Category: My stories

Sometimes, with the right resonance, frequency, the barrier between worlds weakens, and a portal opens.
A point of light, then a swirling vortex of color… and finally, a glowing tunnel.
Strange glowing vapors and humming come from the tunnel.
Where does it go? Where does it lead?
I stick my hand in… it feels cold… and warm at the same time.
Dare I look? Peer deep into the void?
Nah. I don’t need that in my life.
I drag the garbage cans over and dump them into the tunnel.
It’ll save me a few bucks off of the trash tax.

Renee loved her Hello Kitty sleeping bag.
She refused to go to sleep in anything else.
Sometimes, she’d have an accident, so her parents got her another one.
One for sleeping in, and another that could go through the wash.
She had a lot of accidents in her sleep.
The doctors took a while to figure out what it was.
Then, they knew.
There, in her hospital bed, in her Hello Kitty sleeping bag.
Through all the treatments, her hair falling out.
When the time came, they buried her in it.
Well, both of them. One inside the other.

Gandhi did a hundred mile march to the ocean to make salt.
It was a protest against salt taxes imposed by the British colonial government.
He knelt by the shore, pulled out a straining cloth, and laid it down on the sand.
Then he scooped water into the cloth and lifted the cloth to drain out the water.
Leaving salt in the cloth.
Soldiers politely asked Gandhi to accompany them to the local magistrate’s house.
He stood up, brushed the sand from his knees, and walked with them.
The townspeople cheered as he walked past, reaching out to touch him.

The power went out again.
So, the property manager called the utility company.
Who washed their hands of the situation and posted a 4 hour resolution time.
The property manager then called the electrical contractor.
Who, after an hour stuck in traffic, stared up at the pole for another hour.
Then they called another contractor with a hoist and basket.
It took five minutes to reset the relay on the pole.
This whole circus has happened before.
But it keeps happening.
It’s not procedure… it’s passing the buck the same way every time.
And nobody ever fixes the real problem.

I liked the first Dark Tower novel by Stephen King.
Worldbuilding with legends and myths in a parallel world.
So, I pretend the later crazy shit doesn’t exist.
The Matrix ended with the first film.
Kathleen Kennedy never raped another trilogy out of Star Wars.
And nobody ever remade Total Recall, Rollerball, or other perfect films.
If people ask, say “Those never happened.”
Hold a knife to their throat and, with wild eyes, repeat your statement until they agree and slink away like the deluded sad fuck they are.
You know, like how most gatherings at Thanksgivings and Christmases end.

One carried a knife.
Another carried a gun.
The third used poisons.
And the last used his bare hands.
Four bounty hunters, one target, and a huge stack of cash.
Divided… four ways?
No. The one with a knife took a bullet to the heart.
Divided… three ways?
No. The one with a gun choked on his drink and died.
Divided… two ways?
No. The one with the poisons was thrown off a building.
So, the brawler took the bounty?
No. The target paid him even more than the bounty.
And then killed him.
Another four bounty hunters were called.

It is tradition to carve magic spells into the walls of a king’s tomb.
When King Foldo died, we did no different to his tomb.
So many spells we carved, so many wishes:
Thank you, O king, for your benevolent rule.
Protect the soul of our king.
Bring our king back to us.
May our king watch over us for eternity.
Allow the king to guide his descendants as they rule us.
Too many spells, it turned out.
Foldo’s mummy, compelled by all these powerful spells, roams the land.
He hunts us down, hoping to earn his release and rest.

The great orator, Patrick Henry, stood before the Virginia Convention, exhausted from his speech calling for sending troops to fight the Revolutionary War.
But he was not finished.
“Give me liberty, or give me death!” he exclaimed.
A bony finger tapped his shoulder.
It was The Angel of Death.
The Convention fell to a hush. Henry pissed himself.
“How about both,” said The Grim Reaper, brandishing his scythe. “Where do I sign up?”
Death fought valiantly in the war, but was rather reckless, felling men on all sides.
Civilians and livestock, too.
As he did in all wars, I suppose.

Freddy was rich, but he wanted to get richer.
His business partners got in the way, so he got them out of the way.
Freddy’s lawyer got the sentence knocked down from twenty years to five.
But it didn’t matter. A guard beat Freddy to death in the first week.
The insurance company refused to pay out Freddy’s life insurance.
Freddy’s wife used Freddy’s lawyer to sue to the insurance company. And the government.
She’d already been talking to him about divorcing Freddy, but now, she got the best of both worlds:
Freddy gone, and a whole lot of money.

As the pandemic swept across the world, the race for a vaccine began.
Production lines came to life, gambling on various candidates so they’d be ready with supply.
Company after company released their testing results.
Many successes, with few or no side effects.
The government bought up the doses, and sent them out for distribution.
Hidden in the herd, a secret contractor’s product, which they allocated to prisons, soup kitchens, and welfare institutions.
While agents shredded records and smashed hard drives, the slow-acting toxin annihilated the so-called “undesirables.”
And the unsuspecting agents, too, for the truth had also become undesirable.