Tag: mystery

The Teacher

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One day, a crate arrived marked TEACHER on the side.
An electrical cord dangled out from a hole.
“Plug it in for 8 hours,” a note said.
So, the principal did.
All of the kids sat quietly while the box hummed slightly.
After 8 hours, the crate was unplugged and the kids left.
Until it was school time again. Once again, kids sat down and it was plugged in.
A dozen kids showed up on Saturday, wanting to learn more.
“Go home,” said the principal.
None showed up on Sunday. They were at church, staring at a crate marked PREACHER.

The Cut

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Two rival teams of surgeons square off in the operating room.
“What are you doing here?” asks a doctor.
“Johnson at three?”
They all nod.
“Shit. Goddamned scheduling.”
The hospital administrator is called in to officiate. He tosses a coin.
“Heads,” says the anesthesiologist.
The teams scrub up, walking to opposite ends of the table.
One will work from the feet up, and the other down from the head.
“May the best team win,” says the administrator, and he drops a silk to the floor.
Under the mask, the patient breathes deep, and scalpels descend to make the opening cut.

Flower Bandit

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We checked the video twice.
A man walks into the bank, gives the teller a rose, and she hands him all the cash in the drawer.
He kisses her hand and then walks out to the street, vanishing in the crowd.
No alarm at all.
Nobody knows who he is. His face is all over the news, but he’s not armed or dangerous.
The tellers refuse to say anything about him, but they insist on keeping the flowers.
We’ve checked for fingerprints and DNA… nothing comes up.
What’s curious is that since he started, sales of flowers have gone up.

Focus

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I had a boss who made the craziest demands.
Once, she told me to focus on everything.
No. Really.
Focusing on everything.
Isn’t that impossible?
You have to focus on something. And then, everything else goes out of focus.
When something catches your attention out of the corner out of your eye, you shift your focus to that.
And what you had been focusing on, you don’t focus on anymore.
How can you focus on everything?
One day, I noticed that she used a special bottle of eyedrops for her contact lenses.
It glowed green.
I quit the next day.

Colored Clouds

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Paska is a small island with just a few hundred residents.
Everybody knows everyone else.
Especially Josh. He may be Mainlander, but he’s with the Weather Bureau.
He gets freshly-baked pies and hugs when the weather is good.
He gets things thrown at him when the weather is bad.
Every now and then, he likes to tinker with the weather control engine and make the clouds all different colors.
“Make a pink bunny!” says the mayor’s daughter.
Josh pushes a few buttons, pulls a lever, and the island’s church is incinerated by lightning.
“Um,” says Josh. “The bunnies are angry.”

Random Dave

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Every fifteen seconds, Dave hits the Random link in Wikipedia and learns something new.
Hypotrichosis is when you have less than normal amounts of hair, for instance. Dave looked in the mirror and smirked… he might have that.
He kept clicking until he found an article about himself.
He read it from top to bottom.
Everything… his birth, his school days, his career.
It was all there. Boring as hell.
So, he changed it.
He added a wife and kids. Made himself a retired football star.
Everything was great.
Until, of course, someone deleted the page by accident.
Bye, Dave.

Mall Santa

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Yeah, I punched a mall Santa in the face.
Guy had it coming. He was drunk and falling all over himself.
Plus, it was July.
That drunk bastard should be up at the North Pole, making toys.
Instead, he’s making faces at the kids and puking on himself.
There’s enough of that in December, but I won’t want to have to see this crap in July.
Who do you think makes all the fireworks for the Fourth of July? he drools.
The Chinese, I say, and I punch him again.
Santa goes down, and I take his sack of fireworks.

Marble Rain

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You can hear them clacking against the street, shattering windshields on parked cars.
It’s raining marbles. Glass beads falling from the sky, the distant sound of thunder and the flash of lightning.
Yesterday, it was raining bologna.
The cheap stuff, too. Not even store-brand. That institutional crap they sell to schools and prisons.
It’s rained pretty much everything this past year. Cats and dogs ain’t the least of it.
You name it, it’s fallen from the sky.
Popcorn wasn’t bad.
Razorblades, on the other hand, totally sucked.
The weatherman’s given up completely. He just stares at the camera, laughing hysterically.

Financial Advisor

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I got a financial advisor.
He tells me to buy, so I buy.
He tells me to sell, so I sell.
Works out pretty nice.
Then, he tells me to meet him at the diner at midnight.
So, I meet him.
He slides a gun across the table.
He tells me to kill the priest who molested him as a child.
I say no.
He slides a stack of bills across the table.
“I’m here to make you money,” he says. “Go on. Take it.”
I slide it back.
“Invest it for me,” I say, and I take the gun.

Cake Baking

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Mom was busy in the kitchen, baking a gigantic cake.
Little Susie asked why.
“It’s Baking A Cake Day,” said Mom. “And that’s why I am baking a cake.”
“Why is there a Baking A Cake Day, Mommy?” asked Little Susie.
“To celebrate Cake-Baking!”
“Why celebrate cakes? Why not pies?”
“You’re not an unpatriotic pie-lover are you?”
Little Susie asked why pie was bad, but her mother shoved her out the door.
“Go play outside!” she shouted.
Susie walked through the trees to the neighborhood creek and made mud pies with her friends.
But she came home caked with dirt.