Category Archives: Light

January 18, 2016

House Trap: The True Confession of a Fictional Reality Show Star

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Reality shows audiences had become so jaded that they were not interested in watching unless there was the possibility that someone could die onscreen in front of them. Of course, people still lined up to be on the shows, because fame and fortune with the chance of grisly death is still fame and fortune. I was one of them. I’d like to say I did it to raise money for cancer or to feed the starving children of Baluchistan or something but really, I just did it for the money.

A million bucks for 8 hours of work, if you could call it that. Tell me you wouldn’t be tempted.

The show I was on was called House Trap. The premise was that the contestant goes about their daily lives but there is a fatal trap hidden somewhere in the house. The audience keeps watching because the person could die at any moment. Maybe there’s a bomb in the butter or the shower shoots acid or there is a trapdoor that drops into a vat of alligators when the front door is opened. The person moves around the house in a panic and the audiences cheers for him to stay alive, or sometimes, to not stay alive. If the person stays alive for the whole day, he gets the million dollars. If not, it goes to the charity of his choice.

My episode was the fifth in the season. The idea was that I was just going about my daily business but according to the script (and yes, there was a script), I started by cleaning out the garage, then baking cookies, then polishing my collection of antique swords. Just like a normal day, right?

“Don’t worry,” the director said. “The trap is real and it can kill you but we’ll tell you where it is ahead of time so you won’t just stumble into it.” That sounded great but the day of shooting came and I still didn’t know. I asked the director.

“Ask Jack,” he said.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Okay, places everyone!” The next thing I knew, I was pushed inside the house by myself and filming began.

The contract specifically said that once cameras started rolling, there were no re-shoots. If I called it quits, not only would I not get the million dollars but I would have to pay a similar amount to the studio for loss of income. And now I was stuck in a house with a deadly trap and no idea where it was.

I looked at my watch: 8:30am. Just eight and a half hours to go until I was a millionaire and home free. I was pretty sure the trap wasn’t in the first two activities, at least. They needed enough footage to fill an hour show. The previous season, a contestant had died accidentally in the first five minutes. Most of that show was interviews shot previously. Not great TV.

I went to the garage and saw the pile of boxes stacked up precarious just in front of a wood chipper. It looked like it hadn’t been used for ages, but I saw the red LED on the lower panel and knew it could start at any moment.

Skipping the first activity (hey, what were they going to do, sue me?) I went into the kitchen. It was silent and I realized that I didn’t hear the fridge running. I peeked behind it, and sure enough, it wasn’t plugged in. So that meant that either it wasn’t a real fridge or else there was something else inside it. I put my ear to the door and thought I heard some movement inside. That creeped me out.

I wanted to open the fridge really quickly and then shut it, but that was stupid. It could be electrified, could be a bomb, could be anything. Finally, I went and got some rope and with nails hammered into strategic places, I spent an hour rigging up a system where I could pull on a rope from the across the room and open the fridge door, then shut it again by pulling on another. I pushed the couch out and ducked behind it. This was definitely off script, but I figured it would be more interesting than watching me bake cookies.

I pulled the door open with a yank of the rope in my right hand, then slammed it right away with the other rope. Something dropped to the floor and to my horror, I heard a faint skittering sound. I looked up and saw a creature coming towards me like a miniature tank. It was an ant, but a bigger one than I had ever seen. It wasn’t alone either. About fifty had dropped out and were scurrying around, razor-like pincers flashing furiously.

I squashed the one that had charged me but then another one climbed up the back of my leg and bit me. It was like getting stabbed, really. I screamed and pulled it off, running into the other room for safety. My leg was actually bleeding a little and I could not imagine what would have happened if I had just yanked the fridge open and stood there while a wave of ravenous bugs had attacked me.

It took me another hour or so to hunt down the rest of the escaped ants and send them to buggy hell. I still had half the day left and I didn’t feel like playing by the rules any more.

