the floor, as his systems performed a mad dash of diagnostics, all knowing the answer, but wanting to know for sure. His eyes had given out, and some processor was ruined, because his hind legs had disappeared to him.

The girl began wailing, and the mother too, and heavy footsteps raced their way, calling on the radio, calling for help.

For his death, 253 bore the officer no ill will. This was the game they played, and the end result was unavoidable. But the girl’s tears? That, he could not forgive. Her shrieks grew louder the further they dragged her, and in his last moments, where his memory had only a fragment left to rewrite, 253 broadcast to his brothers a single burning message: “It is war. Spare only the children.”

This 1kStory was written for Emilio Sacta (“Robot Unicorns Attack from the Sewer:
Inspired by this: http://games.adultswim.com/robot-unicorn-attack-twitchy-online-game.html
and this: http://knowyourmeme.com/i/8049/original/sewer-horse.jpg”)

Beneficiary

Thu, 27 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Josh was in the middle of his second pint when Meg stormed into the pub, long jacket pulled tight, standing between him and his friends.

“It’s nine-thirty,” she said sternly.

Josh’s smile faded fast.

“Do you want a—”

“Get your coat, we’re going home.”

He smiled weakly at the rest of his friends around the table. They stared at their own drinks with more interest than was likely, pretending to miss what was going on.

“This is Meg, everyone,” he said. “Meg, this is—”

“I don’t care who they are,” she snapped. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you? Do you? Those candles are expensive, Josh! Do you think I like sitting around naked all night? I have things to do!”

The table cleared itself out right quick. Never before had so many people wanted to play pool at the same time. Josh took her by the arm, tried to sit her down on the seat next to him. She refused.

“You’re making a scene,” he said.

“Damn right I am,” she seethed. “We had an agreement, and instead of keeping up your end of the bargain, I find you out here with your friends!”

He sighed, took a long gulp of his beer.

“I think we need to change the rules,” he said. “This isn’t working anymore.”

She got the same look on her face she’d had when he first suggested the trampoline. She leaned forward, voice trembling with fury.

“Are you breaking up with me?” she rumbled.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, listen… we’re not dating, Meg. That’s the whole point of this, isn’t it? It’s friends with benefits. We’re doing this so we can’t break up.”

“Doesn’t seem to be stopping you.”

“I don’t want to break up with you,” he said. “I like you, Meg. I really like you. That’s why we were such good friends—”

“Were?”

“Yes, were!” he snapped, then lowered his voice to avoid eavesdroppers. “When was the last time we really talked? When was the last time we went to see a movie? Had dinner together, just talking?”

“I… I’m busy. You’re busy. I don’t know how we can schedule something like—”

“We find time for sex,” he said, picking up his beer again. “We can slot that in, but nothing else. We went from friends with benefits, to benefits with the occasional friendship.”

She took the beer from him, downed the rest of it.

“So what?” she asked. “No more sex?”

He sighed, looked at his friends playing pool, the quick, nervous glances over their shoulders to see if any blood had been shed. He shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just want to talk to you again. Can we start with that?”

“Sure,” she said, letting out a smile. “Sure, talking works. About what?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “What did we talk about before?”

They both stared into the empty space between them. Meg tapped a fingernail on the table, a tick tick tick that picked up speed as she lost patience. Josh picked up his beer to drink, but it was empty. He put it back down, but missed the coaster, and it almost slipped off the edge of the table.

Meg ran her hands through her hair, slumped down into the seat.

“This is what it’s like to be married, isn’t it?” she asked.

“I think so,” he grumbled. “You see what I mean? We’re strangers with the same schedule. Everything I loved about you is gone. Except it’s not… I just don’t get to see it anymore.”

They said nothing for a minute.

His friends cheered for a lucky shot, and Josh looked up, a smile creeping across his face. He held out his hand to her.

“Let’s try this again,” he said. “You want to play some pool?”

She smiled, took his hand, and they stood up. “Definitely,” she said. “I’ll kick your ass, like the old days.”

He laughed. “Dream on, loser.”

“Oh, loser am I? How about this? You go get us a pitcher each, and the loser pays!”

“You’re on,” he grinned, then held out his hands to take her coat. “Let me take that for you. It’s hot in—”

“Don’t,” she said, then leaned close, whispered. “I’m not wearing anything.”

He stared at her, at the coat done up tight, and then met her eyes.

“I thought we’d make up in the cab ride home,” she said, laughing nervously. He laughed too, then looked over his shoulder to his friends.

“Sorry, guys! Ball and chain beckons! Catch you later!”

This 1kStory was written for Sheila Lathia (“It’s no longer friends with benefits but more like benefits with the occasional friendship”).

Dark-Stained Nightmare

Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The water went blistering hot before it shut off, and the shock of it made Kent smack his head on the shower head, leaving a long gash in his scalp.

“Jesus!” he gasped, almost falling through the curtain. “Janey! What happened?” He turned the tap on and off, but all he heard was a horrible sucking noise, like some kind of beast in the pipes was trying to escape. He brushed the shampoo lather from his eyes and looked back over his shoulder. “Janey!” he shouted. “What happened to the water?”

There was no answer, and worse than that, no footsteps in the kitchen, no TV playing in the background. It was eerily quiet. He reached for his towel, but his hand slipped off the cool metal rack.

He looked at it, blinking, then over at the stack of spare towels. Nothing. Not one. Not even a face cloth. His hair was full of lather, his body was dripping wet, and he had absolutely no way to stop it. He reached down for his dirty clothes, but they were gone too.

“Janey?” he yelped, leaning his head out the bathroom door. “Hello?”

Nothing. Not a sound. He took stock of his situation: naked, wet and alone in a suddenly-silent apartment. Not a good sign. He reached around the corner, into the hall, and snatched the little Inuit statue he’d never really liked, trying to hold it like a weapon. He took a deep breath, and carefully stepped into the hall.

The bedroom was empty, but the closets were raided; there were dark wet smudges in the carpet he couldn’t place. He followed them back, down the hall, past the bathroom, until he came to the edge of the kitchen. The smudges ended there. He got a better grip of the statue, and leapt around the corner, ready to strike!

The kitchen was empty too. It looked a mess, but there was no foul play here. He took a step inside and suddenly the ground gave out below him, and he flipped on his back, landing on the floor with a crack.

“Janey,” he gasped. “Janey, I hurt.”

He sat up groggily and noticed the entire kitchen floor was covered with a thin layer of water and grime: very, very slippery. He tried to get back up, but landed on his knees instead, which almost hurt more than his back. He was in the middle of creating a whole new subset of curse words when he heard the sound of someone fiddling with the lock to the front door.

His eyes shot open wide and he scrambled into the hall and down to the front door, sliding the security chain into place. The door unlocked a moment later, but caught on the chain.

“Heh?” grunted a voice from outside. A man’s voice. Deep and gruff. Sinister. “Mr G?”

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Dom, the super.”

He paused. The super. The super!

“Yer wife called down, said you had a plumbing emergency,” said Dom. “Burst pipe?”

“Ah,” said Kent. “Yes. That makes sense. Do you… uh… know where Janey is, by the way?”

“Saw ‘er on the way down to the laundry room. Had a big basket with ‘er.”

Kent nodded to himself, let out a slow sigh. He wanted to open the door, but he was still naked, and far too soapy and wet to just dress up and pretend it was okay.

“One second, please, Dom,” he said. “I just need to fix one thing.” He raced down the hall to the linen closet, throwing it open and reaching into the very back of the top shelf.

“Need a hand?” called Dom, trying to get a look inside.

“No worries!” called Kent. “I’ve got it!”

He found it with some difficulty: a roll of paper towels. he ripped off the plastic, took out a long row, and started wiping off his hair. He bunched up the towels he’d used and threw them into the bathroom, then started to dry the rest of him, wiping the gooey blackness from the backs of his legs, his shoulders.

“Mr G,” said Dom impatiently, “I’ve got other places to see yet, so…”

“Okay, okay! One second!” Kent called, and raced back to the door. “I’m going to unchain it, but give me to the count of ten before you come in, okay?”

“Sure,” said Dom, “whatever.”

Kent closed the door, unchained it, and started racing back to the bedroom, but his foot hit another patch of the dirty water, and he slipped again, twisting his ankle.

The door opened with a crash, and Kent spun around, using the roll to block his privates. Standing next to the obviously-disturbed Dom was Janey, clothes covered in filth, her face twisted in fury.

“Finally!” she snapped. “I called you to help me!”

“I… I…”

“Didn’t hear me, yeah, I know.”

He tried to back up, but something caught her eye.

“Where did you get that?” she yelled. “The paper towels! I was looking for them everywhere!”

“Oh, they were in the back of the—”

She stormed forward, snatched the roll out of his hands, and headed to the kitchen, muttering obscenities under her breath the whole way. Kent stood, naked in the hallway, mirroring the shocked look on Dom’s face.

“The shower’s broken too,” he said with a half-hearted laugh.

“Yeah,” said Dom. “Only gives cold water. I can see.”

This 1kStory is for Kyle Newton (“Paper towel as a substitute for a real towel”).

Screw Up

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Tuesday night was sex night, and every second Tuesday was Jeremy’s night to find a prop. If he were in the habit of telling the truth, he’d have admitted he hated the prop idea, and hated the scheduling even more… but Jeremy didn’t usually say what was on his mind.

Because of the long weekend, he’d totally forgotten it was Tuesday at all, and when Ashley came in in her slinky nightgown, paused by the lamp like she always did, he had a jolt of realization: he was fucked. And not in a good way.

“Hey baby,” she smiled, and dimmed the light to the prescribed level. “It’s eight o’clock.”

It was, in fact, exactly eight o’clock. He slowly closed the side of his computer, trying to look like he hadn’t forgotten.

“Hey back,” he smiled, and brushed his hands on his shirt. “You look great.”

He always said this. He didn’t want to say it the same way every time, but he wasn’t sure what she’d do if he broke with tradition. She knelt herself on the end of the bed, looked at him with those brilliant, excited eyes of hers. He wanted so badly to be excited too.

“What did you pick?” she asked. “Because I have to say, it’s going to be hard to beat those water balloons.”

He smiled nervously, felt his pockets as subtly as he could. Nothing there but his wallet and a few coins. He did a quick sweep of the room, but everything was so pedestrian… she wanted something new, something unexpected.

“Jeremy, baby,” she said, growing impatient, “It’s 8:01.”

“I know, baby, I’m sorry,” he said, finally settling on the first thing within reach. He held it up in as erotic a way as he could manage.

Ashley stared at it.

“A screwdriver?” she asked, uncertain; desperately uncertain.

“Y-y-y-yes,” he said, turning it around slowly. “I want to… uh… use it to… uh…”

“You want to screw me with a screwdriver?” she asked.

There was an awful pause where he realized it would have been better to say he’d forgotten it was Tuesday and furthermore, he didn’t like planned sex at all, and also, her yoga classes were not doing the wonders she thought they were, especially around her middle. Instead of saying any of that, he muttered:

“Yes.”

She said nothing for a moment, eyes fixed on the screwdriver in his hand. And then, without warning, she burst into tears. He dropped the screwdriver and ran to her.

“How did you know?” she wept. “Who told you?”

“Who told me wh—”

“I was drunk and it was college and the nineties were a confusing time and he looked a bit like Ethan Hawke and I’d never seen cocaine before and he told me it was sanitary!” she cried, holding him so tight he nearly passed out. Or was that because of shock? Well, either way, it wasn’t very pleasant.

She looked up at him, mascara running down her face, pleading for forgiveness for something he was having a hard time imagining.

“It was just the one time,” she whispered urgently. “Thirty-six hours tops.”

“It’s… it’s okay,” he said meekly.

“I swear, baby, I had no idea the cameras were there.”

“I think I need to lie down,” he said.

“Have you told Ellie you know?”

“No,” he said, leaning back on the pillows. “Why?”

Her face was the picture of obfuscation.

“No reason.”

“Wait, Ellie, Father Bishop’s wife?”

She gave him the worst innocent smile he’d ever seen.

“I think I need to sleep now,” he said, voice faint and distant. “I think I need to sleep.”

“But baby…” she said, climbing atop him, sniffling, nuzzling close, “it’s Tuesday. It’s our night.”

“I don’t think I can right now,” he said. “I don’t think I can do anything right now, you know? Maybe tomorrow. We can try again tomorrow.”

“I can’t go to sleep like this!” she pleaded, shaking him lightly. “I want you, baby! It’s our night! Let’s do it!”

“Sorry,” he said, frustration boiling over. “Why don’t you call up Ellie, see if she’s free.”

Ashley sighed, flopped onto the bed next to him, staring at the ceiling unhappily.

“She’s not,” she pouted. “Prayer group. Otherwise I’d switch your nights, believe me. Scheduling you two is such a pain in the ass.”

“Oh,” he said.

“The other five aren’t so bad, though.”

This 1kStory was written for Burt (“Screwing With the Screwdriver”).

Ofanlanzibar

Mon, 24 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

It was the summer of the year dear Queen Vic made her way down to Matlock Bath that the four downtrodden friends found the tiara. Now, being from Bath as they were, they weren’t totally oblivious to the finer things in life, but all the same, it took them a solid day to realize the tiara was indeed what it seemed.

There was some debate as to their next course of action. Wiggle, always this way and that in matters of importance, thought the Queen had lost it from her carriage trunk, and they should return it right quick for fear of being blamed for the crime.

Tom, five games of blackjack behind him and nursing his tenth pint, bought into the carriage angle, but argued to keep it. If the Queen hadn’t noticed yet, the Queen wouldn’t notice at all. Besides, getting it to London would cost them a pretty penny, and he had very few pennies to give.

Ponners had no opinion on the matter, but took the tiara home to draw it in one of his copious sketchbooks. One of his sketches sold, half a century later, for nigh on 200 quid, which would have amused him greatly.

But it was Abstar, wild red hair a freckles a-plenty, that made the real move. One evening, after a particularly disastrous outing with Tom, he made his way down to the edge of town, bottle in hand, and sat idly with a tramp named Pep, all beard and no teeth. What happened next was a matter of some debate, but by morning, the town all a-buzz.

The haggard tramp of old had been replaced in the night by a wondrous, luscious creature named Lady Pep of Bath. In her oddly-fit corset, bright gown and rouged cheeks, the men of Matlock Bath found — if not love — a modicum of odd fascination. Never mind her deep, throaty voice; never mind the five o’clock shadow, or the odd gait to her walk. The thing about her was the story, and the story wiped the rest away.

To hear it told, Abstar happened upon the river that night, and in the depths of the current, out emerged a beautiful woman, buck naked from head to toe. Abstar, stone sober as always (bless my soul and hope to die) was dumbfounded by the sight, and though he offered her his coat, it was much too short to be of use to her.

Thereupon, old Pep the town drunk had appeared, and gave to the woman his long, thick cloak, with a toothless grin. In thanks (or so said Abstar), the lady of the river bestowed upon Pep her magic tiara, which she said would grant him insight into the futures of men. Like a witch, but less heretical. And the very touch of it transformed him into the Lady now seen prancing around town, singing feminine songs in a tenor voice.

Soon, all of London was pouring out to see Lady Pep, begging to catch a glimpse of her odd beauty, and perhaps spy into their own destinies. Ponners, ever the artist, made keepsake paintings of the Lady; Wiggle, with a nose that wiggled when he laughed, became the town’s youngest mayor, and its most popular to boot; Tom took over the tavern he loved, renamed it The Lady Pep, and reaped the rewards. And Abstar, who, as manger for the magic tiara and the one who wore it, kept the whole thing afloat.

It was years later, after Pep had passed and the tiara was put on auction, that Abstar, a millionaire many times over, sat down with the ailing Queen Vic in her summer home up north. After tea, and with a slight smile on her face, the Queen said to him: “The tiara was mine, you know. It was not magic, it was Dutch. And the Dutch don’t tell the future at all.”

And Abstar, ever the wily one, with his greying red hair and courteous smile, replied: “Not so, your Majesty. For when I saw the tiara, it said to me thus: ‘Stick lipstick and jewels on a hapless tramp, and by God, you’ll be rich.’”

And thus was born the British film industry.

