022421b

 

I could kill you now,

but how much sweeter:

maroon you on this rock,

staring into the singularity,

spinning closer, closer--

nowhere to go but down.

 

090620b

 

kid mooned my mother

what you think

I was gonna do?

 

081420

 

"My name is Daisy. You mowed my parents. Prepare to die."

                                                          --The Meadow Bride

083019d

Whose bright idea was it to arm wildlife with suicide vests?

081419e

You wake stuck to the bed by prodigious quantities of mucus. It takes days for the snails to drill through your skull with their radulas. You have plenty of time to regret all that escargot.

120418d

I paid all I could afford
to get revenge on the neighbor
who shot my dog

tomorrow
three in the morning
his house will turn to sour cream

the witch
a dog lover
gave me a big discount

021918b

The Lich

"But if the warlock be of exceeding grate powerr, his dead corse may rise agayn, an such an abomination is called a liche."

--Abdul Alhazred, translated by G. W. Cooper

Shawn Hutton sprinkled the old witch's powder over the corpse while speaking the last words of the spell. If he had correctly interpreted the old woman's notes, the body of the most powerful wizard Alabama had ever known would become his willing slave. If not ? well, he shuddered to think what De Wayne Miller's lich would do to him if it was not under his control!

Lightning flashed outside the grimy windows of Shawn's toolshed-workshop, immediately followed by a deafening peal of thunder. Involuntarily, Shawn turned towards the window.

"That had to be close," he muttered, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.

Then came the rain, hissing through the azaleas and drumming on the roof nearly as loudly as the thunderclap of a moment before. Shawn's ears registered no sound inside the room, so loud was the rain, until a heavy hand fell onto his left shoulder. He screamed and tried to twist away, but it was no use. Another hand caught his hair and bent his head so far backwards that all he could see was Miller's half-rotted face, upside down and a bare inch from his own. Shawn screamed again, for the last time.

Miller dropped the corpse and strode stiff-legged towards the door. The fool had completed the reanimation spell, just as Miller'd intended, but had bungled the job. Miller hardly had any feeling in his extremities, and his muscles were not responding as they should. This would not do. He had to get to his own laboratory and finish the task. He tried to grasp the doorknob, but his hands were like wood: they kept slipping off. Finally, frustrated, he slammed the door with his shoulder, ripping the hasp right out of the jamb. He strode out into the rain without a backward glance.

Jasmine mumbled to herself continuously as she rummaged through the wizard's paraphernalia. Every so often she would exclaim delightedly over some discovery, shoving her finds into a shapeless denim sack. Every now and again, too, she would pause, to stare intently at a glass globe that lay in the center of a large oak table. What she saw seemed to reassure her, and each time after a few moments' pause she went back to her work.

The witch worked quickly. She moved from the desk to a shelf of books, reading titles, occasionally taking a book off the shelf and flipping through its pages. Two or three volumes she put into her sack.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning struck very near the old house: thunder boomed loud enough to rattle the glassware on the shelves over the pot-bellied stove. At almost the same moment, the dim glass globe blazed forth with a hideous pale green light. The witch snatched up her sack and trotted nimbly toward the door. However, even as she reached for the handle, the door was wrenched open from outside.

"You!" she gasped, starting back. "But the powder?!"

Yes, Miller thought, I suspected the powder. So it wasn't made right. Still, here I am, you back-stabber. We had a deal. Alas, his undead lips could not form words so quickly. All he said was "Powder! Backstabber!"

The witch knew what he meant. "I intended you to remain in hell," she said. "I admit it. You should not be here. But we can still keep our agreement." Her eyes darted from side to side while her hand slipped into her pocket.

"Deal broken!" the lich barked. "You die!" Yes, you crooked old woman, he

thought, I paid you well to restore life to my clay, and you betrayed me. That young fool had just the wit to do your bidding. I suppose he paid you too, and was told I would be his slave. We were partners, but now you must pay for your deceit.

He lurched towards the witch, arms held stiffly before him, growling hoarsely. She took a small bottle out of her pocket, pulled the cork with her teeth, and flung the contents at the lich. His chest and right arm immediately began to pop and sputter like hot oil splashed with water.

The witch cursed under her breath: she'd been aiming for his face. The lich ignored the flames, lurching forward and embracing the witch. She twisted

out of his grasp, he overbalanced and toppled to the floor, but he caught

her ankle with one hand. The snap of ankle bones filled the room. The witch bit her lip and reached into her sack, rummaging for something. The lich dragged her to the floor just as she pulled another small jar out of her sack. It slipped out of her hand, shattered, and a dark thin liquid soaked into the planks. Sparks from the burning lich fell onto the patch of liquid and it exploded with flame. The two figures writhed apart, engulfed in flames, the witch letting out one short shriek. The lich staggered back to his feet. Flame billowed from his entire body. The witch rolled on the floor, trying to put out her burning clothes.

The lich silently cursed his former partner. You fool! I would have lived forever. I would have treated you fairly -I needed an assistant. We could have ruled this county. He turned toward the door, but the fire was too intense. He lurched back to the center of the room, beating at the flames that ate into his head. Fire had now spread throughout the small building. The witch dragged her sack with one hand, shielding her face with the other. She rattled the back door but it was locked. She kicked at it. Something in the witch's sack exploded, hurling her into the door, which did not yield. She fell to the floor. The lich growled in rage and

stumbled toward her just as the roof fell in. He was buried by burning beams. The

flames leaped up to meet the falling rain, and a column of steam rose into the night.

