Category: My stories

The Shadowcat

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Three rings in the wizard’s nose.
A glass eye, solid blue.
No hair at all. Not even eyebrows.
He tells me of the legedary Shadowcat, a spirit in his library.
Only he can touch the books. If someone else enters the library, the Shadowcat strikes.
Instant death.
“Never go in there,” he says.
I nod.
“Can you make a Greyhawk Slinger?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say.
“You’re hired,” he says, and I am now the butler to the most powerful archmage in the land.
He hands me a book. “Mind putting this back in the library?”
I laugh.
He smiles.

Nine

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Calendars are artificial constructs, I keep telling myself.
The number of days in a week or month, the number of months in a year. These are all based on arbitrary standards that society has chosen.
The length of the year and where it starts varies, adjusted constantly to compensate for these inconsistencies.
September was once the seventh month. Now, it’s the ninth. The ninth of September, on a year set from an arbitrary start, has no cosmic meaning.
I repeat this over and over as the skies turn red, and taloned beasts crawl out of the shadows, sniffing for prey.

Corn Dogs

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There’s nothing quite like a fresh hand-dipped corn dog at the county fair.
These aren’t the pre-processed ones you get at the state fair or the grocery store.
You can watch as they pull a hot dog out of the kettle, spear it with a stick, dip it in the batter, and dangle it in the hot oil.
Look behind the curtain, and you’ll see the batter-maid milking a batter-cow into pails, hot dogs picked straight from a hot dog tree, and the oil pumped straight from the Great Vegetable Oil River.
As I said, as fresh as can be.

Idiot Tax

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The Idiot Tax collector stumbles from door to door, shaking his burlap sack and shouting at the top of his lungs.
Four in the morning. He always comes at four.
I watch a door open and a broken toaster fly out.
He catches it, grunts, and shambles off to the next house.
It’s against the law to kill an Idiot Tax collector. Even by accident.
My rusty butcher’s knife is in his chest.
“I tried to hand it to him,” I say. “Honest.”
I cry. I whine. I babble incoherently.
I, the new Idiot, pick up the sack and howl.

Ceiling Fan

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I good salesman.
I sell ceiling fan to anybody.
I sell to The Pope.
He say his church, it too hot.
Ceiling fan, it a work? He ask.
You try, if it no work, you give back, I say. No pay.
The Pope, he rich, but he no stupid. He like no pay if no work.
We shake hands, share a pizza. Nice wine.
He buy fan, say put it up in my church.
I look, whoa. Tall ceiling. I need big ladder.
I put ceiling fan in chapel, right on Adam’s bellybutton.
It not pretty, but it a work.

Turtle Teacher

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Every classroom has a turtle in an aquarium, placed on a table in front of each class.
The kids stare at the turtle for four hours, take a break for lunch, and return to staring at the turtle for the rest of the day.
Cameras watch the turtles and students, and the principal watches the video screens.
Nothing happens for days… weeks… months…
The Ministry was ready to pull the plug when an alarm went off in Classroom Twelve.
The turtle was gone, a greasy smear on the inside of the aquarium.
Upon review, one student’s eyes glowed red.
Success!

Teleprompter

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The President read the words on the teleprompter, the camera watched him, and the people loved it all.
One day, The President decided to sleep late, so they pointed the camera directly at the teleprompter.
The people loved it much more than they loved The President.
When he woke up and heard that they loved the teleprompter more than they loved him, he appeared on camera without the teleprompter.
The people booed and hooted. They told him to go away.
So, he did. And when the teleprompter was broken, the Vice President’s teleprompter took over.
That’s when people freaked out.

Smacked in the face with a rollerskate

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I’ve never seen Lisa rollerskate.
She just carries that pair around to smack people in the face with.
That’s why I wear a football helmet with the full facemask.
She can slap me in the face all she wants with those rollerskates. It won’t make a lick of difference.
Other people, you can tell she’s whacked them. A bloody lip, a black eye, or a knocked-out tooth.
But me? My face is unblemished and injury-free.
That’s when she tried something new.
“Kiss me,” she said. And she pulled me real close.
So, I took off the helmet and… WHACK!
Bitch.

Fern

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The kids all point their fingers at Fern and laugh.
She doesn’t cry. Instead, she reaches into her backpack and pulls out a compass.
There’s no greater sight than the look on a bully’s face when he’s been stabbed in the chest. That change from the purest malice to emasculated shock happens quickly, but time slows down enough to let the moment be savored.
The bully goes down, hands clutched to his chest, blood leaking through his fingers.
Others scream, but Fern just rifles through the bully’s backpack.
She takes the compass, stows it away in her backpack, and leaves.

And back again

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The princess needed to smuggle gold from one castle to the other without thieves knowing.
Ruplestiltskin was long banished into nothingness, but his spinning-wheel remained.
So, she spun the wheel backwards, turning gold into straw.
She sent out the straw with farmers, and then the princess with her spinning wheel afterwards.
Brilliant, she thought.
The next day, the carts were loaded up with the straw and sent out.
Soon after, the princess began her journey.
Midway there, she found that bandits had struck the caravan, bodies and straw scattered in all directions.
She wept for the gold, and started gathering.