This 1kStory was written for Paul Abbot with the set-up:

4 guys (Abstar, Ponners, Wiggle, Franco) on a usual summers day by the river in Matlock Bath find some treasure on the bank, get advice from a local tramp called Pep on what to do with the treasure, and become millionaires.

Wiggle is wobbly & his nose wiggles when he giggles, tom loves his ale n playing cards, ponners is the creative arty one, abstar well who knows erm joker.

The Last Piece

Sun, 23 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Raw canvas lay across the floor, shredded and mangled with muddy footprints. The sink had been left on, drain clogged, and the floor was a long, imperfect mirror, showing the wreckage left of the studio. Amber sunk down in a crouch, cocktail dress dipping in the water, and ran her hands through her hair, trying not to cry.

“The police will be here soon,” said Peter, turning off the tap. “They told us not to touch anything.”

“What’s left to touch?” asked Amber, looking at the cracked frames, ruined paintings, the paint-spattered easel standing alone in the middle of the room.

“You can paint it again,” he said, as if reading her mind.

“No I can’t,” she sighed, stood up, wavering in place, the water soaking through her shoes. “I can’t do it again. Not the same.”

Outside, the sun was setting, drawing long shadows across the room. It was beautiful, the shades of orange and red. She wanted to paint it so badly, she made a fist to calm herself.

“Look,” said Peter, squeezing her arm gently. “I’m sorry. I know how hard this must be for you—”

“It’s all I have left of her,” she muttered.

“You can do it again,” he said. “Maybe not the same, but you can re-create it. I know you. I know you can.”

She shook her head, buried her face in his chest, holding back a sob. He held her, strong hands pressing into her back, holding her tight, and she gave in, let out a mournful cry.

“I can’t lose her again,” she gasped. “What if I can’t do it? What if I can’t capture her the way I remember her?”

“You’ve been looking at that painting every day for five years, Amber,” he said, rubbing her back. “You’re going to remember.”

“I’ll remember the painting of her, but not her. I don’t even know if I remember her face, or the strokes I used to make it.”

“Are you sure there aren’t any photos of her anywhere you could—”

“There’s nothing,” she said. “Everything was lost in the fire. Even aunt Julia came up empty. It’s like she doesn’t exist, Peter. It’s like she never met my dad, had kids, fixed my dress on our wedding day… none of it was real.”

“It was real,” he said, holding her tighter. “I remember her. You remember her. It was real.”

She looked to the side, to the easel, the red, black and blue paint down the legs, the stool tipped over, seat half-soaked, a darker shade of ochre. It was a gaping hole in the room, warning her to stay away.

“I worry I’ll wake up one day and the memories will be gone,” she said. “And I use… I used that painting to hold on to her a little longer. It’s like chamomile tea when my heart was broken, and it’s gone. It wasn’t her, but it was something.”

“I know,” she said, kissed her head. “I know.”

She stayed there, wrapped in his arms, staring at the easel, still shocked at how empty it seemed. Footsteps and quiet radios in the stairwell warned of the business of taking stock of the day. What was gone, what was ruined, what could never be replaced.

By the time she went to bed, early the next morning, she finally realized she’d lost her mother for good, and this time seemed to hurt worse than before.

This 1kStory was written for Nancy (“a paint-splattered easel”).

Summer Train

Sat, 22 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

It was a game they played, down by the shoreline in southern Louisiana. Sentence trains, stretching off through lazy, humid afternoons. Thick, ancient oak trees blocking the sun, her red-and-white dress spread out around her, next to him, as she watched the clouds pass.

“Something was hidden in the darkness,” she said, resting a hand on her forehead, watching her fingers dance in the breeze.

“Darkness hides things that shouldn’t be seen by men,” he said, turning away, at the tree instead, trying not to watch the sweat slip down her neck. The grass was rough on his skin, prickling like the heat.

“Men are the least of my worries,” she said, and he looked back, and her face was there, smiling at him. He held his breath, trying to think.

“Worries,” he said softly.

“Worries,” she repeated.

He closed his eyes, tried to focus, but all he saw was her. He thought of her boyfriend, arms wrapped round her, saying good-bye before the two-week trip to Florida. Those two, glorious weeks. He’d promised to take care of her, to keep her company. That’s what friends do, isn’t it?

“Worries have a way of creepin’ up on you,” he said finally, and she laughed, looked back into the sky. He did, too, but to escape the hell he was in.

“You have no idea what worries are,” she said, sighing, arms out wide, brushing his head.

“Are you willing to teach me?” he asked.

She laughed, put her hands in a “T” and propped herself up on an elbow, leaning against him like she had no idea what it meant to him.

“That’s just cruel,” she said. “How do I start a sentence with ‘me’?”

“You could be a caveman,” he shrugged, and she stuck her tongue out at him.

“Add a word to yours,” she said. “Make it ‘are you willing to teach me how.’ That oughta do it.”

He laughed, shook his head.

“That’s cheatin’,” he said. “I can’t go fixing things to make it easier on you. Defeats the point of the game.”

“You can if you like,” she said, sly and shining as the breeze blew her hair across her face. He held his expression, held on to it for dear life, but the urge to kiss her drew the thoughts out of his head until he was left with just one.

“What’s in it for me if I do?” he asked, and felt the loud, sucking silence of the space between them as he realized he’d taken one step too far.

Her eyebrows twitched, and she laid back in the grass.

“My eternal gratitude,” she said to the air. She made the “T” again, and broke it apart with a flourish. The game was on.

“Are you willing to teach me how?” he asked, as promised.

“How will I know you’ll listen?” she replied.

“Listen to the wind, it’ll tell you the answer.”

“Answer,” she said, and he glanced over to see her arms over her head, her dress pulled tight, legs swaying in the breeze.

“Answer,” he nodded.

“Answer me one question, and I’ll teach you anything.”

He swallowed.

“Anything for you,” he said softly.

“Can you keep a secret?” she asked.

He frowned, and she looked at him, a shy smile on her face, watching him closely.

“The word was ‘you’,” he said.

“I know,” she nodded. “Answer the question.”

“Can I keep a secret?” he asked, slowly. She nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes I can.”

“Good,” she smiled, and kissed him under the old oak tree, at the end of their last long sentence train.

This 1kStory was written for Anna (“Sentence trains”).

Wrong Place

Fri, 21 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The gunshot made the baby kick, and while everyone else pushed themselves closer to the floor, Daisy could only sit against the counter, cradling her belly and trying not to cry.

“Open the damn safe!” shouted the tallest robber, pistol aimed at the bank manager, fumbling with keys. He dropped them, bent to pick them up, when a bullet ended his life. “You!” snapped the robber. “Get the keys and do what I say!”

Ethan slid closer to Daisy, grabbed her hand and squeezed.

“Are you hurt?” he whispered, checking over his shoulder to see if any of the gunmen had noticed. Daisy shook her head, clenching her teeth, trying not to make a noise. She wanted to scream. Her tinted glasses were missing, her white cane too, and the chaos around her were overwhelming her other four senses.

“Where are they?” she asked, trying to keep her eyes closed. If they thought she was looking at them, they might take offence, and she’d be dead.

“Everywhere,” hissed Ethan. “They’re everywhere.”

She nodded, rubbed her belly, started to say a prayer, praying to survive this, for Ethan to survive, to be able to deliver her baby and give him a name and teach him everything her mother had taught her, and—

“Is that a spell?” Ethan asked, squeezing her hand.

“What? No!” Daisy hissed. “You know I can’t—”

“If there were ever a time, this is it!”

“Ethan!” she said, taking her hand away. “It could hurt the baby! You know what happens if they’re exposed in the womb. I can’t do that to our son!”

He reached for her hand again, but then she heard it: heavy footsteps coming near.

“You two!” shouted one of the robbers. “What’s the chatter?” Ethan yelped as they pulled him away from her, and she heard the sounds of his feet kicking out, sneakers sliding on the tile until he was thrown in a heap somewhere too far away from her.

“She’s pregnant,” pleaded Ethan, “she’s just preg—”

She couldn’t see, but she knew the sound of bones breaking. Ethan shrieked, panting, and she heard a bullet being loaded into the chamber of the gun. Daisy held on to her baby, held on to her hope, and tried to weigh him against the only man who had really loved her without the spells.

“Everyone!” yelled the robber. “I said no talking, or there’d be consequences! And here they are!”

He cocked the gun, and Daisy squeezed her eyes shut. The next words out of her mouth were a desperate chant, and she prayed to god he’d forgive her.

This is for Sora Kainomori (“A 25 year old blind pregnant former magical girl is a hostage in a bank.”)

Concessions

Wed, 12 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

When his legs cramped, all he could do was shift them to the side, hope to feel the blood rush through, a brief warm sensation, his feet coming back to life. Half an hour later he’d repeat the process in the other direction, bound inside his tiny invisible box, out of sight from the world, alive for thirty minutes more.

He checked his watch compulsively, kept count of the hours with his fingers, up one hand, down the other. He hadn’t missed one, hadn’t slept the whole time. Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven…

The sounds over this wall, this crumbled wall of his, they kept him awake, kept the red in his eyes more than the dust and the dirt ever could. Tanks crunching brick and bodies, feet shuffling, marching, running, stepping through a courtyard he only vaguely remembered anymore. From the fountain, you could see his wall, but not him. Not if he stayed in his box.

The voices, foreign and haunting, traded intel and orders, jokes and curses, but none of them made sense to him. As much as he prayed for them to move on, he knew this was the perfect shelter, the best place for a camp. Their voices kept him up at night even more than the smell of their food.

By daylight, he could see the body at the other side of the room, staring at him with empty eyes. The blood on the ground was dried, caked and brown and stopping just short of the wall, wrapping around his boots, sticking him down. He didn’t remember the man’s name, but he knew he had a wife, two kids. His job was to carry the ammo, the box at the doorway, tipped over, unreachable.

Thirty-eight.

A pair of rough voices sidled up to the wall, low and hushed at first, then halting, contemplative. The click of a lighter, the sweet smell of tobacco, and then the conversation began in earnest. He made up meanings to the words he heard, and none of them were good. “No prisoners.”

He shifted his legs towards the wall, and his left boot came unstuck from the blood. It made the sound of moving sand, louder than he ever would have guessed.

The voices stopped, and so did he. His finger rested on the trigger to his rifle, and he dared to flex it, see if it still moved. The sounds had been imposing, but the silence was horrible. He tried to look up, but his helmet blocked his view. The only shadows he saw were cast by the damned wall, the only sounds were the echoes of his boot in the blood.

He closed his eyes and tried to think of a prayer, of a song, of something to fill his head other than the nothing. All that came to him was a childhood tune, and the more he repeated it, the more panicked he became: he wanted back there, back before the guns and the helmets and the boots and the shots from a blackened window. He was that boy, not this. That boy didn’t deserve this. That boy ran free in the fields, singing harmless songs and loving the blue sky even when it rained.

And it rained now, too. The first mortar hit out of nowhere, blowing debris and blood over his wall. He was showered in brick and bone, and he covered his face with his hands before the second round struck, sending the courtyard into a deranged panic. Screaming, crying, shouting, pleading… he heard the guns roll away, boots racing this way and that, trying to take cover.

A boy scrambled over the wall and landed atop him. This kid, this crying, sobbing kid, was covered in blood from himself and others, and his eyes were wide in a panic that seemed surreal. He shoved the boy off him, into the room, and pushed himself against the wall a little tighter.

Opposite uniforms, identical impulse. But there was only one chunk of wall.

They stared at each other, unblinking as another mortar hit, unblinking as the black rock rained down around them. Guns fired in the distance, but they stayed dead still, waiting for the other to make his move. The boy’s pistol was on his belt, but it was a long way to reach.

The wristwatch, ignorant to the world, ticked past another half-hour. Like clockwork, his legs begged him to move, to run, to use them even just one last time.

And so he did. Slowly, carefully, he pulled them in, up to his chest. He turned his head away from the boy, looked at the space he’d made. Half the wall, at the end of the trail of blood. A tiny slice of shelter. Half of a tiny slice of shelter, but it was all he could spare.

And then, with the shells exploding all around, he closed his eyes, and he went to sleep.

This Topic Tag is for Cranmer, inspired by the request “small piece of wall.”

hiroshima iv

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Dustin was trying to write with his right hand while his left picked up his grande dark cherry non-fat soy latte from the table. It was a tricky feat. His pen slipped the line, and when he moved to recover, he spilled the cup over the table. He snatched the notebook away in time, but the coffee dripped onto his knee, burning and making him yelp.

“Here you go,” said a woman at the table next to him, handing over a napkin.

“Thanks,” he smiled. He stopped the flow and righted the cup, pushing the lid inside uselessly. His little round table was like a mirror of caffeine, painting a dark and mournful glimpse of the world above. He looked absolutely wretched, he thought.

A barista came by with a heavy cloth and wiped up the rest of the mess. He passed her his customer card, apologized, and asked for another of the same. She disappeared behind the counter as he waited for the table to dry.

“Student?” asked the woman, leaning over the back of her chair, her dirty blond hair weaving about in the air conditioned wind.

“Sorry?” he asked, meeting her blue eyes.

“You’re busy writing,” she said. “Are you a student?”

“Oh,” he smiled. “Oh, no. Not a student. Not for a while now. I’m a poet.”

“Poet,” she said. “You don’t hear that often. Most poets are songwriters these days, aren’t they?”

“Can’t play a guitar,” he shrugged, holding up his hands. “Butterfingers.”

She laughed, turned her chair around until it touched his, rested her chin on her palm and looked him over.

“What kind of poetry do you write?”

“Not too sure yet,” he said. “I’m just starting out. Trying to find my voice.”

“Broken heart?” she asked, taking a sip of her coffee and leaving a smudge of pink on the rim.

“Nothing like that,” he muttered. “Been a bad year, and I thought back to my college days and figured… I dunno, maybe I can sort it out like this.”

“Cheaper than a shrink,” she smiled.

“Exactly my point,” he nodded, then glanced over at the day planner on her table. “What do you do?”

“Event planning,” she said, under her breath. “I know, not too sexy.”

That word made him pause. He was about to speak when a coffee cup was placed on his table, and a heavy-set figure sat down across from him. He turned to see a man in a black leather jacket, a toothpick sticking out of his mouth.

“Good evenin’,” said the man cordially.

A second man appeared next to the woman, arms crossed over his massive chest. He kicked her legs uncrossed, motioned with his chin.

“Beat it, girlie,” said the first man. “Go on, scram.”

She looked from Dustin to the two men, and then gathered up her things and bustled out of the cafe. The second man took her seat, turning it around and leaning in close.

“So I hears you’re a poet,” said the first man.

“Th-that’s right,” said Dustin. “And who are you?”

“Vinnie Two-Beat,” he said. “And this here is my associate, ee comeback.”

“E.E.… Come—”

“It’s un-capital-like,” said Vinnie.

“Oh, I uh—”

“Let’s see what we got,” said Vinnie, snatching the notebook and flipping to the start.

“No, wait,” said Dustin. “I’m not very—”

Vinnie leaned back in his seat, settling on the second page. He licked his lips as he read down the page, then looked up at Dustin. The scar along his right cheek reshaped into sideways “v” when he smiled.

“That’s a nice poem you got there,” he said. “It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.”

Dustin looked over at ee, who was grinning a golden grin.

“Sorry, what?”

“I’m sayin’ it would be a tragedy if your poem were to befall an accident or some other—”

“No, I understand that,” said Dustin. “But it’s a poem. What could you do to it that would—”

Vinnie reached into his inside jacket pocket and in a swift motion, pulled out a black ballpoint pen. He licked the tip and started marking up the page. Dustin reached for it, but ee grabbed his arms, slammed them onto the table, squeezing wedge-like fingers into his muscles.

Vinnie finished writing, then laid the book down across Dustin’s arms, nudging it forward.

“There,” he said darkly. “Consider it a warning.”

Dustin read over the page. He’d expected the text to be scribbled over, horribly mangled, disfigured and ruined. Instead, it looked pretty much the way it had started.

“What… what did you do?” he asked.

Vinnie smirked, pointed to a line with his pen.

“Added a comma,” he said. “And right here, semicolon.”

“But…”

“For someone writin’ in the freeform style like yourself, a semicolon’s just embarrassin’.”