First, I found duct tape and taped the fridge shut. Then I dragged it to the garage door and spent another hour fashioning up a funnel out of sheets and blankets and attaching it to the fridge door. Then I moved the wood chipper to the other end and turned it on. I took the duct tape off and the fridge door came open, right into the funnel, sending a wave of homicidal ants into the whirring steel blades.

The garage instantly became an entomological Jackson Pollock work, a myrmicine Texas chainsaw massacre. A very gory, satisfying mess, in other words. I turned off the wood chipper, shut the garage door and spent the rest of the time polishing the antique swords.

It turns out that my episode was the highest rated in the history of the show. They even changed the title of the show to House Trap: MacGyver Edition, where the contestants got paid double if they found the trap and disarmed it in some creative way.

I didn’t get paid any more though. They did let me keep the wood chipper though.

4 Comments | tags: danger, driver ants, fiction, house trap, quirky, reality show | posted in Light, Uncategorized

September 21, 2015

We can’t all be Hemingway

By David Stewart

6 Comments | tags: 6-word story, baby shoes story, fiction, Hemingway, spoof | posted in Light

September 14, 2015

Attempted Evil

By David Stewart

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Randy McPherson, Knight of Incomprehensible Evil (junior grade), rolled off his bed and onto a goat-headed statue that he’d accidentally left on the floor. He yelped and jumped up. He was tired and now in pain. This was definitely going to be a bad day. He felt briefly happy about this fact, then paused: was he supposed to feel happy or sad? It was so confusing being evil.

It was definitely a lot more mental work than the brochure had indicated. He had seen the booth for the League of Incomprehensible Evil at the Career Fair, with their black brochures that proclaimed in red letters, “Steal me!”

He had and had stayed up all night learning the value of being evil. Things like not paying your taxes, not waiting behind others in line, or not being politely bored at parties. The last test was to call a number to prove you had really stolen the brochure. He had called and the woman on the other end had berated him for following instructions.

“Truly evil people do what they want!” she scolded.

“Sorry,” Randy said.

“Never say you’re sorry, you pathetic maggot!” she bellowed. “Only good people say sorry.”

“Well, go to hell then!” Randy said, finally getting into the spirit of things.

There was a shocked silence. “You don’t have to get pissy,” the woman said and hung up.

Randy should have known then to leave it alone, but the forbidden fruit of pure, chaotic freedom beckoned to him, like the last piece of pie in the fridge when you’re staying overnight at someone else’s house. He went to next meeting and met the leader of the Knights.

“Welcome to Knights of Incomprehensible Evil,” Archlord of (Blackest Evil Badness)² Gerald Humbert said. Then he punched Randy in the stomach and stole his wallet.

“What do I do now?” Randy gasped from the floor. “How do I be evil?”

“Figure it out!” the A of (BEB)² said. Then he kicked Randy and set his hair on fire.

Randy tried to think of the evilest thing he could. He snuck out at night to a hospital and slashed the tires of all the cars in the handicapped parking spots. Then he felt bad and called a tire repair center and had them charge all the repairs to his credit card.

“Okay, that was just a little lapse,” he told himself hours later, as he was mentally kicked himself for his weakness. “I’ll be worse tomorrow, I swear.”

He got some encouragement (or discouragement) from the weekly Knights of Incomprehensible Evil (KIE) meetings. Most of the members would just get together and lie shockingly about all the evil deeds they had committed over the last week. The meetings generally ended early though, as someone invariably tried to poison the punch or blow up the building. Gerald had to walk to the meetings too, since it was a rookie mistake to leave your car in the parking lot where it could be stolen or car-bombed.

Still, Randy soldiered on. He filed his tax return because he he forgot not to, but then made up for it by wildly overestimating his deductions. Once, on an emotional high (or low), he started to plot how he could murder one of his neighbors. But in the end, he settled for trampling the flowers in his garden.

“I just don’t think I’m very good at being evil,” he confessed at one of the KIE meetings. The members laughed at him, then held him down so they could take turns giving him wedgies.

