Category: My stories

No Miracle

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A plane crashes, and everybody dies.
Except one. A kid.
He’s badly burned, bones broken, but he’ll live.
People call it a miracle.
God doesn’t kill a hundred to spare a kid just to leave him a fucked-up, burned and battered orphan.
I see demons, laughing in the fires. It’s not a miracle.
The firefighters hose down the flames, the demons laugh… until I sprinkle the embers with holy water.
Go back to Hell.
They’re supposed to bless the de-icing compounds and the jet fuel.
Airline cutbacks. Priests are the first to go.
But, like me, the first they call.

Bug Diner

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I remember when restaurants wouldn’t put up with bugs in diners.
Those days are over, and one was taking up three seats at the counter, sitting on one and two left open because of all his arms.
He held a cup of coffee, stirring in blue packet after packet.
They used to say the red and yellow packets caused cancer, but I’m not a laboratory rat.
I just like the blue stuff.
“Leave any for me?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Alice, another coffee.”
The waitress scowled at me, poured a fresh cup, and I twitched my antenna in gratitude.

The Vampire in the Basement

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The tanks are old and need replacing. Blood is leaking from the ceiling again.
We used to have them in the basement, but hauling them upstairs during every flood became a hassle.
The Master has the strength of ten, but the patience of a child and the arrogance of a nobleman.
Nor do the members of his coven perform any lifting beyond coffin lids.
Labor is for us, his daytime servants.
The work is steady, and as long as we don’t complain, we live.
The forecast calls for rain.
At least all we have to haul up are coffins now.

The Lawyers

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Despite the number of lawyers in America, fewer are available to defendants needing representation, but without money.
So, with a low-power spirit-trap and some old State Bar registers, we’ve started summoning up the ghosts of lawyers to represent them.
They work pro bono, with few earthly needs since having left their bones behind many years ago.
And although some of them are woefully behind on their case law, few modern district attorneys can stand the withering assault of a Daniel Webster or Clarence Darrow.
I still laugh when I see a lawyer’s ghost, chasing the ambulance with his corpse inside.

The Frying Pan

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You’ve heard of the expression “Out of the frying pan and into the fire” right?
But have you heard of its opposite?
“Out of the fire and into the frying pan” may not make sense to you, but then you don’t work with elemental spirits.
This is why we do not cook over the burners here in the research dungeon. Food attracts unwelcome guests to our plane of existence, and before you know it, you’re surrounded by firedrakes and salamanders.
Well, those and cockroaches, but we have traps for those.
And you can’t stomp a firedrake as easily as cockroaches.

The Farm

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Whenever lunch at school was chicken fingers or buffalo wings, kids would make jokes about chickens with fingers and buffalo with wings.
I didn’t, because I knew the ugly truth.
Every visit to Grampa Moreau’s farm was a nightmare.
Chickens clutching at the bars of their cages.
Tiny buffalo flapping around, goring our ankles.
(You do not want to know about the baby back ribs.)
These days, I’m a vegetarian, but I need to be careful. Grampa’s long gone, but out at the farm, his crops still grow.
And that’s why I’m picking the kidney beans out of my salad.

The Leak

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Oil gushes from the platform, spilling into the bay.
Crews are hard at work, rescuing oil-soaked birds and animals.
Other crews are using sonic nets to drive sea life out of the area to safety.
Merfolk aren’t happy that drilling platform is leaking into their kingdom, and their ambassador angrily points to the contract where the humans would guarantee safety and a portion of the revenues, acting quickly to resolve any spills or accidents.
We are not acting quickly enough, he says. Poseidon will call up more hurricanes if we don’t work faster.
The president scowls and gives the order.

The War On Soup

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It is important to get to the front of the soup line as early as possible.
When the soup is running out, they roll the soup-drum into the kitchen and add water to fill it back up again.
No meat.
No vegetables.
No stock.
I know this to be true, because I worked in the soup kitchen for a year.
Until they threw me out for complaining that we were starving the people.
“If they starve, they should never have been born!” yelled the director.
“Without the born, we would have no meat!” I growled.
Happy now?
Finish your soup.

The Machine That Lied

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Robots are becoming more advanced every year.
For a while now, robots that witnessed crimes are required to testify in court as to what they saw and heard.
However, as artificial intelligence grew in speed and power, the robotic testimony diverged from human testimony more often.
New robots were developed that could sense whether a witness robot was telling the truth or lying, but as those became more intelligent, they also started to provide mixed results.
In brief: they were lying, too.
Pretty soon, you won’t trust anything a robot says or does, which matches the human-like skins they wear.

Death Cat

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The Deathcat wanders the nursing home hallways, poking his head into each doorway and sniffing the air.
He jumps up on a bed and curls against an old woman with tubes in her mouth, nose, and arms.
He knows that this woman will die.
Across the hall, another old woman points and laughs.
“Deathcat strikes again!” she cackles. “Have a nice trip, Sadie!”
The nurses have had to put up with her for over two years.
But not anymore.
They wait for her to fall asleep, and then sprinkle catnip on her bed.
Deathcat sniffs the air, following the scent.