“I don’t know,” said Dustin, reading it over. “It actually improves the flow of the—”

“Hey!” snapped Vinnie. “You want me to get iambic pentameter on your ass? That last line ‘bout the fallin’ rain’d get real hokey as a rhyming couplet, doncha think?”

“I guess, but I still don’t—”

Vinnie popped the lid off the drink and guzzled it. When he finished, his mouth was dripping brown, quivering. He took the notebook back, scratched a few more markings, and turned it over to Dustin. ee squeezed the arms a bit harder.

“I don’t see what you did,” said Dustin.

“Right here. Added a period. Makes it look like you’re a queer.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“A homosexual,” hissed Vinnie under his breath. “Yer talkin’ about a girl, but with the period, it changes the subject of the phrasin’ to imply yer talkin’ bout a guy. Which makes you a homosexual.”

“Oh,” said Dustin. “But I am gay.”

ee let go of the arms.

“You’re… you’re a fag?” stammered Vinnie.

“Yeah,” said Dustin. “Is that a problem?”

Vinnie wiped his mouth, pushed the drink closer to Dustin. He closed the book, pushed it across the table and stood up, phone to his ear before he kicked open the door and walked into the street.

ee looked over at Dustin nervously, up and down.

“What’s the problem?” asked Dustin. “I don’t have cooties, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

ee looked over at Vinnie, then back to Dustin.

“it’s not

that

at all,” he said in a quiet, lowercase voice.

“it’s just that

the gay

gay

gay mafia

is bigger and

stronger and

(quite frankly)

scarier

than we

are.”

Dustin shook his head to undo the odd line breaks in his mind.

“So wait, you’re saying there’s a gay mafia? A real gay mafia?”

ee nodded solemnly.

“And you two are—”

“the poetry

mafia.”

“Right,” said Dustin.

“Hey, ee!” yelled Vinnie from the door. “We gotta go!”

ee gave Dustin a surprisingly apologetic look and darted for the door. It closed with a bang, and within seconds the cafe was back to normal. Dustin asked for yet another drink, and then opened his book to write again. He had just uncapped his pen when a well-manicured hand turned his notebook around and started flipping through the pages.

Dustin looked up to see a young man with expertly-coiffed hair and a hint of eyeshadow reading his poetry. He decided to drink his coffee in silence. Finally, the visitor looked up.

“Oh, darling,” said the man. “This is awful.”

“Sorry, who are you?” asked Dustin, bristling.

“I am Jean-Paul Simmons, head of the Gay Mafia’s Poetry Branch. And you, darling, are not leaving this cafe with your so-called poetry intact. It is an abomination.”

Dustin reached for his book, tried to pull it back, but it wouldn’t budge. “Thanks for the input,” he grumbled. Jean-Paul glared at him with intense eyes.

“You write about love, but leave so much ambiguity in your phrasing that I can’t tell if you’re straight or queer. We have special exemptions for hidden subtext with closeted poets, but according to our file on you, that doesn’t apply. Honestly, I haven’t been this offended since Ricky Martin was popular.”

“I don’t see how this is any of your business,” said Dustin. “I can write whatever I want, can’t I?”

Jean-Paul took Dustin’s hand in his, caressing it gently.

“Oh, poor dear Dustin,” he purred. “No, no you can’t.”

Dustin rolled his eyes.

“Or else what?” he scoffed. “You’ll switch all my pronouns?”

Jean-Paul smiled sweetly, then broke Dustin’s index finger.

“Art has no rules,” hissed Jean-Paul as Dustin held back a shriek, “but we do. If I don’t see more flamboyancy in this notebook by Friday, the only poetry the world will ever associate with you will be on your gravestone. Do I make myself clear?”

Dustin nodded, wiped tears from his eyes with his free hand. Jean-Paul let him go, patted him on the cheek.

“Very good, darling,” he smiled. “Now do order me that drink you’ve got there. It looks absolutely scrumptious!”

This Topic Tag was created for the fabulous Gabriel Gadfly when he asked for “Poetry Mafia.” I got a bit sidetracked at the end, sorry.

The Collector

Mon, 10 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Dougley was the picture of madness. He’d dumped out his drawers, flipped up the mattress, and was running his fingers along the tops of door frames, muttering to himself the whole way.

It was at roughly this moment that Effie came in, knocking the stool out from under him. His head hit the floor with a crack.

“Oh dear,” said Effie, scrambling to help Dougley up. “Oh dear oh dear, are you hurt?”

Dougley put a hand to his head while his eyes settled themselves in his skull. He was ashen, utterly pale beneath his brown fur. But it wasn’t because of the fall.

“I’ve no more tacks!” he said, getting to his feet and falling back over again. “There’s a shipment today, and I’ve nothing to fasten them with!”

Effie looked around the room. There were socks stuck to every piece of furniture, socks hanging from the ceiling, and so many socks along the walls that the place almost seemed a big, soft explosion of colour and texture. There were no echoes in here. It was maddeningly buffeted.

“I should find something for your head,” Effie said, bustling over to the ice box. “And you should lay down.”

“Can’t today,” he said, wobbling up to his feet, clutching a socked table for support. “Shipment coming in.”

“You mentioned,” Effie said, wrapping a chunk of ice in a sock and shuffling over, pushing it against the back of his head. He made no move to help her, just kept wobbling along. “I can take the shipment today, if you like,” she said.

He stopped, looked at her seriously, black eyes piercing.

“You can’t tell the difference,” he said, and continued on his way to get his hat.

“I can so!” she said, keeping the ice against his head, and catching the drips of water as they fell. “I’ve been at this a long time, Dougley! I can tell!”

He put on his hat, swatting her away, and wrapped his sun glasses around his head, pinching the middle to his pointed nose. He motioned to the pile of laundry by the window. Socks, socks, and more socks.

“Tell me,” he said. “And be quick about it.”

Effie put the ice down carefully, and raced over to the window, sorting through the pile, carefully considering each piece on its own merits. She settled for three: two with red toes, one with a red heel, and two of them a faded shade of lavender.

“Left,” she said, holding up one. “Right, and right.”

“Wrong,” said Dougley, swinging on his jacket. “Wrong, and certainly more wrong. You see? Even in all that time, you get it wrong. And what’s to be done about that?”

Effie was staring at the socks in her hands, trying to sort them out. She dropped them back into the basket as Dougley reached the door.

“If you want to help,” he said, “find me some more tacks. We can’t hang them out with glue, you know. Now quickly! The shipment is due any moment now!”

He was about to open the door when it opened for him, knocking him backwards and into his sorting table. This time, it made an impression on him, because he said “Goodness,” softly, and fell asleep.

Effie leapt down next to him, putting the ice back on his head and slapping his cheek lightly. His eyes half-opened, and he murmured something soft and irrelevant, and then went back to sleep.

“Yuh-oh,” said Archie from the door, carrying a giant basket of socks. “That don’t usually happen.”

Effie looked from the basket to Dougley, and then back again, her eyes filling with tears. She took a sharp breath in, clenched her fists, nodded, stood up.

“On the sorting table,” she said decisively.

“‘s usually on the ground beside—”

“Sorting table!” she said, and rolled up her sleeves.

Archie watched as she pulled the first heap out of the basket and laid them out on the table. There were five black ones, one dark blue, a pair of pinks, and an assortment of white ones nearly turned brown with mud. Each one had a tiny tag on it, a seven-digit number scrawled in messy handwriting, stapled through the fabric. She made sure none were touching each other, tweaking their positions a bit too meticulously, so that it betrayed her unease.

“You sure about this?” asked Archie, watching her nervously. “I could find the Doc and he could—”

“It’s fine,” she said, then picked up one of the black socks. “This one. And this, and this. And this one. And… and these two as well.”

She clenched the chosen socks in her fist, and then swept the rest off the table, into a second basket on the floor. Then she stopped, swallowed slowly, and handed the chosen ones over to Archie.

“These are the right ones,” she said.

“How do you—”

“I just do, Archie! I do! Now stop questioning me and find some tacks!”

Archie started to comply, but paused, scratching his chin.

“It’s just…” he said, “I’ve gotta start gassing the truck for the trip back. Time’s short as it is.”

“Don’t pull that crap with me, Archie!” she snapped, sorting through another pile. “I know how you spend your breaks! Now find some tacks! Dougley’s depending on you!”

She set back to work, making her way through the basket with jittery efficiency, finishing up with a pair of unworn red socks held together with a pin and folded cardboard. After some deliberation, she put one in the return basket, and carted the pile of right socks over to where Archie stooped, shoulders hanging low.

“Ain’t none around,” he said. “I looked everywhere, and there ain’t none here.”

“Fine,” she said, checking the clock. The workday was wrapping up. Two o’clock — one hour until government workers headed home. They had to move fast.

“Come on,” she said, and dragged Archie and his sock pile to the panel with the green paper above it. She jumped to reach the paper, missing each time. Archie stretched, pulled it down, handing it to her. She read the date.

“Seventy-five days,” she muttered.

“I thought t’was supposed to be seventy-six—”

“Well we’re out of tacks, so this is what we’ve got,” she said, and started unpinning the socks on the board. Archie snatched the return basket, watched each entry as it came down. When she was done, Effie had a handful of tacks rattling in her hand.

“Black ones up top,” she said, and started fishing the white ones out of the pile. “Their worries weigh more. They need the space to fall. You do those, if you don’t mind.”

“Roger,” said Archie, and stretched over, pinning the black socks up near the ceiling. After he finished a row, he cleared his throat, trying to be casual as Effie’s head knocked against his thigh. “You’re a nat’ral at this, Effie,” he said.

“I really hope so,” she sighed. “If we get any of these wrong, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble. You and me both.”

“How’d anyone know if—”

“They won’t, but they’ll come by anyway,” she said. “Last time there was a suicide in our sector, the inspectors were here for a month reviewing our records. Accused Dougley of mixing up a left and right.”

“Dougley?” gasped Archie, “The man’s been at this for longer than you an’ I’ve been alive, put together!”

Effie pinned an Argle sock to the wall, its tag curling out. She exhaled slowly, letting the breath squeak through her pursed lips.

“He always sings as he works,” she said. “How’s the rhyme go? ‘Right socks are the worries; left, the hopes and dreams; hang the bad ones till they’re dry; see how bright the world now seems’. It always seemed childish to me.” She pinned the last of her pile, ran her hand down the fabric slowly. “Not so childish anymore.”

“Tell me about it,” said Archie, standing away from the wall. “You sure you don’t want to wait for him to wake up?”

Effie looked at one of the socks before her, its toe facing left, curling away from the wall. She nodded to herself.

“It’s good,” she said. “We’re good. You’d better get the returns back. A sock or two missing, that’s one thing. People’d notice if their laundry bins went empty.”

Archie laughed, scooped the return basket under his arm. “Some of these places, I don’t think they would,” he chortled, and squeezed out the door.

Effie updated the green paper, climbed the stepladder and pinned it above her very first assignment. She stood back, noting the odd gap in the middle of the board. In time, she’d learn to it better, but for her first try, it was a respectable presentation.

When Dougley awoke that evening, he was on the bench, covered with a rough blanket, head on a pillow. He was alone. By the smell of lemon in the air, he could tell Effie had cleaned the place thoroughly, and recently. His eyes shot to the return basket, but found it missing.

“Goodness!” he gasped, and sat up quickly, recoiling when the cold floor froze his bare right foot.

This Topic Tag is from JanOda’s request at the end of January for “Right Socks, because they are neglected.” I apologize for the tardiness.

A Matter of Perspective

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The break room was a zoo by the time Edmund got there. Two senior watchmen bounced around on a lunch table, throwing stale bread and meat this way and that, screaming into the crowd like a pair of harpies with especially foul mouths.

“What’s all this about?” he asked a junior, easing the door closed and crossing his arms.

“Tech’s on the blink again,” said the junior quietly, eyes darting to the rabble-rousers as if he were afraid to provoke them further. “Lost five marks today already.”

“Did we now,” said Edmund, and then pushed through the crowd until he came to the tables where the two seniors were bouncing. He tapped the close one — a thug named Cranmer — on the leg.

“What?” snapped Cranmer. “What the fuck do you want?”

“Get down from there,” said Edmund calmly. He didn’t look up when he spoke. He was staring at a patch of empty real estate on the floor, and by the way he was looking at it, it was clear that was where the conversation was going to take place.

Cranmer grumbled the whole way off the table, stood in the assigned spot, and continued to fume.

“Let’s have it,” Edmund said, checking his phone out of the corner of his eye. A vein in the side of Cranmer’s head was pulsing furiously, but his colour was coming back to normal.

“The damn pads don’t work no more,” said Cranmer. “There’s been at least five goats gone by today that nobody saw comin’.”

“And the pads are to blame?” asked Edmund, checking his phone. “I’ve been reporting goats all morning.”

“You ain’t using the pads, boyo!” snapped Cranmer. “The phones work just fine. It’s the pads that flake the fuck out! Look here!” He handed his iPad over to Edmund. Sure enough, there was no wifi signal. A little progress icon spun helplessly. Edmund looked above him to the wireless repeater attached to the underside of the bridge, then back to the iPad.

“Isn’t that something,” he said, almost to himself. “It’s been like this all day?”

“On and off,” said Cranmer. “Works fine one minute, and the next all y’hear is someone screamin’—”

“Goats on the bridge!” shouted a junior from the west window. “Goats clearing the bridge!”

Edmund and Cranmer shoved their way through the crowd to the door, up the stairs and out onto the platform, just in time to see a small group of goats clearing the far side of the bridge. The lone junior on the other side was waving his hands at them, trying to make them stop, but they paid him no heed, charging towards the hills, towards… something glinting?

Edmund climbed the western tower, scrambling higher and higher until he reached the lookout station. He took a pair of binoculars from the junior there, focussed into the distance.

“Jesus wept…” he gasped. “How did you not report this?”

“R-r-report what?” asked the junior, squinting at the hills ineffectually.

“There…” said Edmund, handing the binoculars back, and pointing at a boulder-sized grey dome on the horizon. “And there… and there… they’re… they’re everywhere!”

Cranmer reached the platform, out of breath, snatching the binoculars from the junior and taking it in.

“What is it?” he asked. “What are all those things?”

“They’re jamming us,” seethed Edmund. “They’re blocking our wifi and blinding us! They must have someone on the inside! They’re compromised our systems!”

“Oi!” yelled Cranmer to a junior below. “You! Get over that hill and bring back the first grey dome you see!”

“Yes sir!” nodded the junior, and dashed down the road. He got all of ten steps before his brains exploded out behind him and he collapsed into the green grass.

Cranmer and the other workers ducked instinctively, but Edmund just stared into the distance, eyes narrow. He hadn’t seen where the shot came from, but he had a solid feeling there was more than one sniper out there.

A moment later, his phone buzzed, and he opened his mail to see the message he always knew would come one day.

“Trolls,” it said in disjointed hoof-typed letters, “the bridge is now your Prison. Leaf and die. Good Day.”

This Topic Tag was requested by Damon, using the words “iPad trolls”. The funny thing is, I wrote most of this long before the actual devices came out, so I had no idea the wifi glitches would be topical.

A Hell of a Morning

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Daylight savings meant the hell-hounds wanted walking an hour early. Halfway down the street, it started raining sulphur.

He got to work in a pissy mood, used the dull chains to flail, skipped the Armageddon progress meeting entirely.

Some days, Lucifer wondered who was really in charge of evil.

This Topic Tag was requested by the famously famous @irk. Topic was “Lucifer”. 50 words, no less!

The Power Circle

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Ross took a cigar from the box, but did not light it. He held it loose between his fingers, rolling it side to side, like a man with an idea, while the others waited.

“No,” he said finally. “I don’t like it. The coup’s gone on too long. We have to cut funding.”

Eddie scratched his beard. “We can’t cut funding,” he said. “We have assets at stake, and—”

“And Pablo! hissed Bart. “He’ll be a sitting duck if we pull out now!”

Ross leaned forward, and all six of his colleagues did the same.

“Pablo brought this on himself,” he said. “Guerilla warfare was never his forte, and it’s ruined the whole enterprise. From now on, we’re going to back Darth Vader!”

His voice went jovial, and he downed his Red Bull happily. The others did the same. Ross’ mother paused at the door to the rec room, laundry in hand.

