Doctor Frankenstein told Igor to throw the switch.
Igor was good at throwing the switch.
As a child, he practiced throwing the switch all day and all night.
Got merit badges in throwing the switch when he was a scout.
He majored in throwing the switch back in college.
And apprenticed in a switch manufacturing factory as a tester to get practical experience.
Just for the moment when he’d be asked to throw it.
“I DON’T NEED YOUR WHOLE DAMN BIOGRAPHY, IGOR!” yelled Frankenstein. “THROW THE SWITCH!”
Igor said “Yes, Master!” and pressed the button that had replaced the switch.
Any silver will do
They say that you can only kill a werewolf with a silver bullet.
But any silver will do.
Parson Reginald used a silver mirror like a knife.
He also used a silver knife.
Maxwell used a silver hammer to bash in their brains.
Perhaps you’ve heard the song?
Silver arrow heads, silver cigarette stems, silver serving platters.
They all work.
We’ve tested it all, here at the lab.
We obtain werewolves, and we kill them with all kinds of silver things.
Why do our guards carry guns with silver bullets?
They’re easier to use than all that over weird crap.
The perfect costume
Bob came up with the best costume for Halloween.
“This is going to be hard to make,” said his mother.
“I’m going to make it myself,” said Bob.
He studied all kinds of books on fashion and design.
And he watched a bunch of tutorials on Lynda’s website, free through his library card.
But Trick or Treat was cancelled that year because of the pandemic.
Still, he was able to get his mother to take photos and he posted them on TikTok and all the social media, and he texted them to his friends.
They texted back photos of candy.
Sickbed
If you’re feeling sick, don’t go to bed.
Sure, when you’re sick, the bed you’re in is a sickbed.
Are you sure it’s a sick bed?
It could be a deathbed.
And that’s where you’ll die.
Yes, you’ve been sleeping in that bed for years.
Not knowing that it’s actually a deathbed.
What about a daybed? Can a daybed be a sickbed or a deathbed?
Yes. Yes it can.
You won’t see it on the label, though.
And there’s no testing for it.
The only way you’ll find out is if you get sick.
Or, I suppose, if you die.
The bitch of a neighbor
I love to plant flowers and herbs and vegetables.
This house has a big yard. And a bitch of a neighbor.
She rips out the herbs. She thinks they are ugly.
She rips out the rose bushes. She thinks they are too showy.
So, I planted climbing roses, the ones with thorns.
Let her try to pull those out.
And I invited her over for a visit.
Pointed to my garden.
And told her when she dies, I will plant all of this on her grave.
And she’s welcome to reach up from Hell and pull them down with her.
The phone booth of the winds
They call it the phone booth of the winds.
A phone booth set on a cliff in Japan by the ocean.
People come to the phone to call the dead.
They tell the dead not to worry about them, but they should.
They tell the dead that they miss them, and they should.
They tell the dead they will see them again soon, and they will.
And they hang up the phone, cry their tears, and step out of the booth.
Then they run to the cliff and leap over, to lose themselves in the ocean.
The phone never rings.
Serendipidy – Disintegration
I’ve never liked science fiction.
People die far too tidily for my liking. It’s just too sanitised and clean.
Zapped by lasers, vaporised by disintegration rays, or rendered to nothing by molecular disruptors… All very effective, but the recipients either vanish or simply slump to the floor in a nice tidy pose.
Where’s all the blood and guts? Bubbling body fluids, and gory splatters?
You’d think that in the future we could come up with more interesting ways to kill people?
Force fields that slice and dice, ray guns that splurge you over the spaceship walls?
Just, more gore, please!
Weekly Challenge #809 – DISINTEGRATION
RICHARD
Don’t sweat the small things
If there’s one thing we should have learned from Covid, it’s that the smallest things can lead to the breakdown of society and the disintegration of life as we know it.
I’m not talking about the virus…
If you really want to plunge humanity into panic-stricken despair, take away our toilet rolls!
If you want to provoke social unrest and civil disobedience, tell us to wear masks and stand two metres apart, tell us phone masts spread viruses and vaccines are really tracking chips.
If you want to break our will, make us stay at home.
I’d prefer the virus!
TOM
What Could Go Possible Wrong 009
Something about time travel tends to bring out the worst and best of a person. Both extremes flooded Fords brain as he pressed Cevante’s neck. Did he really want to take the time lord out. Sure, he thought, end this endless racing up and down the time line. But wait, Arnesto was his friend, he would give up his life for him. Bout this moment is when the 1st Time Lord to the Queen disintegrated in his hand. “Damn you, you call that Disintegration?” He pressed the stem of his pocket watch and the Taix disintegrated. But the Arms Traven
NORVAL JOE
Before Billbert had a chance to smile smugly at Sabrina’s surprise, she locked her arms around his neck and screamed, “Put me down!”
He equally didn’t want anyone to notice the two of them twenty feet above the ground, or to die from strangulation. He quickly dropped them back to the ground.
“How could you do that to me?” Sabrina shouted at Billbert.
Confused, Billbert said, “It’s not like I froze you in a block of ice or shot you with a disintegration ray. We flew.”
Sabrina stumbled around like the ground shifted beneath her feet. “You don’t know me.”
JARED
Survival
As a species, we Humans had been resilient in all our forms over the many generations since we expanded beyond Earth: Native, Extraplanetary-Evo, GMO-Differentiated, Enviro-Adaptive, Hybridized, and so on. In the four-plus centuries that have passed since we started colonizing the galaxy, we had yet to meet an enemy that we hadn’t defeated or integrated with. Until we met the Cockroaches. Well, we called them that; they called themselves Kodefarian – as far as can be represented in our tongue. Whatever. When we encountered them, there was nothing we could do: their weapons induced entropy in whatever they hit – instant disintegration.
PLANET Z
Landry’s plane was going Mach 2 when it completely disintegrated on him.
Fragments of the fuselage tore Laundry apart.
The fuel pods ignited into a massive fireball, incinerating the shredded pieces of Landry’s body.
A cloud of metal bits, bone shards, and ash rained down.
Investigators had nothing much to work with, most of the plane had turned to dust.
Was it the fuel? A manufacturing defect?
Some strange vibration or harmonic?
Nobody wanted to be the next guy to go up.
So the investigators marked it as a sunspot and closed the file, paying Landry’s widow a big settlement.
A little every day
I swore that I would write one story a day until the day I die.
But, lately, I haven’t been writing them every day.
I go a few days without writing a story, and then I write a few stories to make up for the shortfall.
They’re not good, and I throw them in the trash.
Okay, so I’ve written a story every day, so technically that counts, right?
Or maybe I’m just dying a little inside every day, and time is finally catching up with me.
I’d write more, but this is another one to throw in the trash.
October is
“October is coming,” said the ghost.
The room smelled like burnt hair.
Arthur lit a candle and looked around.
Torn, moldy wallpaper.
Stained carpet.
Rotten wood furniture, a table and a chair.
A rusty knife on the table.
Was that rust? Or was it blood?
Arthur looked for a door, but couldn’t find one.
He felt the walls for a seam.
How did he get here?
Had he been drugged, and put in here, and the walls sealed shut?
Dropped from the ceiling? It looked solid enough.
A trap door? None under the carpet.
“October is here,” said the ghost.