dreadcrumbs

Microstory Monday

LifeCamp

"I'm excited you've decided to enroll," said Director Judy, leading me upstairs to the balconies.
"I am too," I said. "I really need a fresh start."
Judy opened a set of double doors that led to a platform overlooking the facility gym.
"This is the group you'll be joining," she said, indicating the twenty or thirty adults crawling around on the floor below us. "This is their "Open Play" period."
A few of the scuttling figures were completely naked, but most looked to be wearing adult diapers. They weren't making any noise except for the rustle of skin against diaper and the thud of flesh against floor.
"Why," I began, trying to keep an open mind. "Why do some of them not have diapers?"
"It's a personal choice," Judy said. "Free flow clients tend to complicate matters for our janitorial staff, but everyone gets over the disgust soon enough. It's all part of the program."
"Oh," I said.
"So," she said, tilting her head to one side. "Will you be paying the diaper fee, or going au naturale?

Friday Fives

Five Things You Can Do To Keep Sane
"They really work!"
  -Dean Hale, dreadcrumbs.com

1. Hold brief conversations with the voices in your head before you start actually hearing them.
2. Treat everyone as if they were absolutely out of their mind, but be polite about it. Humor them.
3. Keep one or two people at hand who will hug you at least once without an agenda, and then stay well away from everyone else.
4. Spend an entire day each month pretending to be either an animal or something undead (ghosts are okay). The whole day. It doesn't work if you cheat.
5. While among others, ponder on the frightfully numerous ways you could kill a person with your bare hands. If you are small and weak, think on how fast you can run. If you are small, weak, and slow, catalog all the hiding places you have.

They Drive Among Us

I was driving home from work the other day, just one two-ton killing machine amidst hundreds of others, when a large maroon Thing quickly jerked halfway into the lane I was in (just inches in front of me), drifted slowly back where it came from, and then painstakingly reasserted itself into my lane. It then proceeded to do a slow imitation of the ball in the game "Pong." Circumstances being what they were, I wasn't immediately able to get away from this psychopath, and found myself trapped behind Maroon Death for several miles.

Being fascinated as I am with The Mad, I was trying to get a good view of the driver while jockeying to get away. Was it a crazed stunt driver out for revenge in his death-proof car? A hooded spectre of doom on the way to their next reaping? Someone on a cell phone? I had to know. There's something very intriguing to me about the facial expressions of people on subtle rampages.

At the next red light, the car came to a jerking halt about fifteen feet behind the line painted on the road that says "stop here on red." I didn't understand this behavior until the cars on the other side of the intersection got a green arrow indicating they could turn left, across our path. When those cars started to go, the Demon Car jerked forward with a start and nearly plowed into one of the turning cars, stopping in the middle of the intersection when, ostensibly, the error was realized. If the car hadn't started its charge fifteen feet earlier than most, it probably would have actually hit someone. So maybe the driver knew what they were doing. On some level.

In any case, as the car waited in the middle of the intersection, turning cars swerving around it, I was able to get a view of the driver in their rear view mirror. Old woman, probably about 80. She had an intense glare that seemed to accuse the rest of the world for the indignity she had to suffer in the middle of the intersection. Didn't seem worried about impending sideswipes in the slightest.

Here's the thing, though. She had a vanity license plate. Any guesses?

"PRAY NOW"

No lie. I, for one, would not want to see this particular plate across from me at the intersection. Or approaching rapidly from behind. Or chasing me down the sidewalk.

So I think I'm going to give up driving. It's just too dangerous. Maybe I'll pick it up again in forty or fifty years.

Microstory Monday

Blood and Mayonnaise

I dropped behind the palace rubble to reload. The clown's army was only about a click out and still advancing. I sighed and pulled out the greasy photo of a Double Whopper with Cheese that I keep in my jacket, trying to remind myself what all this was for.
Suddenly there was a boom overhead, and I looked up to see a dark cloud erupt in the sky. I watched as the cloud grew, and held out the vain hope that it might still just be rain until I began to hear the scream of a million tiny mouths. "Fry guys!" the voice of Corporal Schill screeched from my belt radio. "They've dropped Fry Guys! Find cover!"
I groaned and kissed the photo, stuffing it back in my jacket. There was no cover out here. Not from this. Not from Them. I raised my rifle to the sky and started firing. Today was a good day to die.