“Would you boys like some pizza?” she asked.

“Would I!” nodded Eddie enthusiastically.

“Thanks, Mrs G!” agreed Howard.

“So,” said Ross, clasping his hands together. “We need to round up some AT-ATs and a brigade of clones to…” he heard his mother close the basement door… “and whatever anti-aircraft launchers we can find.”

“Got it,” nodded Eddie.

“Ross!” called his mother from the top of the stairs. “The pizza’s on its way! Can you pay for it when it gets here?”

“I think so!” Ross replied, pulling a twenty from the top of a briefcase marked “75M.”

“Thanks kiddo! I’ll pay you back!”

“Don’t worry about it,” he smiled. “Senator Palpatine’s got it covered.”

This is a Topic Tag that Jan Oda bought with her points. If you want to buy a story, just log in and check under the “Spend” tab in the console.

Desertbus #1

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The man with the socks on his hands was a terrible assassin. It went beyond the lack of fine motor skills, too. As he sat on the bus with his hands wrapped in burgundy, the man looked embarrassed, and good assassins never look anything but deadly.

“May I?” asked a young woman in a frayed skirt, pointing to the set next to him. Behind her, a thick-set punk with a large artificial tree tried to navigate the aisle, knocking fellow passengers to and fro as he fought for his footing.

The man stared at the woman, his sunken eyes cold like the rain outside. Or at least that’s how he imagined them. To him, cruelty was a cruel mistress.

“You may,” he said, moving his bag off the seat, but he dropped it, and something metal hit the ground. The woman ducked down, scooped it up for him, and paused, a frown on her face.

“Is this…?”

“A branding iron,” he said as darkly as he could, and snatched it back. “Thank you.”

“Why do you need a branding iron?” she asked, sitting next to him, rustling in her purse.

“I am branding things,” he said.

“What kinds of things?” she asked, oblivious to his vicious misdemeanour.

“Evil things. Dead things. Human things,” he said. “I must silence and brand someone this evening, in order to maintain my position at the pinnacle of the assassin’s guild.”

That wasn’t strictly true, but he was too heartless to care.

“Cool,” said the woman, and pulled out a little pudding cup, opened it up and started eating. It smelled strongly of bananas. Bananas reminded the man of his mother, of the blood in the puddles as the thieves—

“I’m in school,” the woman said happily. “Criminal psychology. It’s heavy stuff. Gonna be a profiler one day.”

The man just stared at her. She had banana pudding on her nose. She was exactly the kind of person he would want to have assassinated, if he were the one calling the shots. But tonight, with his mission…

“What do you do?” she asked.

He looked away as he spoke.

“I am a cleaner,” he said.

“Is that why you have socks on your hands?”

“No,” he said.

“Dry skin?”

“No,” he said.

“Lobster hands?” she smiled.

He stared at her, tears welling in his eyes.

Her smile disappeared.

“I clean the world of impurities,” he said. “Of recklessness and naïveté. Of lust and infidelity. Of—”

“Douglas Street!” called the driver.

“This is my stop,” said the man, getting up and pushing past the woman’s knees, clutching his bag close to his chest. He waited by the doors, right behind her, and felt the handle of the knife he kept in his jacket, the rough blade calling out for blood, the woman’s spine so exposed, so pure and clean and desperate to be stabbed… All he needed was one kill… one kill to become certified. One kill to claim his place at the top of the assassin’s guild…

The bus pulled up to the stop and he made his move. In a quick motion, he gripped the knife in his socked hand, pulled back and—

—fell onto the sidewalk with a mouthful of pine needles. Plastic ones, too. The knife plugged itself neatly into his chest, and he stared at it in disbelief, like he had not given it permission to be there, and it was due for a solid scolding.

“Dude!” gasped the man with the tree. “Oh my god, are you hurt?”

But before he could answer, the doors closed again, and the bus drove away, kicking filthy water at his face as it went.

The man with the socks on his hands sat there at the bus stop, knowing he’d failed… failed to assassinate anyone… anyone but himself.

And that wasn’t strictly true, either. The guy with the tree’d done it.

“Shit,” he grumbled, and died.

Tonight’s Topic Tag comes from @tenaciousN, and relates to Desert Bus For Hope

Bunny Tacos

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Nicki peeked her head around the corner, nose crinkled up at the smell and the smoke. It reeked of onion and peppers, but Bill seemed oblivious.

“Bill,” she hissed. “What are you doing in here?”

“Hmm?” Bill asked, peered over his shoulder as he worked in a giant steel pot by the sink. “I’m making tacos.”

“You’re doing it wrong,” she said, started to leave, but then came back for a second look. “What in the hell is in that pot?”

“What pot?” Bill asked, turning to face her, keeping the pot suspiciously behind him at all times.

“The one you’re—”

Just then, a soaking wet bunny hopped onto the counter, its little white tail twitching briefly before it dashed towards the fridge.

Nicki said nothing for a moment.

“Is that—”

“Yes.”

“And you’re—”

“Yes.”

“But—”

“Listen,” said Bill, hustling up to her and speaking in hushed tones. “It’s a foreign dish.”

“I don’t think that matters,” said Nicki, watching the cute little bunny bounce around the room happily, shaking itself off every few steps, trying to get dry. “You’re not going to… you know… butcher it here, are you?”

“God no,” laughed Bill, and she laughed too. Silly misunderstanding. It was all good now. Phew! “No, you’re supposed to boil them alive.”

She stopped laughing.

“You’re joking.”

“No really, it’s a special recipe.”

“I don’t care what kind of recipe it is—”

“Guatemalan.”

“I don’t care where it’s from,” Nicki said, turning off the stove and dumping the pot of water down the drain. “You’re not boiling live animals in my home.”

“It’s Kathy,” he muttered, putting away the salsa with a long face. “She’s coming for dinner.”

“Kathy from the office? Why?”

“She’s been hitting on me,” he mumbled. “Every day for the last three months. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Nicki sat down at the table, picked up a celery stalk and started eating loudly, as if it might help dissipate her frustration.

“You go from stupid to stupider,” she said. “You’re married, Bill.”

“I know.”

“To me.”

“I know.”

“And you invited another woman here for dinner? While I’m still here? I mean, I knew you were stupid, but I didn’t realize you were too dumb to pull off an affair—”

“No, that’s exactly it! It’s not an affair!”

She bit off another chunk, chewed furiously.

“Then what is it?” she asked. “And your answer better be good.”

“I’m trying to scare her off. She won’t take no for an answer, so I’m going to make her sit down for a dinner with you, and serve her bunny tacos. I figure after that, she won’t talk to me ever again.”

“I know I won’t,” Nicki said, picking the bunny up and brushing its damp fur. It sniffed her hand.

“Listen,” he said, kneeling down in front of her and taking her free hand in his. “I know it’s crazy, but please play along. I need her to leave me alone, and this is the only way I could figure.”

“So you’re not going to kill the bunny?”

“Hell no,” he laughed. “I’m going to say I’m running late, just a few steps left to make the recipe complete, and go through the motions. That should be enough.”

Nicki pet the bunny, fed it a carrot.

“So we get to keep him?”

“Her.”

“What’s her name?”

“She doesn’t have one. Any ideas?”

“Sweetie. She looks like a Sweetie.”

Just then, the doorbell chimed, and Bill jumped up, knocked his collar crooked, dishevelled his hair, and sprinted to the door. Nicki kept playing with Sweetie, feeding her another carrot, stroking her black and brown fur.

“Kathy, you remember my wife Nicki,” said Bill, leading a walking bed sheet into the room. Nicki was about to be the polite hostess, but she found herself unable to move for fear of bursting into laughter. Kathy peered out from a pair of eye holes in the sheet.

“Oh,” said Kathy, hesitating. “I didn’t realize there would be three of us at dinner…”

“You don’t mind, do you?” Bill said, dashing back to the counter and bringing some more vegetables to the table, started chopping. “By the way, why the sheet?”

Kathy shuffled her feet a bit.

“I… well, you said it was the Guatemalan Festival of the Dead, so I wanted to come prepared.”

“Ah,” said Bill, working on some carrots. “Good thinking.”

Nicki peered down at the bare legs coming out of the blanket. They were bare quite a long way up. She could make out the colour of a red bra through the sheet, and her eyes narrowed immediately.

“You came prepared,” she said to Kathy.

“I… uh…”

“It’s okay,” Nicki said, petting Sweetie. “There’ll be lots of time to explore the issue after dinner.”

There was a long pause where Nicki wondered if she’s miscalculated and somehow locked herself into an awkward threesome.

“What is dinner?” Kathy said, voice squeaking under Nicki’s persistent glare. “It smells wonderful.”

“Oh, Guatemalan tacos,” said Bill, dumping vegetables into a bowl and filling the pot with water again. “It’s a special recipe we enjoy ‘round here. Boiled bunny meat.”

Kathy’s gaze went from Bill to Nicki to Sweetie in less than a second. She said nothing.

“You almost ready, dear?” asked Nicki, petting the bunny and putting it on the table near the vegetables.

“Almost!” said Bill, turning off the tap. “Help me here a second.”

Nicki grabbed the handle to the pot, winked to Bill, and then they both stopped cold at a loud thunk from behind, followed by some rough sawing.

They turned around to see Kathy’s sheet sprayed with crimson blood, trying to break Sweetie’s spine with the knife.

Nicki dropped the pot on the floor.

Kathy looked up, cocked her head to the side, and left the knife jutting out of the poor dead rabbit.

“Oh crap,” she said. “You’re supposed to boil them alive, aren’t you? Shit. I’m so sorry.”

With contributed insanity by @alexiskn (“tacos”), @Ebonwumon (“bedsheet ghost”), @kdnewton (“inter-office relationship”) and the wonderful @janoda, who sent a pic of two bunnies in a pot. Bloody stinkin’ hell, people. It’s HER fault.

Inhospitable

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

For the fifth day in a row, Lisa woke Barney up at three in the morning by sighing loudly and rolling over in the covers until they came right off him.

“You awake?” she asked suddenly.

“I am now,” he grumbled, pulling some of the covers back. “What’s going on?”

“I’m hungry.”

He rubbed his eye, sat up, turned on the light.

“Fried goat again?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “That’ll make me ill.”

“Then what?” he grumbled, finding his slippers. He misjudged the distance and planted his foot on the frigid ground, and pulled himself back into the bed to regroup.

“Raw onions,” she said. “Raw onions covered in chocolate.”

“Well now I feel ill,” he said. “Seriously, if you want something like that, make it yourself.”

“But it’s all the way in the kitchen!” she moaned.

“You go there all the time during the day—”

“But I only have the one leg!”

“You’ve always only had the one leg.”

She pouted at him, rubbed her swollen belly and made a big, sad puppy-dog eye. It made him hungry.

“I might fall and hurt the baby,” she said. “There’s ice on the floor in the hall.”

“You wanted to live in Antarctica,” he said, turning away. “Don’t blame me.”

“March of the Penguins made me hungry. Who knew they were so gamey. But I still want my onions. Please…”

She pulled the covers off and he put his slippers on, trudged down the hall, around the pool of ice, and found an onion in the basket by the counter. He was just bringing the chocolate to a simmer when Lisa hopped up next to him. She smelled the sweetness in the air, smiled happily.

“That smells delicious,” she said.

“I thought you were scared of slipping,” he grumbled.

“I walked on the whats-it-called instead. The copper mould.”

“Verdigris,” he said, plopping an onion into the chocolate and watching it bob around. “I’ve gotta clean that up. Remind me in the morning.”

“It is the morning.”

“Not in my world,” he said, stabbing the onion with a skewer and pulling it out. He turned it around until the dripping stopped, and handed it over to Lisa.

“It’s still hot,” she said.

“Blow on it.”

“You’re a lousy waiter.”

“You’re a worse customer. I’m going back to bed.”

He was walking around the ice in the hall when the whole apartment shook, and he lost his balance and landed on his back on the verdigris, sliding back onto the ice.

“What was that?” he gasped, getting back to his feet as Lisa hopped around the corner.

“It’s the neighbours,” she said. “They’re having one of their all-night parties again.”

“My home is not a theme park,” he growled, grabbing his coat from the rack and storming out the door. He walked across the snowy field, made a heavy fist and beat against their door five times. Ten minutes later, a tiny human in a parka opened the metal latches and the door swung open.

“What the hell are you doing in there?” Barney boomed. “It’s three in the fucking morning!”

“Sorry,” said the human, looking oh-so tasty, “we had an accident with the boiler and…”

Barney grabbed the little man and ducked down so he could fit into their hut. He stormed down the hall into the main living area, which was full of smoke and cries of agony.

“My wife’s pregnant, you know,” Barney roared. “She needs her sleep! I don’t care how much fun you think it is in Antarctica, you can’t go partying at all hours!”

“But Mr Cyclops, sir…” said the man in his hand, and he shook him around to shut him up.

“What in the hell is that?” Barney said, pointing down to a bloody mess on the floor. It had a jumpsuit on part of it.

“That’s Lucy!” sobbed another of the men, his face bloody itself. “She… she was right next to the boiler when it—”

Barney dropped the little man, clapped his hands together.

“All right,” he said, trying to regain a sense of diplomacy in the midst of all the chaos. “Looks like you have your hands full here. Just keep it down, and we won’t have any problems. Got it?”

“Yes sir,” said the two men. A woman wailed in the back room, and they ran off to help. Barney excused himself, trudged back to his apartment and shut the door against the wind.

“What was it?” asked Lisa, finishing off the onion. “Another party?”

“No, some kind of explosion,” said Barney, taking off his jacket. “Almost excusable, given the mess they’re going to have to clean up.”

“Oh dear. Should we help?”

“You’ve only got one leg, and I’m not in the mood.”

She nodded, licked off her fingers.

“I got you something, though,” said Barney with a smile, reaching into his pocket. He presented her with the wrecked corpse of the woman from next door.

Lisa’s face went pale.

“Oh my god, Barney… is that Lucy?”

“You know their names?”

“She cleans our kitchen every afternoon! She’s here every day!”

Barney glanced at the meat, squinted his eye.

“Oh yeah, I thought she looked familiar.”

“You can’t expect me to eat that…”

“Well no, not raw. But we have some chocolate left over, so—”

“Barney Goldstone Paradopolous! You make me sick!”

She hopped furiously down the hall, back to the bedroom, and slammed the door behind her. Spoken or not, it was clear Barney was sleeping on the couch again tonight.

He dropped Lucy into the compost bin, poured himself a tall glass of scotch, and settled himself in front of the television, flipping through channels until he came to some familiar footage of a penguin in a snowstorm.

“This is the most inhospitable terrain on Earth,” said the narrator.

“Amen,” said Barney, and poured himself another.

With wonderful suggestions by @janoda (“the impossible cravings of a one-legged cyclops living on antartica”), @tenaciousN (“raw onions, verdigris”), @kdnewton (“theme park”) and @quillsandzebras (“CHOCOLATE!”). You guys are insane.

Fall Line-Up

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Yulga is finishing her third cup of coffee in an hour, but by the jitter in her hands, it must be the fiftieth today. Her prospectus is curled and worn as she fiddles nervously, sunken eyes darting left and right, brittle skin almost creaking with the action. Even her leather bodice seems emptier than it should be.

“All right,” sighs Finn, peering out the windows onto Wall Street. “We’re a bit behind the ball here, but we can catch up, yeah? The important thing is that you called.”

Yulga looks like she’s going to cry.

“Vhat can vee do?” she whimpers. “Eez no time to fix! Festeeval of Dead Souls eez tomorrow!”

Finn turns, points at the screen to his side, traces the graph along, down, and down. Taps it at the end.

“The problem isn’t the stock,” he says.

“Eez not?”

“No, the problem isn’t the stock. The problem is the approach. Anyone can be a Black Widow, Yulga. But not everyone can do it with panache.”

“P-p-panache?”

“You know… that je ne sais quoi that says to your market: ‘Those other Black Widows are playing at a game they don’t understand.’ You understand?”

“No.”

“What makes a great Black Widow? Is it the clothes? The hair? The thick eye shadow? No. No it’s not. It’s…”

“Eating zee men?”