Morning sun flooded the glade. Mist rose up to meet it, but nothing living emerged from the rubble of the Mage's house. After a while, a mockingbird perched on the debris and began to sing.

012518e

F.T.L. Geek

We all thought Billy Watson was a dummy until he built a faster-than-light drive for his science project. We take Physical Science in 9th Grade. Billy had done some stupid thing with pea plants for his project in 8th grade. He'd fed them some special plant food and they all died. Then the next summer the kudzu had just about taken over the field behind the school, and Billy claimed that was cos he'd dumped the experiment there. At the time I told him he was full of it, but now I'm not so sure. Anyway, this year we had to do something to do with physics or engineering, and Billy said he was going to invent an ftl drive. "That way," he said, "I can patent it and get rich, and I won't have to hang around here any more." Well, we explained that even if he had the brains to build one, which he didn't, an ftl drive would be stolen by the CIA and he would spend the rest of his life in an underground laboratory in Virginia. Didn't slow him down any.

Billy didn't tell Mrs. Haskell what he was going to make. He didn't want her telling the CIA. So he told her he was doing his project on electromagnetism. She believed him! We told her he was lying, but she always takes his side, says we pick on him. Well, we do, but he deserves it, the little geek!

I can't explain exactly how he made it. He downloaded some plans from the Internet, but he didn't have all the equipment they called for so he made substitutions. For instance, the plans called for a cyclotron. Billy substituted an old Kenmore washing machine. "Close enough," he said. I do know that he made quite a few raids to the old sinkhole near the school, which is where most people dump their appliances and junk cars. When he got done, his project was a monster. I mean, it was bigger than his house! I stopped by one day on my scooter to take a look at it.

"You dummy," I said, "you'll never even get that to the school. And it sure won't fit in the classroom. You are such a dork."

"No prob., scooter-face," he replied. "I built an antigrav. sled to carry it there, and I figure Mrs. Haskell will come outside to see it." He was right, too. She always liked him best.

It was that night, I guess, that Joe-Bob came up with his idea. "She'll give him an 'A' even though it won't work," he said, "but I'm going to fix him." He hefted a 4-pound sledge hammer he'd swiped from the building supply store. "Who's with me?"

"Come on, JB," I said, "leave the geek alone. It will be bad enough for him having that rusting pile of garbage in his front yard, reminding him of how dumb he is."

"No, I want to see him cry when he comes outside tomorrow morning and sees its guts strewn half-way across town."

Well, I didn't go with him, but a bunch of others did. I trailed along behind to see what happened. I guess I had the feeling even then that Billy knew something we hadn't given him credit for. Joe-Bob crept up to the thing about 3:30 in the morning, when no one else was out but us. Even the high-school kids had finished screwing out by the lake and were home in bed. There was kind of a blue glow around the thing, like Billy'd left a night-light on somewhere inside it. Joe-Bob raised his hammer and swung.

There was the loudest CLANG! you ever heard. I figured for sure Billy would come running out of the house, maybe with a baseball bat. But no, far as I could tell he didn't even wake up. Joe-Bob raised the hammer to let loose again but the blow didn't fall. About that time the blue glow got a lot brighter, and it kind of expanded to include Joe-Bob and Billy's mailbox, which was right behind him. Suddenly, Joe-Bob shot up into the air, yelling like the dickens, and the mailbox tore right out of the ground and went with him. In no time at all we couldn't see Joe-Bob or hear him. We waited around a few minutes and then just went on home. We never did see or hear anything of Joe-Bob or the mailbox again, unless you count Mr. Thomas finding the hammer imbedded in the roof of his house over on the other side of town the next day.

Finally, the big day came. Billy came riding up to school on his machine, steering it with the wheel from an old John Deere that he'd mounted on the front. He parked it right in the middle of the parking lot. When 4th period came around, he persuaded Mrs. Haskell to come outside and look at it, and of course the whole class came too. Most of them crowded up close around it, marveling at all the weird things he'd made it out of, but I hung back. I had a funny feeling that we were going to see some fireworks.

Billy talked a minute or so about how important an ftl drive was, how we could go to the stars and all, and how he was going to be rich and famous. Then he pressed a big red button. The whole thing just vanished. A big wind rushed into where it had been, and there was a sound like the loudest fire cracker you ever heard. A couple of the kids never did get their hearing back. I was jerked off my feet and slammed into the pavement, like to broke my arm. I got to my feet quick as I could and scanned the skies. Didn't see nothing, then or later. Billy never came back. The sheriff figured the machine had exploded right there in the parking lot, but I dunno. I kinda figure it worked just like Billy said it would. I think he went to a star. Thing is, he couldn't come back. See, when he pressed the red button, he wasn't wearing any space suit; just his regular clothes. I guess it's hard to breathe out there in space. Yep, I think Billy did everything right except that one teensy detail, and he's orbiting some far off star right now, cold and dead. Stupid little geek.

122817c

Nobody was laughing at the cupcakes when they returned, heavily armed, to the bakery. A custard blaster is a fearsome device!