Category: My stories

Edward noticed a discrepancy. A lot more people were dying in nursing homes than when a robot was sent out to help someone with in a home care. The statistics showed an elevated number of assisted suicide requests in the nursing homes. And a few had elevated medication error rates. Because of the turnover, nursing homes could turn through residence were frequently and collect more down payments. Several years later, after all the settlements, Edward retired to a resort on a Caribbean island. All human staff. Not a single robot. his nurse poisoned him, stole his money, and completely vanished.

Sometimes, father Burke would lose it during confessions and yell I wish I had held you under the water in the baptismal font until the bubble stopped. I mean, that’s perfectly understandable for serious things like murder and rape, but littering is not as bad. Unless of course the person threw a banana peel on the sidewalk and father Burke slipped on it and broke his leg. Jenny burst from the confessional, crying and running, father Burke tried to chase after her, but with his cast and crutches he wasn’t fast enough. He smack her during choir practice, he figured.

Henderson Hills is an exclusive gated community. Only the finest people live there. Only the finest students in their school. Only the finest restaurants delivering the finest food to the finest servants who packed the finest picnic lunches for them. Only the finest ants at their picnics. The finest etymologist, EO Wilson, assured the finest staff that these were the finest ants of all. he had measurements, proof! He even wrote a book about it. It was the finest book, the number one best seller at the New York Times. Which, these days, I’d hardly describe as the finest newspaper.

Frank in room seven had been an avid fisherman, but his kids come to visit maybe once every few months and they don’t take him out like they used to. So he dresses up in his fishing gear and puts a chair by his bathtub and sits there for hours. His roommate Joe decided to play a prank on him and while Frank was napping by the tub, he put a fish on the hook. You caught one, Frank! Frank reeled it in and yelled at the confused cafeteria staff to scale and cook it for him. It was delicious.

Some say that the Necronomicon is a powerful book, while others say it’s just the spells contained within it are what’s powerful. Lucius decided to run an experiment. He transcribed the spells in the Necronomicon to simple looseleaf notebook paper. They were just as powerful and demonic in the trapper keeper. He took photos of the spells and printed them out. They were also just as powerful. Finally, he made an e-book out of the spells and sold them for one cent on the Kindle marketplace. A massive supernatural tsunami tore the Earth apart. Lucius never collected his sales.

Due to a programming error, the terraforming probe that landed on Meridian Seven ingested all of the wrong compounds and tried to stitch together a suitable habitat for the incoming colony ships. By the time the colonist arrived and were revived from hibernation,, Meridian seven was a bubbling, putrid mass of tentacles and fangs floating in boiling oceans of acid. The colonist went back into hibernation after sending a message. Wake us up when you fix this crap. The colonization ministry sent another ship out and 100 years later it vaporized the sleeping colony ship and the Meridian seven disaster.

• Richard
• Lizzie
• Tom
• Serendipidy
• Norval Joe
• Planet Z

The next topic is Pulse

RICHARD

Roger
Let me introduce my dad, Roger.
He’s eighty-eight, and can be a miserable git some of the time. Well, an awful lot of the time actually. To be fair, he struggles with getting about, which is frustrating, and with his heart, digestion and a catalogue of other medical issues, who can blame him? I’d most likely be pretty grumpy too.
He does have his good moments though, and playing cards with him is always fun.
I don’t think he’s ever wanted fame or attention: but now, I’ve made him internet famous. Well, just a bit.
That’ll make him really grumpy!

SERENDIPIDY

The great thing with locking flight deck doors is that if the hijacker is already the wrong side, nobody’s getting in to intervene.
That’s why I learned to fly a plane, and now the life of 420 passengers and a dozen crew was in my hands, or as we like to say in the industry, four hundred and thirty one souls.
That doesn’t include me.
I have no soul.
And I have no qualms about what I’m about to do.
Air traffic control are begging me to do the right thing. I listen, but ignore their plea.
Roger, and out.

LIZZIE

Wrench, he said. Roger, she replied. Screwdriver. Roger. Spark plug gapper. The what? Spark plug gapper. What did he mean? She searched the tool box and couldn’t find… what exactly? Quick, the spark plug gapper, he shouted. She looked at him in a panic. The what, the what? And then, it was too late. He had lost his human form. Well, now you know, he said. The spark plug gapper was the code to reset her brain-vision connection. For some reason, it hadn’t worked this time. He would have to complain to management, because he did like his human helper.

TOM

A voice in the darkness

Timmy loved old WWII movies. He would go around the house talking in to a microphone in the most monotone voice: Rodger Wilco Out. Had no idea what it meant, but it sounded cool. When New York fell to Harvesters he joined the resistance. He rose to senior signal operator for the upper Hudson river valley. Timmy’s call code was: Rodger Wilco Out. Late at night some grunt in makeshift recon bunker would hear those words and feel less alone. At the end of the war Timmy learned what the world conveyed: I have received your message and will comply.

NORVAL JOE

When I saw Roger’s name on caller ID, I wondered why he was calling on a Saturday morning.

The person calling was the community service officer from Loomis to tell me that Roger had died in a hit-and-run.

The driver was messing with his phone.

So, he called his wife and said he hit something and needed to hide his car in the in-law’s garage.

Roger was alive when he was found, but he was too severely injured and died at the hospital.

The driver got ninety days. The judge didn’t want it to be a hardship on his family.

PLANET Z

Everybody knows Johnny Appleseed, but do you remember Freddy Chainsaw. While Johnny planted apple trees, Freddy cut them down. Of course, they’re both legends and not quite the real people they represent. Johnny was planting apples that could be mashed into cider and not the delicious ones we eat today. And the chainsaw hadn’t been invented during Freddy’s time, he probably used axes and saws. But the principal is still the same. And the tall tales that preserve their memory, twisted or not, spark, the imagination of children of many generations. And we are grateful that Johnny came out victorious over Freddy .

When the truth came out about Bob, the town was horrified. The class president, the captain of the high school football team, the valedictorian, the most popular kid in school was nothing but a bunch of pillows shoved under a sheet in his bed. Steve, Bob’s alleged, brother, was trying to sneak out one night and his parents caught him and he said oh that’s not me under the covers. It’s your other boy Bob. His parents, both suffering from short term, memory conditions, fell for it. No one wanted to tell them otherwise. Bob got expelled the next day.

Heather was a wild one. She got in all kinds of trouble, and did crazy things. But she never got hurt. Her parents said she must have a dozen guardian angels working all shifts. And not to anybody surprise, she did. And when Heather was 16, the guardian angels went on strike demanding holiday pay in overtime. The archangels passed the buck off to the big guy, and he let it sit on his desk. Meanwhile, Heather broke her legs and arms, and lost an eye in a skateboarding stunt going wrong. After that, she didn’t need so many angels.

The layoffs were brutal. Hundreds of production staff at the media company lost their jobs, while the executives and anchors and star reporters got raises and bonuses to keep them around. Mindy wanted to fight back. She remembered when agencies would send boxes of donuts as a gift to the staff and the anchors and executives would hoard them and admonish the staff for accepting gifts. And they’d eat them. She put on a disguise and delivered a stack of poison donuts to the office. The death toll was massive. The company went bankrupt. And Mindy’s severance was never paid.