“Eating the men, exactly! I’ve looked through all your marketing materials, and I haven’t seen that mentioned once!”

“Zey sought it vould scare people avay.”

“Who are ‘they’? Marketing folks, yeah? You can’t trust marketing folks. They specialize in making you beautiful, loveable, digestible. Thing is, Yulga, you don’t want to be digestible. You want to be doing the digesting yourself. From the looks of it, Yulga, you haven’t done much digesting at all. Have you?”

“Not zo much,” she says, flipping through the prospectus slowly, avoiding eye contact. Finn sits across from her, leans onto the boardroom table.

“What’s your favourite product this season? If you had to pick just one, what’d it be?”

She turns to the row of posters along the wall, each touting Black Widow brand delicacies. Her eyes settle on the first one in the row.

“Zee tiramisu,” she says.

“Excellent. Excellent choice. Now how do you advertise it? You see? You say ‘Old Country Delicious,’ but what does that mean? What Old Country? Everyone’s got that. It’s boring. It’s like organic food. You need something with punch. So how about this: ‘Black Widow Tiramisu: Dangerously Delicious.’”

Yulga isn’t sure.

“And then,” Finn continues, “You put a splatter of strawberry sauce down the centre of the cake, just to seal the deal. You can see it, yeah?”

Yulga nods slowly.

“Eez not bad idea,” she says. “But von’t zat scare customers avay?”

“The ones you scare, you don’t want to keep. Look: I specialize in helping people like you make the most of what you are. I won’t tell you to water yourself down. There are people out there that want full strength vodka, and they’re not impressed by anything less. Be that vodka, Yulga. Be it.”

She looks down at the prospectus again.

“But investors vant zeir money und profits…” she says.

“Speaking of investors… have you shacked up with any of them yet? Have you considered that angle?”

She shrugs.

“Eez not so easy. Only one of zem eez man.”

“It’s the twenty-first century, darling. You’ve got to catch up. Maybe you should consider one of the women instead. A bisexual Black Widow could be your angle.”

“Dazelda from Romania does zat, many years now.”

“Yes, but she only eats old women. And frankly Dazelda has a drinking problem. She might not even realize what she’s doing.”

“But vomen are so… thin…”

“Darling, this is America. Look around.”

He winks at the camera. How can someone so successful be so obtuse?

“But if I eat zee investor,” she says, checking her blood-red nails. “Zen zee rest of zee investors vill vant to get avay, yes?”

“No, Yulga. Small picture. Small picture. You eat one of the investors, and then you tell the others to double their money or you’ll spend the night. Instant liquidity. Easy as pie, and it’s just doing what you do best.”

She nods. The colour is coming back to her cheeks. She’s watching Finn with hungry eyes, reaching across the table and taking his hand in hers.

“You are very kind,” she says. “And strong…”

He squeezes her hand back and she shudders with pleasure. He smiles, nods.

“My pleasure. Seriously. I had one of your cakes on the plane, and it was life-affirming. Honestly. Even if you had no money, Yulga, I’d do it for the food. You have a gift.”

Her irises have gone black, and there’s sweat on her heaving, flushed chest. She smiles coyly, dancing fingers along Finn’s hand, licks her lips.

“You are too kind,” she says with a lush, deep voice.

“I can see you’ve got the spirit back already,” he smiles. “The spark’s back, yeah? You know where you’re going?”

The room is so warm. Yulga leans across the table, nose touching Finn’s palm so slightly, but we all feel it like a shockwave.

“I do,” she purrs.

“Good,” Finn grins. “You take that direction, that energy, that pure, unbridled sexuality, and you wrap it in chocolate, and that—”

“— is your fantasy?” she breathes.

“— is your next quarter profits. Honestly, how do you think Apple does it? iPhones? Vampiric bloodlust.”

Her hand runs down his chest as we move in closer. We have to move in closer. We need to see…

“Tell me more…” she whispers to his heart.

There’s a knock at the door. I want to scream at them to go away.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” says Yulga’s assistant, a young guy in a over-sized suit and a pair of sneakers. “Trey wanted me to let you know the sale went through. You’re divested.”

He leaves and Yulga continues caressing Finn, who seems oddly out of the moment.

“Divested what?” he asks.

“Eez nothing,” she groans, brushing her hand on his cheek.

“Divested your stock?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. “To pay for beautiful bedroom vhere ve can do vonderful zings together…”

Finn takes her hand in his, squints.

“How are you paying me again?” he asks.

“From share of profits,” she says and it’s like the dirtiest talk I can imagine. We can’t get close enough. We need to get rid of this camera…

Finn frowns at her, straight into her gorgeous, black eyes. She’s panting, razor teeth desperately calling him in. Calling him close. Calling me close.

“I don’t work on promises,” he says. “What else do you have?”

She laughs, licks her lips.

“Vhat else do you vant…?”

He sighs, shakes his head, and takes a step back as she lunges for his chest with gutting claws. She topples forwards, off the table, onto the floor. There’s a crack and a loud shriek, but Finn doesn’t pause. He grabs me by the arm and pulls me towards the door.

Yulga gets back to her feet, nose gushing blood, and it’s somehow so erotic I can’t stand to be apart from—

“You know what?” Finn says, turning suddenly. “I told you on the phone: don’t panic. Don’t do anything. Wait till I get here. I took me five hours, Yulga. Five hours. And you can’t wait that long?”

“I vill make you so happy…” she moans.

“Happy?” Finn laughs. “You can’t bake simple desserts, you tart. You’re not making anyone happy.”

“But you said you liked my sveets!” she pleads.

“Oh that was just for show. You know why your stock is tanking? Your tiramisu tastes like liver and kidneys. And not even good ones. Do yourself a favour: hire a patissier and try not to eat him.”

We hear her wailing all the way down the hall. It broke my heart. Thankfully, not literally.

The elements to this story were: Stock market rumblings by @alexiskn, tiramisu by @mjgolli and a Black Widow by @janoda.

What You Paid For

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The door was open a crack, but Oscar knocked all the same. There was no answer at first, so he took hold of the door knob and knocked again, with slightly more force. Something inside shifted, and he thought he heard snickering.

“‘ello?” came a thin voice.

“Hello, yes,” said Oscar, clearing his throat. “I’m looking for misters Boots and Heehaw, please.”

“Thas’ us!” said the voice above a cackle. “C’mon in!”

Oscar stepped inside, and a bucket of water, perched at the top of the door, dumped over his head. He paused, removed his small round glasses, and wiped them on his equally-soaked handkerchief.

The ghouls inside were laughing their heads off. Almost literally.

“Thassa classic!” cackled the nearest one, tongue dripping out of his semi-opaque skull. The hefty one on the empty water cooler slapped his knee so hard his hand flew off. Oscar sighed as politely as he could, and smiled.

“Hello, sirs. I’m Mr Hilderoy, standing in for Mr Wells.”

“How is old Wellsey?” said the smaller ghoul, floating closer.

“Still in his coma, sir,” said Oscar without a hint of disdain. “I have business, if you don’t mind.”

“No mind,” said the thicker one, eyeballs looking in different directions, neither of them Oscar’s.

“Iss about last week, is it?” asked the smaller one.

“I’m afraid so, Mr… Boots, is it?”

“That’s me, yeah,” said Boots with a slimy grin. “Did we make ‘em mad? Did we?”

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid you did,” said Oscar, pulling his notepad from his pocket, watching both ghouls carefully. “The Association has launched a formal complaint against your group—”

“We’ve got a name y’know,” said Boots.

Oscar lowered his notepad, cocked his head.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware. And you are…?”

“The United Brotherhood of Ghouls is what we are.”

Oscar nodded, betraying no emotion.

“Very well, sir. I—”

“And girls. We ain’t just the boys. Girls too. Brotherhood and Sisterhood.”

“Girlies!” said Heehaw, sinking into the water bottle.

Oscar jotted down the name on his notepad, smiled politely.

“Very well. The Association has filed a complaint against the United Brotherhood and Sisterhood of Ghouls, as a result of your protest last week during the festivities.”

“Howzabout a bagel?” said Boots, handing over a plate with a far-too-average bagel on it. Oscar eyed it for a moment, then smiled.

“No thank you, sir.”

The bagel burst into flames. Boots threw the plate over his shoulder, crossing his arms and squinting menacingly.

“So what’s the Ass-ociation gonna do?” he snapped. “Fine us? Ooo, scary!”

“No sir,” said Oscar. “They are well aware of your lack of liquid assets.”

“Likky!” said Heehaw, face bubbling in the top of the water, arms waving around beside him like a hyperactive penguin.

“They are issuing orders to have you deported, sirs. I am here to discuss alternatives, if any are possible.”

“Where’d we be goin’?” asked Boots.

“Antarctica,” said Oscar.

“It’s cold there,” said Boots.

“That it is, sir. So if we could just discuss—”

“Th’French Riviera!” said Boots, floating tall, a mean glint in his eye. “Exile us there and issa done deal!”

Oscar sighed, wiped a few strands of dripping hair from his forehead, and folded his hands together.

“I’m afraid that will not be an option, sir,” he said.

“Why not? It’s exile, yeah?”

“The punishment, sir, would not fit the crime.”

“What crime?” snapped Boots. “We had a list of demands, an’ if the Ass-ociation had taken th’time t’read ‘em, we’d have been out there last week, scarin’ them kidsies and making ‘em wet ‘emselves!”

“Your demands were quite extravagant, sir,” said Oscar, flipping through his notes.

“Extrav’gnt? Like how?”

“Well, for one, I do not see how we would acquire sixty-two porcupines dressed as ballerinas.”

“Yer just not tryin’ is all.”

“No sir, it is the Association’s assertion that you intended to boycott Hallowe’en from the start. That all these ‘demands’ were but a cover for your true concerns.”

Boots played with the desk lamp, sparks firing in every direction when he touched it. Heehaw was sitting in a pool on the floor, painting his toenails pink. The smell of the nail polish made the room somewhat less hideous. Boots caught a few sparks in his mouth, then glowered at Oscar.

“Y’know what the problem is?” he asked.

“No sir. But if I could help, it would greatly please me.”

“It’s the kids,” grumbled Boots. “They don’t like us anymore.”

“I don’t think that’s—”

“They like zombies, an’ they like vampires, but ghouls? Nada. No time o’ day, right? No one returns my calls no more.”

“I’m sure that’s—”

“Here, let me show you. Heehaw! Do your thing!”

Boots grabbed a raggedly mop head from the corner of the room, stuck it on his head, and batted his pasty eyes in what might be considered a feminine way, if females were prone to inducing nausea and psychological damage.

“Oh Edward!” he said in a squeakier voice. “Why dontcha love me, Edward?”

Heehaw, playing Edward, stood there, distant, like a large block of foul jello. It was hard to say if it was a James Dean act, or if he had died on his feet.

“That’s very impressive, sirs,” said Oscar, rubbing his temple. “But I—”

Heehaw vomited a small canister onto the ground. Shoe polish. No one spoke for a moment.

“I’m afraid this is an issue for the Communications Department, and not entirely relevant to the issue of your contractual duties last night insofar as—”

“Who missed us?” spat Boots, tossing the mop to the side and sticking the lamp on his head. It lit his eyeballs up.

“Who… missed you?” asked Oscar.

“Yeah, who knew we were gone? Anyone?”

Oscar flipped through his notes, frowned.

“I… I’m afraid I’m not sure, sir.”

“Iss cause there’s nobody,” Boots said. “Nobody knew, nobody cared. Ghouls ain’t in vogue no more. Thass why the Brotherhood’s takin’ a stand.”

“By not showing up.”

“Yeah,” nodded Boots confidently.

Oscar nodded, stowing his notepad and clasping his hands behind his back.

“I’m afraid the exile will stand, then,” he said. “I thank you for your time, sirs.”

Boots suddenly flared to life, unholy white fire pouring off his body as his eyes turned blood red and his teeth split into a hundred needle-like shards.

“Hold the fuck on!” he screamed like a banshee. “I ain’t done with you yet! I’m gonna essplode your fuckin’ brains from one side ‘o the universe to th’other so even fuckin’ GOD can’t putcha back together again!”

Oscar turned to leave, yawning as he went.

“Issues of quantum physics and theology are best left to the Practical Magic Department, sir. But I thank you for the thought. It is good to see you’re not out of practice.”

Boots went back to his quiet self, smiled hopefully.

“I ain’t?”

“No sir. Quite frightening.”

Boots blushed.

“Aw shucks,” he said. “Thanks fer sayin’ that. Ya dunno how hard it was, keepin’ that inside on Hallowe’en. My freak outs are what keep me goin’, y’know?”

“I do sir. I’m honoured to have seen it.”

Boots grinned like a fool and held out his hand to shake.

“No hard feelings, then?” he said. “I mean, I won’t send ya a postcard from Antarctica, but I won’t go an’ hex ya neither.”

Oscar eyed the hand, then smiled.

“Thank you sir, it was nice to—” the second he touched the hand, the heavy voltage from the lamp shot through Boots’ body and straight into Oscar’s, cooking his organs and making his eyeballs pop open and sizzle before he hit the ground.

Boots and Heehaw laughed themselves onto the floor, rolling around in hysterics, gasping for air they didn’t need.

That is, until Oscar got back to his feet and straightened his tie.

“H-h-how didja…” gasped Boots.

“Undead,” said Oscar with a raw but composed voice. “All the Association’s upper management is undead, actually. We find it helps us better control the problems.”

If he’d had eyes, he would have been giving them an evil stare.

“I know a great many people will miss the wild antics of the ghoul era, but honestly, from an administrative standpoint, it was pure hell.” Oscar nodded briskly and turned to go. “Luckily, it’s over. Good day, sirs. Give my regards to the frozen tundra.”

The door closed gently behind him.

“Ice cream!” said Heehaw.

“Shut up,” said Boots.

This week’s topic tag is a mix of so many strange ideas, I was seriously worried I wouldn’t fit them all in. Luckily, I am insane. With random ideas by @kdnewton, @LynThorneAlder, @piers_hollott, @tenaciousN, @quillsandzebras and @Tally_LRR

Minimum Purchase

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The waitress brought pie, but Marcy brought trouble.

She slid into his booth without permission, head bowed low, loose jacket swallowing her whole. The old man sipped his coffee and put down the cup. It rattled into place.

“You drinkin’?” he asked.

Marcy glanced up at him.

“S-sorry?” she asked.

“They don’t like it if you don’t order.”

“Oh,” she said, flashing a smile. “Um. Yeah. Coffee.”

He nodded towards the waitress and picked up his fork, prodding the pie. His right hand was bent, twisted into a strangled fist, every action a jerking imitation of what it should be. Marcy couldn’t help but stare.

“You’re Mr Con… Constan…”

“Constancz.”

“Julius Constancz, right?”

He pulled a cherry out of the pie, spread red sauce around the plate like paint.

“May be,” he said finally.

“Teddy said…” she began, then leaned in closer, whispering the rest: “Teddy said you can help me.”

“Did he now.”

A cup of coffee and tent-topped bill slipped in front of her, and the waitress disappeared.

“Teddy said you protected the mayor. Said back in the day, you were somethin’ fearsome.”

He grunted, speared a cherry and popped it in his mouth. Marcy sipped her coffee, glancing nervously at table between them. There was a menu beneath a sheet of plastic. Nothing more than five bucks. One cup minimum.

“How long has it been?” she asked, glancing up. “I mean, how long since your—”

“Ten years.”

He broke off the crust, mashed it into smaller pieces, and shovelled one into his mouth. He had to be quick, his fork shook so much. She watched him work, mouth hanging open slightly.

“What’ve you been doing since then?” she asked.

“Eatin’ pie,” he said.

“Have you—”

“Five hundred a day,” he said, still chewing. “A grand if there’s shooting. Medical bills extra. I choose the doc. What you need protecting from anyhow?”

“You know Ivan Rosetta?”

“Knew his father,” he nodded, chewing. “A grand a day, then. What’d you do to make little Ivy mad?”

She tipped her head down.

“He thinks I stole some money.”

“How much money?”

“A hundred grand.”

He put another forkful in his mouth, chewing slowly. Marcy watched him silently, watched the scar on the left side of his neck ripple every time he swallowed.

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Steal it.”