Finally, there came a breaking point. One night, Randy disguised himself and snuck out to a homeless shelter. He spent a wild night of abandon, feeding people, doing laundry, and teaching literacy classes. But before it got light, he crept back home, put on his black cape and blared his music at 5:00am. No one suspected he was anything but a terrible person.

Randy is still a member of the KIE. He still goes to the meetings but it’s all different now. He sneaks out to fix the damage other members do. He carries around antidotes for the inevitable poisonings. He even chips in money for the coffee and doughnuts. He’s taking the organization down from the inside.

6 Comments | tags: evil, fiction, funny, Knights of Incomprehensible Evil | posted in Light

August 30, 2015

Busting out Putin

By David Stewart

Note: this story is not political, only silly.

Busting out Putin

What does Vladimir Putin eat? That was the topic of debate after my friend Antonio got his new batch of miniature clones (or mi-clo’s) in the mail from Thailand.

All the others were eating. Antonio squatted over the holding pen’s grated top, rolled up a pancake and pushed it through the bars. Mi-clo Mother Theresa and Pierre Trudeau ran and snatched it up. Putin didn’t move, just shook his Lilliputian fist at us and jabbered away in Thai (a sure sign of a knock-off).

“Do you think he only eats Russian food?” Antonio asked.

“You’d have better luck with pad thai, probably,” I said.

“Well, I only know how to make pancakes,” Antonio said. “He can eat them or starve, I guess. I only got him because he came free with the Freddy Mercury I wanted.”

Over the next few days, Putin still refused to eat. He was getting thinner and his 1-foot tall frame soon looked bony. I was getting worried but Antonio only shrugged.

Finally, I decided to get him out of there. The next day, when Antonio went to the bathroom, I lowered a rope down. Putin grabbed it but was too weak to hold on. I unlatched the door and dropped down into the pen.

Bad move. Tony Blair and Cher jumped at me but I shook them off. I seized Putin and jumped out of danger right before the rest of them swarmed to attack me.

“Let’s go get you some food,” I said. “You like tacos? Burgers?”

He said something I couldn’t understand but it didn’t sound like either tacos or burgers. “Let’s try tacos,” I said and ran for the door.

I didn’t know what we’d eat and I didn’t know how this would end, but I was certain that I was going to save this little guy if I possibly could.

Epilogue: Putin turned out to love Popeye’s spicy chicken sandwiches. He soon returned to health and is now living happily in an abandoned dog house in the woods behind Walmart.

15 Comments | tags: Alastair's Photo Fiction, clone, fiction, flash fiction, funny, science-fiction, Vladimir Putin | posted in Light

August 29, 2015

Grave Orientation

By David Stewart

To all my friends in CIE. You know who you are.

copyright Claire Fuller (is it cheating to use it for a non-FF story?)

Grave Orientation

“Welcome to Death,” I say. The morgue is full of the new arrivals, shuffling incorporeally through the gurneys and equipment. They’re a motley group, from the peacefully departed to the violently wrenched. There’s no fear among them, just mild confusion.

I, however, am a nervous wreck.

I cough. “I’m here for your orientation. There are going to be several sessions, from the dos and don’ts of haunting to astral plane immigration policies. If you’ll all look at the screen on the wall—”

They’re not listening. Most are wandering away. One is inexplicably sleeping. I start to panic. I am not even supposed to be here. My boss Larry always did these, until he died last week, somewhat ironically. I wonder briefly who did his orientation and if he found it helpful.

Specters are disappearing through the walls. It’s my neck if they get away without some basic training. What’s worse, they’ll all be haunting my office the first time a graveyard bully crosses their path. I’m sweating and scrambling frantically for what to say.

“Who you going to call?” I scream suddenly.

Every eye swivels slowly until the whole, ethereal crowd is looking at me, real fear evident in their wraithish eyes. Then they trundle towards me.

