Tag: mystery

Headache pills

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Jennie pulled open the mirror and fumbled through the bottles of pills.
“Where are you… where are you…” she muttered, pulling bottle after bottle off of the shelves, looking at their labels, and dropping them in the sink.
“Where are my headache pills?” she whined.
She then looked in each of the drawers, sliding each one out and then slamming them shut.
No headache pills.
She turned out the light, went back to bed, and felt a lump under the pillow.
The pills!
She shook one out of the bottle and dry-swallowed it.
Pain filled her skull.
“Not tonight, dear…”

The Dangerous Salad

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I ordered a Chef’s Salad, but the chef didn’t want to part with his salad. He does that sometimes, the crazy bastard.
So I ended up with a Dangerous Salad instead.
Nothing was dangerous about the ingredients themselves, mind you. From the iceberg lettuce to the herb-encrusted wheat bread croutons, you’d assume that it would be benign.
You’d assume wrongly. Because a salad’s ingredients might all be ordinary, it’s the arrangement of those ingredients that can have fatal consequences.
Well, that and the salad dressing. I mean, who ever heard of Arnsenic Vinaigrette?
I specifically ordered fat-free Arnsenic Vinaigrette, dammit.

Ulysses grants

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Ulysses sold Inspiration in a bottle.
Sure, it was ordinary tap water, and the bottles dingy beer bottles with cheap laser-printed labels glued on them crooked-like, but people desperate for Inspiration will pay anything for it.
Ulysses does his best bsiness on Artist’s Row in Midtown. He goes around collecting up empties like an old-fashioned milkman, leaving full bottles on the doorstep.
“I need a lot of Inspiration for tomorrow,” says a painter. “Twice the normal order.”
Ulysses grunts, marks a pad with a nub of a pencil, and pushes his cart down the alley.
Inspiration waits for no one.

The Dali Code

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I know you’ve heard of the DaVinci Code, but have you heard of the Dali Code?
Just as the true nature of Christ is in a vault only reachable by following clues laid out by Leonardo DaVinci’s work, Salvador Dali’s work is a map to the Missing Fifteenth Station of the Cross.
Dali? Devout?
Of course he was. Why else would he paint Crucifixion?
Okay, so here’s the secret: Between having his clothes stripped off and getting nailed to the cross, Jesus was slapped with a fish in a bowler hat.
Okay, so he was a weird kind of devout.

Lawyerbot

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Lawyers who had defended the most savage and brutal mass-murdering war criminals had refused his case. Not even for tens of billions of dollars.
“Keep your blood money,” they told the multi-billionaire software mogul..
So, faced with using court-appointed chumps, he decided to defend himself.
He took a long weekend to re-engineer his massive search engines to scour every law book, every court record, and every TV court drama script.
The beta hung the jury. And the Gold release won.
As revenge, he distributed the Lawyerbot program for free.
Lawyers sued to stop him. But Lawyerbot beat them, of course.

Cones

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Tomorrow, all across the world, every orange traffic cone will vanish.
Then, three seconds later, they will reappear just as suddenly as they vanished.
Nobody will realize that they’ve been gone.
They’ve trained us not to notice.
Over the decades, the traffic cones have been watching us, manipulating us, learning our weaknesses.
They especially like construction zones. They think we’re at our most interesting there.
When construction begins on something, they show up. Then, when it’s done, they hang around for a little bit before moving on to somewhere else.
They also like watching driving lessons, just for danger’s sake.

Inkblots

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Every inkblot is a confession.
The first shows a child of nine stealing candy bars from the drugstore.
The second shows an angry teen setting fire to the home of the rival to his affections. Romeo burns. Juliet burns.
The third reveals another theft – test scores for his university admissions exam. A+!
The final one shows his business partner allowed to choke to death after a discussion about insurance.
Wait. There’s one more left, doc?
Hold still. Let’s see… that’s you. And me. Standing over you.
No idea how I kill you, but I’ll try to make it interesting.

Elevator Angst

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I used to be deathly afraid of elevators. I’d look down the gap between the elevator floor and the building floor and worry I’d fall through that crack.
I had nightmares about the bottom of the elevator shaft. I’d wake up in a cold sweat, screaming.
The doctors couldn’t help me. I kept thinking about that dark, bottomless pit.
One day, an elevator supervisor took me to a panel at the bottom of the elevator shaft. He opened it and showed me that the bottom of the shaft was strewn with candy and dimes.
I feel so much better now.

Angels on the radar

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By adjusting the sensitivity, power, angle, and reflectivity of a weather radar, you can detect some interesting things out in the heavens.
If you’re really good, you might even find signs of heaven itself.
Now, I won’t tell you the exact settings you need, but imagine the shock when I twiddled a few dials and came up with a squadron of angels sweeping over the land.
Or maybe they were ghosts. I’m not sure. I’ve still got a lot of research to do.
What Nobel Prize category should this be under? Do you think I have a shot at winning?

Chicken

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Why did the chicken cross the road?
I’ve spent my life trying to find the answer. It hasn’t been easy, considering that the government won’t give me a grant to research the issue fully. However, thanks to some generous contributions from the Tyson Corporation and Bo Pilgrim, I think I have the answer once and for all.
No, it’s not just about getting to the other side. It’s more.
I need to hurry up, though. Chickens are being slaughtered across the planet because of bird flu, and there may not be any left by the time my research is complete.