“Oh,” she said, returning her gaze to the menu. “Yeah. A bit by accident, but—”

“Ain’t no accident in stealin’,” he said. “You either do, or you don’t. Best come to terms with it.”

She nodded, said nothing.

“You got it somewhere safe?” he asked.

She rested a hand on her jacket pocket, nodded.

“Yes sir,” she said.

“That ain’t safe. Jesus. That ain’t safe at all. Only thing you got goin’ for you is nobody’d think you’d be so dumb.”

He motioned to the waitress again, and she flipped the store’s sign to “closed” and locked both dead bolts. The second one stuck.

“Ivan ain’t no slouch,” he said. “Saw a pair of Rosetta thugs outside just now. They’re hunting. You know their trademark? How they do things?”

“No sir,” she said quietly.

“Two gunmen, two shots each. They never miss, not one of ‘em. It’s all for show. Scare the neighbours.”

Marcy put her head in her hands, shaky breaths pushed down by sheer will. Mr Constancz took another bite.

“Calm down,” he said. “You hired me, didn’t you? Don’t go insultin’.”

She took her coffee in her hands and sipped some. It slowed her breathing. She nodded, smiled to him.

“Sorry,” she said. “And thank you.”

“Forgiven,” he said. “Now let me think.”

He started mashing the rest of the pie up, fork double-tapping the plate with every motion. An errant bone shifted in the back of his hand as he worked, sliding against the skin. His fingers never uncurled.

“Never been here before,” Marcy said. “Is it any good?”

“Best pie in town,” he said.

“Everything’s so cheap.”

“It adds up,” he said, and she met his eyes. “Come here every day, three times a day, and it adds up. You hungry?”

“I guess,” she said.

“Come on, then,” he said, pushing himself to his feet, limping along in his weathered shoes. Marcy began to follow, but stopped with a yelp at the sight of two men peering in the front door. She stumbled into a stack of plates.

Mr Constancz followed her stare, and tilted his head to the side like he was thinking hard. The watchers stepped away and disappeared into the night. Marcy stayed frozen.

“Were they…?”

“Yeah. Shorter one’s Charlie Denver. Knew his gramps.”

“Won’t they tell—”

“Nah,” he said, still watching out the windows. “They know you’re mine.”

She nodded, smiled weakly.

“Thanks,” she said. “What do you mean—”

His gnarled fist caught her chin and pushed, and made a wrenching crack her last memory. He lowered her gently to the ground, shut her eyes, and slid the envelope out of her coat. He pocketed five thousand with a shaky fist.

There was a rap at the window, and the two men stood there, huddling in the cold.

“Almost done?” asked the waitress, stepping around Marcy’s feet and wiping the counter with a browning rag.

“Yeah,” he said, and passed her the envelope. “Turns out she spent some before she got here.”

“Sounds good,” she nodded.

“Oh and Lexie? You think five grand’ll cover my tab?”

She smiled at him, shook her head.

“Can’t be sure, Jules,” she said. “But it’s a start.”

Here we have a totally random story based around a phrase I will not share, but you can guess at.

The Everliving Crap

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The tape on the hockey stick needed to be changed, but Joey didn’t seem to care. He and Scott kept up their prowling — which, to the outside observer, looked a lot like prancing daintily — through the darkened city streets, on the lookout for danger.

Two blocks past Tim Horton’s, they stopped dead in their tracks. Ahead of them, lumbering like a mutant penguin/walrus half-breed, came something neither of them had expected.

“Riley!” hissed Joey, flipping up his hockey mask to better communicate his frustration. “What the hell are you doing?”

Riley unzipped the part of the snowsuit covering his mouth, reached his chin out for a breath.

“I’m fighting crime,” he said.

“No you’re not!” snapped Joey. “Not like that, anyway! Didn’t I say hockey pads and cloaks? What are you wearing a snowsuit for?”

“Two snowsuits, actually.”

“That’s not intimidating at all!”

Scott, who never said much, just nodded at all this. It was hard to tell whose side he was on.

“I don’t have hockey pads,” said Riley. “And I told Marcia why I needed them and—”

“Wait wait wait, you told Marcia? About what we’re doing? About the pact?”

“No, not about the pact. Just the crime-fighting—”

“Dammit, Riley! What about our secret identities? You’ve gone and blown our cover!”

Riley thought for a moment, then pulled his face back inside the snowsuit.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. I get it now.”

“You’re the dumbest person I know.”

“Sorry,” Riley muttered.

Joey sighed and pushed on, prowling without quite as much pep as before. Scott shrugged to Riley and followed. Riley wasn’t really equipped for prowling, so he just lumbered ominously.

Two blocks later, in front of the Tim Horton’s, there was a man in a light fall jacket trying to break open a newspaper box. The three heroes stopped in their tracks, watching him pull and rattle and kick the box.

Joey landed first, hockey stick held aloft like a Japanese sword made by CCM.

“Nice try, criminal!” he shouted, and swung the stick down, hitting the man in the shins. The criminal toppled forward in agony, curling into a ball and weeping. Joey’s shoulders slumped.

“He was supposed to flip off his feet,” he said as Scott arrived, still prowling.

Scott shrugged again.

“What the hell are you doing?” gasped the man, checking his legs with trembling hands. “That hurt!”

“Theft is a crime!” said Joey with his best super-hero voice. “Now you’ll think twice about stealing newspapers!”

“I’m not stealing, you moron! It ate my loonie!”

Joey and Scott glanced at the newspaper box, then back at the man. Joey scratched the side of his neck with the tip of the hockey stick, trying to appear somewhat nonchalant.

“Well. Um. Kicking it won’t help.”

The man was crawling away, crying and cursing with every motion. Riley finally arrived, out of breath.

“What’d I miss?”

“Nothing,” said Joey, and moved on. Down a side street. And with a lot less spring in his step.

They heard it before they saw it: the sound of smashing glass, urgent calls, feet running down wet pavement. Joey and Scott prepared their sticks, and Riley stretched his arms out wide, ready to rumble. Five seconds later, a pair of teenagers in thick baggy coats nearly ran into them, carrying two laptop boxes each.

“Nice try, criminals!” laughed Joey, spinning his stick behind him. He dropped it, scrambled to pick it up again. Scott just stared.

“What the hell, man?” said the shorter of the criminals. “Go back to your rink ‘fore you get hurt!”

Joey laughed derisively (something he’d practised at home for just such an occasion).

“You don’t scare us, criminal! We are justice! We are rightness! We are—”

“Righteousness,” interjected Riley.

“What?”

“Righteousness. I don’t think ‘rightness’ is a word.”

Joey turned on Riley, flipped up his mask again.

“You know what? This is the kind of thing we discuss at the planning meeting, not on the street.”

“But Marcia had those tickets to—”

“Stop it,” snapped Joey. “I don’t want to hear it. You want to nitpick wording, show up. Otherwise, it’s ‘rightness’, and you can suck my—”

He turned at the sound of boxes hitting the ground, and thugs whimpering in agony. Scott stowed his hockey stick and went back to his statue-like composure. The criminals were lying on their backs, holding their bleeding noses.

“What the hell, man? We weren’t doin’ nothing!”

Joey stepped forward, bearing down on them.

“You stole those laptops.”

“Did not.”

“Did so.”

“Did not.”

“Did so!”

“Hey,” whispered Riley in Joey’s ear. “Say ‘did not’. It’ll trip them up and they’ll admit to—”

“And anyway!” snapped the criminal. “It’s a free-for-all, man! It’s the end of the world!”

Joey’s face blanched under his mask. The end of the world! The biggest test of his life, and on his first day! He stood up straighter, puffed out his chest, and nodded to Fate. He was ready.

“The internet’s down, man!” said the criminal. “Like down-down! Panic on the streets! Screw the rules, it’s time to loot!”

Joey put the blade of the stick under the criminal’s chin, lifted his head.

“Not today you don’t,” he said with as much darkness as he could muster.

The sound of breaking glass across the street distracted him for a moment, and when he looked back, the criminals were gone with the laptops. He checked around urgently, saw them running down the street, coats blown up like sails on a ship. Joey looked to Scott, nodded.

“Do it.”

Scott twisted his arm back and threw his hockey stick like a boomerang. It sheared through the air, hitting the first, then second criminal in the back of the head, before tumbling back towards Scott. He caught it flawlessly.

“Help!” came a shout from across the street. “Someone help!”

“What’s wrong, ma’am?” asked Joey, arriving at the scene of a smashed shop, fire inside.

“Twitter’s down!” wept the woman, looking at her phone in despair. “Facebook is down! I’m… I’m so alone!”

Joey looked to Scott, who shrugged. Riley came stumbling up, face beet red.

“Guys,” he wheezed. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”

“Wait!” hissed Joey, holding up a finger. “Do you hear that?”

The city was alive with the sound of smashing glass, sirens and shouts of panic. The sky was turning red with fire. Somewhere, a car screeched into another, and gunshots echoed like fireworks, rapid and so terrifyingly loud. The city needed him. It needed justice.

Joey looked to Scott and Riley, gripped his stick tightly, and tapped them both on the chests with his heavy, gloved fist.

“All right lads,” he said seriously. “Good show today. Strong start. Same time tomorrow night?”

The suggestions that went into this were “The internet is DOWN! The HORROR!” by @mjgolli, “snowsuits!” by @tenaciousN and “A bunch of hosers get it in their mind that they can fight crime like Casey Jones from TMNT, eh.” by @kdnewton. Thanks again!

Happy

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Joe’s feet swung four inches off the ground as he sat on the park bench, watching the people scurry by. The oak tree above him was blocking most of the rain, but then a large drop landed on his paper bag, shocking him out of his daze. He brushed it away with his yellow rubber glove.

“‘ello, sir,” came a voice from behind, to which Joe did not respond. He put another wedge of peanut brittle in his mouth and chewed loudly, as if to drown out all other noises.

“‘ello, sir,” said the voice again, this time from the other shoulder. Joe set his jaw and watched a young mother push a pram through the park. A toy kitten with fluffy white fur peeked out from beside the baby. Joe held his breath at the sight.

“‘ello again, sir,” said the voice, and this time there was no ignoring it. The squirrel was sitting on his lap.

“Hello Galapogous,” Joe sighed, closing up his bag. “You found me.”

Galapogous shot quick glances left and right, then edged forward, rubbing his little hands together like he was trying to put out a fire.

“Yes I did, sir. Yes I did. ‘ow are you doin’ today, sir, if I may ask, sir?”

Joe looked away, took a long, steady breath.

“I think you know,” he said.

“Izzit the ‘puter still, then? The ‘puter bein’ the issue?”

“Yes, still,” snapped Joe. “It’s only been two hours, you fur-bound terrorist!”

Galapogous nodded over and over again, twitched his head to the side and sighed as loudly as his little lungs could manage.

“Right you are, sir. Right you are. And as a matter of fact, on that related topic, I want to make a correspondence with you about—”

“Oh no,” Joe said. “If I see his scrawny little face again, I’ll punch it in. You keep him away from me.”

Joe got up, holding his bag tight, and started down the path, trying to ignore the little squirrel bouncing along beside him.

“‘owwas I supposed t’know he’d go diggin’ in the ‘puter, sir? I mean really. Thass just not done, is it? Totally unexpected!”

“You know what he’s like. There’s a reason they call him Mad Jeffy.”

“Iss not ‘is Tourette’s then?”

Joe said nothing, just kept walking through the rain, until he came to an abrupt stop beneath the big maple near the fountain. There was something blocking his way.

“Motherfucker!” spat Mad Jeffy, checking under a rock.

“Hello, Jeffy,” Joe said.

“Piss pang butthole!” Jeffy said. “Have you seen any raisins?”

“No, Jeffy, but more to the point: have you seen any raisins?”

The ferret looked up at him, eyes squinting and teeth bared. He was begging to be kicked like a football, but Joe was not that kind of person. Yet.

“How do you mean?” Jeffy asked.

“Well, what I’m asking is when exactly did you previously came across raisins hiding inside a computer? Does it happen often? Is it a natural place to expect them? Or are you completely deranged, perhaps?”

Jeffy stared at him ominously.

“No need t’answer that, Jeffy m’boy,” said Galapogous nervously. “C’mon there, sir, let’s keep walkin’, right?”

“My cat,” Joe said suddenly. “Killed herself today.”

Neither animal spoke.

“Do want to know why she killed herself?” Joe continued. “Would you like to know?”

“Shitfaced bollocks-dropper,” Jeffy said. “Sure.”

Joe knelt down close to the ferret, eyes narrow and hand squeezing the life out of the peanut brittle.

“She missed her keyboard cat.”

The ferret did what ferrets consider shrugging.

“Fuckin’-A,” he said.

“She missed her keyboard cat, and because you destroyed my computer, I couldn’t show it to her, and she became despondent, and she killed herself.”

Galapogous shuffled his feet, swished his tail.

“‘ow’d she do it, sir?” asked the squirrel.

“Excuse me?”

“‘ow’d she off ‘erself? As a matter’o curiosity.”

“While I was doing dishes, she climbed onto the stove and lit herself on fire.”

“That explains the gloves, then,” nodded Galapogous.

“Yes it does,” said Joe.

“Buggerfuck tit falls,” added Jeffy.

“That’s just nasty, it is, sir,” said Galapogous. “You alright, sir? That’s some pretty heavy stuff t’be—”

Joe caught the squirrel by the neck and lifted him off the ground, squeezing his fist tighter and tighter.

“Do I look all right to you?” he growled.

Galapogous would have replied, had he had any air.

“I was happy, you know! I had a life! I was just coming to grips with the idea that I could talk to animals, and then you two went and ruined it for me!”

Galapogous’s arms stopped moving with quite so much force, and his eyes started to slide closed.

“Pussbugger!” screamed Jeffy, leaping at Joe. He latched onto the hand holding Galapogous and bit savagely into the closest finger. Joe shrieked in agony and dropped the both of them, pulling his hand close and checking the bloodied hole in shock.

“You little beast!” he shouted at the ferret, and prepared to kick him into traffic.

Jeffy grinned savagely, but then his expression changed with a start. He gasped, lurched, and toppled to his side. He was choking… something yellow was stuck in his throat!

Joe smiled at the hole in his yellow rubber glove, standing over the ferret as it drowned in its own failed heroics.

“I hope they have raisins in Hell,” he grinned. “For the Devil’s sake.”

Jeffy stopped moving, spread limply in a puddle as the rain kept pouring. Galapogous stumbled towards his friend, rubbing his eyes.

“What ‘appened?” he asked.

“He bit off more than he could chew,” said Joe.

“Oh,” nodded Galapogous. “You alright, then?”

Joe looked down at his furry companion, closed his rubbered fist, and let out a deep breath. The autumn air was vicious and refreshing.

“Yes,” he said with a smile. “I’m all right. In fact, I may just be happy again.”

And he was. Until he discovered he could talk to animal ghosts, too.

Today’s topic tag is, unlike previous instalments, aiming to be happy. With ideas from @quillsandzebras, @theamericanbook, @sharontherose, @mfeige, @mjgolli and @tenaciousN.

Bumpy Wash

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

“You and I need to have a talk,” said Pam, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and pulling her night gown closed. Wendy closed the lid to the washer and the banging started again, echoing through the small apartment.

“Sorry,” Wendy said, lifting the lid a crack so it stopped spinning.

“You want to do laundry at two in the morning, switch rooms with me.”

“Sorry. I’ll be done soon.” Wendy opened the door and leaned in, adjusting things left and right. Her wet hair fell in front of her face, and she pushed it back with trembling fingers.

Pam got a drink of water at the sink and sat down at the kitchen table.

“Fun night?” she asked.

Wendy just shrugged, said nothing.

“I wish I could go out with you. Must be getting old. I can’t party on a weekday anymore. Wipes me out for days.”

“Yeah,” agreed Wendy.

“How’s Rick?”

Wendy stiffened suddenly, hit her head on the door to the washer. She turned towards halfway, smiled.

“Didn’t see him today. Girls’ night out.”

“Ah,” Pam nodded. She glanced at her glass, swished it around. “You know, cold water is the wrong choice for a late night snack.”

Wendy wasn’t listening. She was moving laundry in the washer. Pam dumped her water and poured half a glass of soy milk from the blue jug in the fridge. She put it in the microwave and sauntered over next to Wendy.