Friday Fives

Five Personally Tested Ways To Get People To Stop Bugging You

1. Greet them with a kiss on the forehead
2. Eat the chocolate you keep under your fingernails
3. Cover your mouth and scream politely every two or three minutes
4. Every time your name is spoken, smile and say "You may call me Papa."
5. Laugh heartily at every third thing they say

Microstory Monday

The Avenging Armadillo

Skip stared at the photograph of his own back.
"As you can see," said the doctor, "we've got pretty good coverage across the neck and shoulders, and very little infection in the nail beds."
"I need more," said Skip.
"I think we're barely below notice as it is," said the doctor. "If you hadn't insisted on only transplanting toenails..."
"They're the strongest," said Skip.
"Yes," said the doctor. "But each donor only has two, and we'd need at least ten more to cover the rest of your back."
"I'll get the toes," said Skip, looking up from the photo into the doctor's eyes. "It's important."
"Important enough to endanger everything you've worked for?" asked the doctor.
"The world has waited long enough," said Skip, walking to the room's door and throwing it open.
"But..." started the doctor, stopping when Skip raised his hand, silhouetted in the doorway.
"Get the operating room ready," he said. "I'll be back in two hours."

Friday Fives

Five Things I Would NOT Do If I Woke To Find Myself Transformed Into A Giant Beetle (or other monstrous vermin)

1. Whine. No one likes whining, especially when it sounds like the chitter of Approaching Doom.
2. Stay locked in my bedroom. My subjects will need to see their new overlord occasionally to be reminded of their place.
3. Starve myself. When else am I going to have a biological justification to eat garbage and the occasional meaty Austrian? No way would I give that up.
4. Go around without clothes. I may be beyond the petty morality of Man, but I'm not about to flaunt my naked carapace to the world. There is such a thing as common decency.
5. Neglect to reinforce my exoskeleton with a leather cape or other armor proof against thrown apples.

Microstory Monday

Every Other Generation

My son's teacher stared at me from across her desk. "Jack is very bright, you know," she said. "He is a pleasure to teach."
"That's good," I said.
"But," she started, sighed, then began again. "There have been a few problems lately."
"Fighting?" I asked.
"No, no," she said, waving her hand. "It's his lunch. His bag lunch."
"Lunch?" I asked.
"It frightens the other children," she said. "And, frankly, some of the teachers as well."
"I don't understand," I said. "We've paid for school lunch."
"Oh dear," said the teacher. "This could be a problem, then."
"What is it?" I asked, a slow chill starting its creep from the base of my neck. "What is he eating?"
The teacher pulled out a paper bag from her desk. It looked like it held something wet.
"He didn't finish this one," she said, handing me the bag. "Take a look."
Opening the bag, the sickly sweet odor inside instantly took me back to my childhood on the hog farm, and I winced.
"Right," I said, closing the bag. "It's a...uh...cultural dish. My father used to eat these."
"Oh," she said.
"I'll talk to him about being more discreet," I said.
And about covering his tracks, I thought.

Friday Fives

The Nicknames I'll Give My Five Remaining Toes Should I Lose The Other Four in A Bizarre Combination of Accidents

1. "Brother Newt"
2. "Gristy McSquig"
3. "Sister Hillary"
4. "Peter Pointer, The Spectacular Spider-Toe"
5. "Lil' Bandit"

The Silent Laughter of The Elder Ones

My company is once again promoting the blood siphoning of their employees. Like usual, they've posted strange one-sheet advertisements in the building elevators announcing the date of The Drain.

This iteration's advertising isn't quite as horrifying as the last batch, but still questionable. It features two gray-haired businesspeople, a man and a woman, laughing. They're perfectly decent looking mature adults, but apart from the forced vitality of their manic grins, they don't look particularly, well, alive. Both have a gaunt quality that implies undernourishment, but that could just be the curse of anyone who makes their living being photographed. The real chiller is how pale they are. Extremely pale, even for people of possibly Nordic stock. They look like...lets be honest here...like they've been drained of blood.

The natural assumption is that the advertiser intended these people to be either:

1. Examples of the withered joy we might also experience should we Give Of Ourselves, or
2. Examples of those desiccated husks that will feed on our donated blood, thereby prolonging their already unholy lifespans.

I had intended to continue my guerilla war against such ads by replacing them with visually similar duplicates that change the phrases bracketing the photo from "We like to save lives" to "We like to take lives" and "Give blood" to "Give us blood."

Alas, I could not find the photo they used in any of my myriad on and offline stock-photo repositories. I spent half my lunch hour looking at several hundred candidates without finding any matches. So now my vision is swimming with the laughing disembodied heads of the old. Once I figure out whether they're laughing with me or at me, I'll know whether swatting at the air and repeatedly shrieking "Go away!" is called for.

I hope it is. I haven't had a good repeated shriek in quite a while.