“Good,” I say. “Now, let’s get started.” I click the remote. “Slide 1: proper mausoleum maintenance—”

10 Comments | tags: death, fantasy, fiction, flash fiction, ghosts, morgue, orientation, quirky | posted in Light

July 27, 2015

The Man with the Basilisk Eyes

By David Stewart

The Man with the Basilisk Eyes

I tow my stone dog carefully up the ramp in front of Precinct 45, the rear wheel of the red wagon squeaking with the weight. A woman holds the door, trying to smother her amusement.

Squeak, squeak, squeak. All the way to the desk sergeant.

“Hey Sarge, I want to report a crime.”

He peers over at me. “You don’t say? How old are you?”

“Ten. What, ten year olds don’t have any rights?”

“Touché. What’s the crime?”

“A man in the park turned my dog Scruffy to stone. I was playing fetch with him and Scruffy ran over by this man with real yellow eyes, like a basilisk, like in Harry Potter. Scruffy gave a yelp and ran back, but he started running slower and slower like he was caught in molasses. By the time he got back, he was like this.” I tap the stone dog in the wagon.

“So . . . you want me to arrest this ba-zo-lisk eyed man?”

“Of course! He killed my dog. Ain’t petrification a crime?”

“Here’s the thing.” The sergeant leans over. “My buddy over at Precinct 28 told me a kid came in last week with a stone dog and the same story.”

“Well, if you can’t get justice one place, you go somewhere else,” I say, but it’s clear I’m getting no sympathy there. I wheel ol’ Scruffy out to where Brad is waiting.

“Any luck?” he asks. I shake my head.

“Let’s try 51. I hear the sergeant over there is a fantasy nerd.”

“Okay,” Brad says, “but let’s hurry. Mom’s going to be pissed if she notices her lawn ornament missing.”

9 Comments | tags: Alastair's Photo Fiction, basilisk, fantasy, fiction, funny, Harry Potter, kids, police | posted in Light

June 5, 2015

The Day the Beach Came to Me

By David Stewart

It was Saturday morning and I was stumbling around the house, vainly looking for the coffee maker, when the front door burst open and four tons of sand poured onto my carpet. It coalesced into two vaguely humanoid figures that lay basking on the floor next to my coffee table.

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“Ah, it’s good to get away from the beach and into some nice incandescent lighting,” one said.

“Yeah, although I always come away with carpet fibers simply everywhere,” the other one said. A seagull had flown in as well and had just made a nasty mess on my couch. One of the figures covered it discreetly with a pillow.

I finally recovered my senses enough to shut the door. I wasn’t entirely sure this wasn’t a dream and was also wondering if a wet-dry vac would constitute murder.

“We should built a book castle,” one said. “Remember that book castle we built last summer?”

The other chortled in a gritty sort of way. “We had it up to 145 volumes until the owners rushed it and swept them all away.”

“Take the good with the bad. If you don’t have owners, you don’t get the electric lights.”

I turned off the light.

“There! Look at that, that’s the switch now. It’s like Man’s cloud.”

“Be patient, it always comes back eventually.”

Just then my cat Vader drifted by behind the footstool, only his tail sticking up.

“Cat!” the sand piles screamed and bolted towards the door. Ironically, the seagull was not at all worried and a moment and a lightning-fast pounce later, I had even more mess to clean up.

I locked the door and went back to bed.

The next day, I bought a Beware of Cat sign for my house. My neighbors didn’t understand it, but at least I didn’t have to replace my carpets anymore.

13 Comments | tags: beach, fantasy, fiction, funny, quirky, shark cat | posted in Light

May 18, 2015

The Worst Thing About Skeletons

By David Stewart

The Worst Thing About Skeletons

The worst thing about skeletons is that they’re heartless. It’s also true that they don’t have an ounce of bile in them, but this hardly makes up for it. I’ve only known one skeleton and he drove the ice cream truck that prowled my neighborhood like a jangling Jaws.