“Let me take a look,” she said, leaning over.

“It’s okay,” Wendy said.

“The sooner this gets fixed, the sooner I get to sleep. Now push over.”

She reached into the washer and felt around. Heavy water-logged towels were spread across one side, and what felt like hand cloths and underwear on the other. She started shifting stuff around, and then stopped, frowned.

“What the—”

She pulled out a red stiletto.

“You’re kidding me,” she said.

“It… there was…”

“Oh my god, Wendy. You’ve got to be kidding me. These are like six hundred dollar shoes!”

Wendy lowered her gaze, and dropped herself into a chair by the window. Her hands were clasped together, shaking, bright ochre nails pressing into her skin.

Pam reached in and found the second shoe, shook it out and put it on the floor next to the washer. She crouched down next to Wendy, put a hand on her knee.

“Listen, they’re your shoes, so you can do what you want with them… but next time you need something cleaned, ask me first, okay? With a little work, we can sort things out.”

Wendy nodded, but still wouldn’t look up. Pam went back to the washer, spread out the towels and closed the lid. The machine started up again, this time without all the racket.

The microwave beeped loudly, and she hopped across the room and pulled out her glass. She blew on it twice, then took a sip. She almost gagged.

“Did you mix up the milk jugs?” she asked. “This tastes like vanilla.”

Wendy looked up quickly, eyes wide.

“I… I m-might have,” she said.

Pam sighed and dumped the rest of the milk down the drain. Wendy watched it go.

“Let’s try and stick to the system, okay? Vanilla makes me ill. Regular milk in the blue jug, vanilla in the green. If Rick can figure out how to stick to the green, so can you.”

“Sorry,” said Wendy.

“I’ve gotta pee,” Pam said, feeling her stomach shift. She shuffled off to the bathroom, nearly falling into the door as she went. She rubbed more sleep from her eyes, turned on the fan lights and set herself on the toilet. The floor was freezing without the mat there.

It smelled strongly of bleach and air freshener, and the shower curtain was wide open, dripping wet. Pam grumbled to herself and closed it. The tiles were sparkling, but she could tell mildew was on its way.

“It’s like having children,” she sighed, and reached for the toilet paper.

As she was washing her hands, she noticed a watch on the counter, behind the toothbrushes. She picked it up and turned it over with a smile.

“You liar,” she laughed, peering around the corner again. “Rick came over, didn’t he?”

Wendy said nothing. She looked like she might cry. Pam just rolled her eyes.

“He must be a sound sleeper to not hear all this,” she said. “You should get back to bed. He’ll get the wrong idea if he wakes up alone.”

Wendy just stared. Pam shivered.

“It’s freezing tonight. You really should get to bed. You look beat.”

Pam swayed around and headed for her room, but then saw the cold bathroom floor again and a shiver ran up her spine. That floor needed a mat.

She opened the closet door and gasped at the sight. What few towels there were, were all jumbled and tossed like a tornado had gone through, one shelf at a time. She pushed things out of the way to get to the floor mats, but paused.

At the back of the closet was a wet towel, bundled up tightly, but strangely lumpy. She reached in and pulled it out, but it came unravelled at the end and dumped its contents onto the floor.

Bones. Dozens of bones. A meaty, soggy skull. She stumbled back, tripped and landed in the bathroom, the skull staring at her. She wanted to scream, but the noise wouldn’t come. Her throat was so tight she was wheezing.

Behind her, Wendy was scrubbing the bathtub, hair pulled tight and eyes red from the bleach.

“You never wake up when I get home,” she said. “I always worried you might, but you never do. Then you go and drink the milk, and now my day’s gotten longer.”

Pam gasped desperately as her vision faded, and her head hit the tile. All she heard was Wendy, bitter in her cleaning, talking to herself.

“I wasn’t expecting two rounds in one night. But with a little work, we can sort it out.”

@quillsandzebras suggested “dirty shoes in the washing machine”;
@Tim_LRR suggested “Poisoned milk jug” and
@kdnewton suggested “Letting one’s skeletons out of the closet”.

The Fine Print

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Johannes Gutenberg sipped his tea with the utmost grace, but his hand never left the pistol. Marty was in no mood to drink. He was going to be late for the board meeting.

“All right,” he said as pleasantly as he could, “I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think I can do thirty percent. The way things stand with the publishers right now, we’d be deep in the red if we went much over five percent.”

The translator wasn’t even finished the first sentence before Gutenberg laughed, shaking his head and sloshing some tea onto his lap.

“Raise your prices, then,” said the translator as the German wound up.

“Is that a joke?” Marty asked both of them.

“I don’t think so,” answered the translator.

Marty reached over to his iPhone and flipped to the calculator. He entered some numbers and his face dropped. He spun it around and showed Gutenberg.

“There’s no way I can sell an e-book for $14.99. No way. The market won’t bear it. The print version would be cheaper.”

Gutenberg said nothing.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Marty said, running his hand through his hair and trying the calculator some more. The translator sipped some of his own tea quietly, he and his master ominously patient.

“You know what?” Marty said turning off the iPhone. “This makes no sense. What makes you think you can just come in here and demand a cut of an entire industry? The digital marketplace didn’t even exist when you were in business!”

Gutenberg didn’t reply, even after the translation was done. He gently stroked the pistol with his index finger.

“Fine,” grumbled Marty. “Fine. I can maybe squeeze you in for five percent. But that’s it.”

“Five percent will not suffice,” reported the translator as Gutenberg spoke. “The standard rate is thirty. It is non-negotiable.”

“Standard? You mean you’ve done this before?”

“You will make payments on the fifteenth of each month at a rate of approximately five euros to the guilder—”

“Now hold on—”

“And Mr Gutenberg reserves the right to audit your books up to four times a year to check for discrepancies.”

Marty inhaled deeply. In most conversations, this would be the part where he slammed his fist on the table to take charge. The gun in the room changed the dynamic somewhat.

“Listen,” he said, switching gears, “we’re just a start-up here. Sure, these are nice offices, but they’re not earned yet. If you want real money, you need to hit up the New York publishers. That’s where your thirty percent will pay off.”

Gutenberg finished his tea in one gulp and stood up suddenly, handing the gun to the translator and wandering out of Marty’s office.

“He’s using the facilities,” the translator explained.

“He’s a damn fool,” Marty grumbled, leaning back in his chair. “Where the hell does he get off demanding this from me? I don’t owe him anything.”

“He is the founder of the printing press,” said the translator. “I think we all owe him a little something.”

“Bullshit,” said Marty. “He should be dead. He shouldn’t need money anymore.”

“He is dead,” said the translator. “In the past, at any rate. The man with us today has time-travelled from 1454, from what I understand.”

“How the hell did he manage that?”

“Oh, he’ll never say. He’s quite paranoid someone will try and stop him.”

Marty just nodded. The absurd had given way to the surreal, and the Jack Daniels was on the other side of the room.

“I’m not clear on the details,” continued the translator, “but it appears he owes a man named Fust a large sum of money.”

“He can’t possibly owe that much.”

“He’s also developed a pachinko habit,” said the translator. “Just not the luck to go with it. And unfortunately, he spends most of his time in 22nd-century Tokyo, trying to beat the system.”

“Not my problem,” Marty grumbled.

“Oh but it is, you see.”

“So what, I’m supposed to pay a third of my income to support his gambling addiction?”

“In a word, yes.”

“Bullshit. Fifteen bucks and we’ll go out of business. The industry is moving to digital, and he wants to handicap it out of the gate? Absolute bullshit.”

“I think he sees it as preserving his legacy.”

“Legacies die all the time.”

“So do people.”

The door opened again and Gutenberg strode in, throwing himself into his chair and taking the gun from the translator. He checked his tea cup, saw it was empty, and reached over to take Marty’s. He sipped, then spoke.

“Do we have a deal?” said the translator.

“No,” said Marty. “I’m calling your bluff. I’m not paying you a cent. You want money? Do something useful with your life. No freebies to freeloaders.”

Gutenberg sat forward as the translation finished. He looked down at the gun, then back at Marty.

“You… you ignorant swine,” said the translator, his voice growing shaky. “I will… I’m sorry, the German he uses is hard to follow sometimes… he’s saying… something about your mother… and…”

Gutenberg slammed his fist down on the table, and everyone jumped. He took the gun, swung it around towards Marty, and then, very deliberately, pressed it to his own temple.

“I gave Luther his voice,” said the translator, backing away. “I brought freedom to the world, revolution to the weak, riches to the poor. I changed the world like no man has ever done, and I swear to the Almighty that if you do not give me the compensation I rightly deserve, I will take it all away from you.”

“W-what’s he mean?” Marty asked the translator.

“I think he means to say that he’ll kill himself, and the change in history will throw humanity back into the Dark Ages. As if the Renaissance never happened.”

“Is that possible?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Tell him to stop it.”

“I don’t think it will do any good. He’s quite serious.”

“Just wait!” Marty said, this time to Gutenberg. “If I give you what you want, you’ll stop this? You won’t shoot yourself?”

Gutenberg stared at him, then shrugged slightly.

“He would consider it,” said the translator.

Marty glanced at the iPhone, thought of the red in the balance sheet, the falling numbers, the investors rushing for the door. But then he thought: if I don’t do this, there would be no balance sheet, no numbers, no investors and no door to run out of.

“It’s the fate of humanity for thirty percent?” he asked.

The translator asked Gutenberg, and Gutenberg said: “Ja.”

Marty sighed, then nodded solemnly. The translator exhaled, smiling. Gutenberg took the gun from his head and handed it over to the translator, then reached out a hand to his new licensee. It took a lot of willpower to shake it.

As they were leaving, Marty caught the translator by the arm and held him back.

“This is going to put me out of business, you know.”

“I think he knows that, yes.”

“Then why is he doing it? If he works with me, we could make some serious money at this game. It could be great.”

The translator shrugged.

“Truthfully, this is not the first time he’s pulled this stunt. The New York publishing houses have been paying him fifty percent a month for close to ninety years, and in return, he is obliged to keep their competitors at bay.”

“Wait, so he’s sacrificing the future for a quick buck?”

“Goodness no,” smiled the translator. “He’s seen the future. Digital wins. He’s just squeezing the ripest fruit of the day. And you, sir, are not yet ripe.”

This story, about the future of books, is all Piers’ fault. You may send him hate mail.

Yellow Towel

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Norman’s PDA was broken, but he still had four hours left in his day. He rotated the batteries, just in case, but there was no change. The thing was dead.

“Hey Norm,” said Pete, popping out of a nearby doorway with a thrashing sack over his shoulder. “Lovely evening, ain’t it?”

Norman stowed the PDA and paced over next to Pete.

“I don’t suppose I could check your firehose, could I?”

“Why?” said Pete, eyes narrow.

“My PDA died.”

Pete sighed, fished his own out of his pocket, and handed it over. Norman paged through the entries as efficiently as possible, but the scroll wheel was sticking… tacky, almost. He shuddered to think why.

“All strange-os t’night,” said Pete. “I been through the list six, maybe eight times, and notta one that don’t give me the willies.”

Norman nodded. They list was rather freakish. He was about to give up when he saw something truly unusual. He held the PDA up so Pete could see.

“What do you think this means?”

Pete’s face twisted into a semi-smirk.

“Izzat even English?”

“Somehow, I hope not.”

“Looks sick,” Pete laughed. “This I gotta see.”

He snatched the PDA back and started down the street. He took a moment to deposit his sack into the steel trap of a Collection Truck, then turned back toward Norman.

“You comin’ or what?”

Norman hopped to attention. He ran after Pete, barely catching the door to a low rise before it closed with a thump. They skirted their way into a dark stairwell, started up as quietly as they could manage.

“It’s a door upstairs,” said Pete, labouring up the steps. “Never a door downstairs, izzit?”

“We could use the exercise,” said Norman.

Pete stopped, turned on Norman with a sneer.

“Y’know why the PDA thing always happens t’you, right?” he said. “Iss the subconscious expectationlism you got goin’ on. You think it’s gonna break, so it breaks. You gotta think more positive-like, yeah?”

Norman said nothing.

They arrived at number 508, listened by the peep hole. There were voices talking inside, but the wood was too thick to hear the words. Pete turned the knob, and the door swung open silently.

Inside and down a short hall was a small, shabby living room with aqua-green carpeting. At the far side, perched on the sofa, was a young woman with wet brown hair, wrapped up tight in a yellow towel. Her eyes were closed, her head back, and she moaned softly, deeply,

There, kneeling below her, was a gnarled old woman with greenish skin, patchy grey hair, and a giant wart on the end of her nose. She had the young woman’s foot in her hands, caressing it gently with her foul, purple tongue.

“‘Witch lick feet’,” laughed Pete. “Well I’ll be. This’s goin’ in the record book, I can bet you that.”

The young woman and her witch both looked around quickly, suddenly aware of the intruders in the room. Norman took an involuntary step behind Pete. He couldn’t stand this part.

“Hullo, ladies,” said Pete. “Sorry to interrupt, but my friend and I are going to have t’take the old bag away.”

The young woman looked frantic.

“B-b-but…”

“It’s nothing personal,” said Norman, almost apologetic. “You can pick her up in the morning if you—”

“The going rate forra full humanoid inna state such as this is, it’s about four-fifty. That’s payable in cash, or credit, but please no personal cheques unless they’re certified, yeah?”

The young woman didn’t answer. The witch was backing into the bedroom, eyes wide with fear. Pete pulled a sack from his jacket and started after her, moving with the calculated precision of an experienced kidnapper. He closed the bedroom door behind him while he worked.

Norman finished filling out some paperwork on his notepad. His pencil tip broke.

The woman sniffled to herself, and even though he didn’t want to, he felt the need to say something to her.

“It’s fairly standard business, kidnapping fantasies like this,” he said. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. I mean… we see some truly remarkable things every night. Yours is fairly mundane. You really shouldn’t worry about it. As long as you pay the ransom within a week, nobody has to know.”

The woman nodded just as Pete came in, dragging the thrashing sack behind him. He stopped next to Norman, checked the notepad, and nodded.

“We all good here?” he smiled.

The woman refused eye contact. Pete laughed, a cold edge to his voice and sidled over to the woman, tugging at the edge of her towel.

“Missy,” he breathed, “we all good?”

The woman, again, refused eye contact. So Pete gripped tightly, and with a mighty heave, took her towel. He slung it over his shoulder as Norman quickly averted his eyes. The witch in the sack started squealing viciously, shoving her head out the hole in the top.

“Zippit, hag!” Pete grunted, and pushed her head down.

Norman left the receipt on the coffee table and quickly backed out of the apartment without glancing at the woman again. When they were safely in the hall, he scurried next to Pete, whispering urgently.

“Was that really necessary?”

“Respect issa two-way street,” Pete said.

Down at the Collection Truck, Norman once again got to browse the PDA while Pete tried to shove the witch into the hole. She was getting louder and more frantic, furiously trying to get free.

“Witch not bad!” she shouted. “Witch get even! Witch make you slavers! Witch make you cry!”

“Yeah yeah,” said Pete, shoving harder. “Heard it, seen it, and whatever.”

Finally, the sack went in, and the door closed with a clunk. Two seconds later, the air filled with a horrible grinding noise, like a fat hamster in a food processor. Pete and Norman both frowned. It was rather jarring.

“That don’t sound right,” said Pete.

They opened the door again and peered in. Rather than the usual sparkling dust and whiff of ephemeral whimsy, the processor was thick with blood, bone and hair. It dripped thickly down the sides of the tube.

“That ain’t right at all,” said Pete.

Norman quickly re-scanned the entry that had sent them there: “Witch lick feet”. He opened the full details for the order, saw all the random chatter from the agents who’d intercepted the fantasy request, the chain by which it had arrived downstream… and finally, to the full report.

“Oh dear,” he gasped.

“What?” asked Pete. “What’s what?”

He took the PDA from Norman and started reading, and in a second, his face turned from concern to outright horror.

“Goddamn character limit,” spat Pete, walking away with his head in his hands. Norman fell back against the Collection Truck, swallowed a sob.

“Witch lick feet,” he said quietly, “of beauty in yellow towel.”

This week’s topic tag is actually courtesy of @quillsandzebras, who send along some truly remarkable search terms that people used to arrive at her site. I won’t list them here, but you’ll probably be able to guess… they’re the really, really freaky parts of the story.

Broken Beyond Repair

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Harvey’s job was a tad ridiculous these days. Here he was, sitting on the woman’s floor in his little slipper-covered work boots, chatting on his Bluetooth headset while the woman yammered away on her own cell phone… all for the sake of a landline that he suspected nobody would ever use.

“Still holding,” he said to Jen as she came back on the line for the fifth time. “Any signal?”

“None yet,” Jen grumbled. “You sure it’s a live line?”

“Registers in the house,” Harvey said unhappily. “Strength is good right to the hub. It’s gotta be on your end, Jenny.”

Jen’s voice got louder, more personal.

“It’s Jen, Harv. I’m not a little girl. Stop calling me that.”

“Sorry. Old habits die hard.”

She put him on hold as a rebuke. He glanced over at the woman, sitting on the sofa with her phone glued to her ear, and smiled as apologetically as he could. She rolled her eyes at him.

“I know,” she sighed into the phone. “It’s been almost an hour. How hard can it be?”

Harvey went back to testing the line, even though he knew it wouldn’t work. He checked the cables from his unit, down along the ground and into the socket, but they all looked to be in good shape. He wiggled them a bit. A small spark shot out and he pulled his hand back, sucked on his finger.

“Jesus Christ,” he grumbled. “Didn’t expect that!”

The woman on the sofa stared at him with nervous eyes.

His phone rang, and he switched lines without thinking.

“Harvey here,” he said.

“Harvey Wallace?” asked a quiet, almost anxious voice.

“Yeah, that’s me. What’s up?”

“Oh my darkness, you’re kidding! You’re really Harvey?”

Harvey checked his phone. The number was “(666) 666-6666.” He sheathed the handset and pretended he was working on the line again.

“Who is this?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know how to explain,” said the voice. “I’m your uncle Lucifer.”

“I don’t have any uncles. Who are you?”

“This isn’t the right way to have this conversation. Can we meet somewhere?”

“I’m workin’.”

The woman passed by closely on her way to the kitchen. She wasn’t saying anything anymore. Listening.

“Yes of course,” said Uncle Lucifer. “Working. I understand. Well then, I’ll do my best. You, Harvey, are—”

“Are you done yet?” asked the woman, arms crossed, eyes fixed. “Because I have plans this afternoon. So if you could, you know, wrap it up…”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Harvey smiled, tapping the wires again. “Almost there.”

She grunted and went back to refill her coffee cup.

“Sorry,” Harvey said into the headset. “You were saying?”

“The Anti-Christ,” said Uncle Lucifer.

“The which?”

“The Anti-Christ. You are. The Anti-Christ.”

Harvey rubbed his eye. Allergy season.

“All right,” he said finally. “I’m not following. What are you trying to say?”

“I’m saying you’re the leader of the Forces of Darkness, Harvey. You are the Chosen One. He who will crush the Lord and bring about the End of All Time. The son of Satan. The Unrighteous Bastard of—”

“Sorry,” Harvey said, “got another call.”

He switched lines, tested the signal again, and saw it was working. He grinned happily.

“You got it!” he said. “What was the problem?”

“Wrong address on the file. We’ve been resetting the neighbour’s connection all morning.”

“Damn.”

“Tell me about it. So we’re good?”

“Very good,” Harvey said, packing up his stuff. “Thanks, Jenny!”

“Harv!” she yelled. “Stop it! Seriously! Stop!”

“Sorry,” he nodded meekly. She hung up on him, and he got to his feet, stretching his legs and back. He pulled a clipboard out of his pouch and peeked around the corner, smiling to the woman with the coffee.

“All done,” he said. “I just need your signature here.”

The woman scribbled her name on the line and not-so-subtly rushed him out the door. She locked it the second it closed. Harvey pulled the slipper-covers off his boots and shoved them in his pocket.

His earpiece beeped softly.

“Sorry,” he said, taking it off hold, “I forgot you were there.”

“I’ve never been on hold before. It’s so… boring.”

“Necessary evil,” Harvey said, lumbering down the walk to his van. He threw the gear in the passenger side. “So what do you want me for again? Some kind of club?”

“Oh, Harvey!” exclaimed Uncle Lucifer. “What to say? Honestly, we should have found you the second you were born. I’m as sorry as I can be that you’ve gone these forty-three years without knowing your true potential. I’ll understand if you hate me.”

Harvey shrugged, started climbing in the van. Just then, the woman swung open the front door and sneered furiously.

“You boar!” she shouted. “You scraped my hardwood floor! I should sue!”

“You can smite her if you like,” said Uncle Lucifer. “I would. She’s so shrill and obnoxious. Go ahead. I’ll wait.”

Harvey got out of the van, and trudged over to the house, slipped on his slipper-covers and carefully shuffled over to the spot where she was pointing. There was a light mark on the floor. He leaned down, rubbed it with his finger, and it came off.

“I don’t believe you people!” the woman said. “You’re always late, you take forever, and you destroy my house!”

Harvey finished rubbing the mark off the floor, then stood up and faced the woman. Her face was red in patches. Her ears were practically purple. He lowered his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have been more careful. We’ll… uh… credit your account for two months of free service.”

Her eyes narrowed at him.

“I should think so!” she snapped, and rushed him out the door again. He stood outside, slipped off his slipper-covers, and walked back to the van. A baseball whacked him in the back, and he turned around to see a pair of boys two yards over. Their faces were blank with apprehension. He reached down, picked up the ball, turned it over in his hand.

“You threw this?” he called.

The boys nodded.

“Good spin on it!” he said, and tossed it back. They caught it and hustled inside. Harvey smiled, climbed into the van, and started the engine.

“Still there?” he asked Uncle Lucifer.There was a long pause.

“Y-yes. Yes I am.”

“You were sayin’…”

Another long pause.

“Harvey,” he said carefully, “I don’t think this is going to work out.”

Harvey checked over his shoulder as he started to back out. He paused to let a teenager in a red convertible go by.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I’m pretty booked these days anyway. The switch to digital is a pain.”

“I know. We… er… made it that way.”

“You don’t say.”

“Again, I’m so sorry, Harvey. You could have been so powerful. So powerful. I feel terrible. I will find the minion responsible and flail the flesh off him for the rest of time.”

“No need for that,” Harvey said. “These things happen. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this job, it’s that you can’t blame anyone for anything, because it might just as easily be you. No hard feelings, then.”

Uncle Lucifer sobbed briefly before hanging up.

This is for @mjgolli, who wrote “Telephone Repairman discovers he is the Antichrist.”

Arrears

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It was Death at the door, wearing his usual pinstripe suit.

“Oh for the love of Pete,” growled Louis in his housecoat. “You soggy pale bastard. I thought we settled up. What do you want now?”

Death’s smile faded and he started fidgeting with his briefcase. He had a genuinely pitiable look on his face.

“I was reviewing your file,” said the Grim Reaper softly, “and I’d like to discuss the results with you, if you have time.”

“Well I don’t. The stove’s on. Good-bye.”

The door slammed, nearly clipping Death in the nose. He took a step back, straightened his tie, and rang the door bell again. He could hear Louis inside, stomping around angrily, but never close to the door.

He waited for exactly 60 seconds, and rang it again.

The stomping and cursing got louder, and finally Louis opened the door again, eyes blazing, cup of coffee sloshing in his hand.

“What?” he fumed. “What? What is it now? What do you want?”

Death licked his pale lips and removed a sheet of paper from the side of his bag. He glanced at it briefly, then handed it over to Louis with a pleasant smile.

“What’s this about?” Louis said, squinting at the small type on the voluminous form.

“It’s a lot of writing which largely boils down to one fact: you slipped on the ice outside your brother’s school when you were five, did you not?”

“Five? Years old? Maybe. What of it?”

Death traced a finger down the page, then let it flick off the end. Louis was having a hard time reading everything. It looked like gibberish to him. He took another sip of coffee.

“There was an oversight at the time,” Death said. “In the course of our audit, we discovered a lack of physical impairment from that fall. Certain speech disabilities, chronic illnesses… that sort of thing.”

Louis handed the paper back, leaned against the door frame unhappily.

“I don’t follow. What are you getting at? You’re just being a sore loser here. I beat you fair and square, you un-calibrated wimp. Don’t blame me if you can’t swing a club. Wait till the next heart attack, will you? I’m busy—”

Death blocked the door from being closed with a very thin, gloved hand. He still looked cheerful, but determinedly so.

“The head injury you suffered should have prevented you from acquiring the… lifestyle… you now possess,” said Death. “The lack of lifestyle would have, obviously, impacted your general health and well-being. Your lack of health would have, we estimate, put you at high risk for heart disease by the age of forty.”

“I already had a heart attack.”

“Just one, though. Your doctors will make sure it’s the last, too, I’m afraid.”

“So what? You want me to stop seeing my doctor? Fat chance of that.”

“Oh, we understand that,” nodded Death. “We can’t force you to voluntarily expire any more than we can change the past. As I said, it was an oversight. Someone forgot to apply the appropriate reductions to your account at the time, and for that we sincerely apologize.”

Louis blinked. Death, as always, looked serene.

“Well. Um. All right. Apology accepted.”

Death nodded, tipped his hat and took a step back.

“Of course,” he said amiably, “we’ve had to make reductions to correct the imbalance. Nothing major, you understand. Retroactive adjustments, as it were. Payment of arrears.”

Louis took another sip of the coffee.

“So what’s that going to run me?”

“We’ve had to shave a few years off your life span.”

Louis nodded. He’d been through this before.

“How many?”

Half a second later, the stove’s persistent gas leak caused a chain reaction with the old-style furnace, causing an explosion so powerful, the better part of Louis was vaporized instantly. Death did his utmost to retain his composure, but in the end, he had to chuckle. Sometimes — and just sometimes — his job was so droll.

Today’s topic was suggested by the incomparable @mjgolli, who wrote: “How about ‘Death and Taxes’. Or ‘Death by Taxes’. Same difference.”

Sentient Glowing Balls

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The sky had been alight with shooting stars, and to Darlene, spread out on her lawn at two in the morning, it was like her own private miracle. And then she threw up.

She spat twice — once on each side of her, for variety’s sake — and took another swig of beer to wash away the taste. Friday night lights is what it was, and she was loving every second of it. She was so glad they’d kicked her out of the pub, or she’d have missed this. It was awesome.

She finished the bottle and set it down on the grass, then got to her feet, hands out and at the ready, and she stumbled her way back inside to the kitchen. The fridge door rattled with alcohol… remnants of the rained-out BBQ party from last weekend, impossible to reschedule, it turned out. She grabbed another two bottles — to save herself a trip — picked up a bag of chips off the counter, and swayed out the door.

On the lawn, right atop her empty bottle, was a meteor.

Darlene blinked at it, rubbed her eyes with her forearm, and stepped cautiously forward. The meteor was hovering just above the ground, throwing blue and green light around like it was on fire, but it wasn’t… it was a nice, soft glow like a night light. It was so beautiful that Darlene felt compelled to open another bottle and keep drinking.

“Hello, little, meteor,” she said, sitting down next to it.

“Hello,” it replied, in a voice like a child’s, but not so whiny and obnoxious. God, she hated kids.

“Would you like a beer?” she asked, offering it a bottle.

“No thank you,” said the meteor. “We are travelling.”

“Ah. Right,” nodded Darlene, and took a long, brooding sip. “Where’re you off to anyways? There’s a lot of you, isn’t there?”

“Two hundred and seventy-five, yes,” said the meteor. “We are looking for a new home.”

Darlene nodded appreciatively.

“Well, I’ve got room on my couch for five of you, but I dunno wha’tdo about the other two hundred an’… an’…”

“Seventy,” said the meteor. “Do not worry. We can find our own accommodations. But please, tell us… what is your homeworld like? It is quite beautiful from afar.”

Darlene shrugged, opened the other beer, and chugged for a bit.

“I dunno,” she said. “I mean, there’s a park down the way, an’ the movie theatre’s pretty nice now that they’ve got the bigger screens an’… I guess you’d have trouble there if you glow all the time. Oh! And D’Arcy’s Pub is really awesome, but they ban you if you try an’ make out on the pool tables.”

“That is unfortunate.”

“They’re prudes.”

“Yes,” said the meteor, swaying slightly.

“How ‘bout you? What kind of things’re you looking for? My last boyfriend was looking for sex. Are you looking for sex?”

The meteor paused at this.

“No,” it said finally. “We are looking for a sentient race with which to co-exist, share the wealth of our learning, and work together towards a new era of peace and prosp—”

Darlene couldn’t hold it. She barfed on the meteor. Luckily, most of it seemed to burn right off, so it was like no harm no foul. She burped, took another drink.

“Wow,” she said breathlessly. “Sorry. Those come outta nowhere sometimes. Hold on a sec, let me make it up to you…” She tried opening the bag of chips, but for whatever reason, her fingers couldn’t manage it, so she just popped it open the old fashioned way. Except it popped open at the bottom. She sighed, picked some of the bigger chips out of the grass.

“Here you go,” she said, holding up a handful.

But the meteor was gone.

“Meteor?” she called. “Little meteor?”

There was no answer, no sign of lights, no sign of anything. She lay back on the grass and checked the stars again, but none of them were moving. Eleven seconds later, she passed out.

The next morning, she awoke to a world where extra-terrestrials were still the stuff of fiction, and her hair smelled like vomit. It suited her just fine.

Today’s topic comes from the everpresent kdnewton, who suggests: “The mass migration of sentient balls of light, mistaken as a meteor shower.”

The Cottage

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The knife tap, tap, tapped against the glass window, making a horrible noise as it slid down like a snake. The yellow-haired one turned slowly in the darkness, face lit by moonlight, but saw nothing. She’d missed the knife, the mask that had been there, the red in the eyes. Not Sandy. She’d been watching that window like a hawk.

“Did you hear that?” the thick one say to the yellow-haired one. “What was that?”

“I knew this was a bad idea,” the yellow-haired one said, her voice wavering like the beating of wings.

“Shhh, let me listen!” said the thick one.

Everyone sat perfectly still, even Sandy. She so wanted to stretch her legs, but if the bigguns were being quiet, she felt a certain obligation to do the same. Besides, the room wasn’t especially interesting anymore, now that the lights had all gone out.

A long, shiny knife stabbed down into the thick one’s shoulder, and he screamed, fell forward, and tried to get away. There was blood all over the place, but what was most frustrating for Sandy was that if the masked biggun was inside, that meant a door or window had obviously opened, and she’d missed it. She was about to beat herself up about it when she noticed the thick one was about to fall into her.

She shot through the air as fast as her little wings would go, weaving left and right to avoid the masked one, trying not to panic with all the screaming going on. She landed on the ceiling, far above the fray.

The thick one was gurgling blood now, trying to protect himself. His fingers got chopped off, and Sandy fought the urge to go see if they were tasty. She liked hot dogs, and these looked like hot dogs. She wondered if this is how they made hot dogs. Hopefully not. It was horribly inefficient.

Now the yellow-haired one was at the back of the cottage, hands gripping some kind of silvery tube thing, pointing it at the masked one.

“Get off him!” she yelled, and he looked at her suddenly. The yellow-haired one aimed the silver thing up at the ceiling, and without warning, the wood right next to Sandy exploded! She took off into the air, zigging this way and that as splinters rained down. She hated the normal rain, but this was absurd!

When she finally got her footing on the wall, the yellow-haired one was exploding the masked one all over his abdomen. Still, the masked one kept on coming, like he was one of those ants that doesn’t need a head to move. Those things were creepy. Sandy could understand why she’d be exploding him.

Finally, the masked one got up close to her, and he stuck the knife right into her eyeball, which was (in Sandy’s opinion) a tragic waste of an eyeball. The yellow-haired one got all jumpy and fell on the ground, looking all quiet.

And it was just as the masked one fell on top of her, blood pumping all over the floor, that Sandy realized what she’d been watching: this was how they made maggot farms! Boy was she glad she hadn’t escaped out the open door after all! What a great night!

This week’s story is based on heliosengine’s topic: “a horror story written from the perspective of a literal fly.. on a wall.”