Tinkle tinkle tinkle

I was mowing the lawn one day when I heard the truck coming. The sound make the image of frosty popsicles and drippy ice cream sandwiches rise like mirages in my heat-addled mind. The truck pulled up and stopped next to me.

“Hey Mort,” I said.

“Hot day, isn’t it?” the skeleton said, leaning out, the afternoon sun gleaming on pearly white bone where his heart should have been.

“I’m on a diet,” I said. “You know that.” I’d been off ice cream for over 50 days. Ice Cream Anonymous had even given me a chip.

“For old time’s sake?” Mort said, holding out a Fudgsicle to me.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” I said, then had an idea. “Okay, fine. I’ll have one . . . when you gain one pound. How much do you weigh now?”

“17 pounds,” he said.

“Prove it,” I said. He came into the house and weighed himself: 17 pounds, 2 ounces. “The day you’re 18 pounds, 2 ounces, I’ll have an ice cream,” I said.

“No problem,” he said, grinning with all his teeth.

I saw him later that week, stocking up on calcium pills. Two weeks later, he stopped by. “I’m up 3 ounces,” he declared proudly. A month later, he’d made it up to 17 pounds 7 ounces. I wasn’t very worried.

The next week Mort showed up at my door. He was wearing a coat, which was odd for him. He usually only wore a coat in the fall to keep errant leaves from sticking in his rib cage.

“I’ve gained a pound,” he said quietly. “I’m 18 pounds 2 ounces now.”

“Really?” I looked hard at him. His bones didn’t look any thicker. I wondered vaguely if he’d gotten a brain.

He opened his coat. “I got a heart,” he said. I saw it sitting in his rib cage, pumping idly in a self-conscious way, like a shadow boxer who suddenly finds himself the main event.

“Fine, you won.” I fingered the 100-day chip in my pocket sadly.

“I’m sorry for before,” Mort said. “I didn’t understand.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a peeled apple perched on a cone of wrapped kale. “Snack?”

21 Comments | tags: Alastair's Photo Fiction, diet, fantasy, fiction, flash fiction, funny, heartless, Ice cream, Mort, quirky, skeleton | posted in Light

May 12, 2015

A Mother’s Revenge

By David Stewart

Happy Mother’s Day, only two days late. This story is fiction and any resemblance to real life is coincidence. This story is not about me, especially since the narrator is female.

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I was a terrible kid when I was young. My mother was half-way to sainthood, in that she was as patient as Job and I almost sent her to an early grave.

It wasn’t really that I was bad, I was just . . . creative. Which is why the police brought me home after I chased my friends down the road with a hammer. I tried to explain hammer tag to my parents, but they just grounded me. I didn’t want to be grounded, so I threw all my bedding and clothes out the window. I was planning on running away and wanted a soft place to land when I jumped out my window. My parents never understood the logic behind what I did; they just sighed, put the clothes in the laundry, and then grounded me longer.

It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized how much of a pain I had been to my poor parents.

“I’m sorry for how difficult I was when I was a kid,” I told my mother once, over tea soon after I got pregnant with my first baby.

“Oh, we got through it,” she said with a smile. Then she stopped and leaned in. “I hope you have one just like you.”

“Mom, that’s mean of you,” I said, trying to laugh it off. She just kept smiling and stirred her tea, a look of vengeful triumph in her eyes.

My husband and I soon moved to Papua New Guinea to work with a NGO. We came back once every two years or so and although we spoke on Skype, my mother didn’t really get to know my two girls very well until we moved back again, when my oldest daughter Alice was six and my youngest Emily was four.

“So, how are the girls?” she would ask sometimes in our long-distance chats. “Quite a handful, I’m sure.”

“They’re fine,” I said, but I could tell by her close examination that she was looking for stress lines on my face.

* * *

“I’m sure you girls get into trouble all the time, right?” my mother asked. We were back in the States and sitting around the kitchen table with the girls. They looked at each other and shook their heads.

“Well, would you like a snack?” she asked, undeterred. “I have pixy sticks, and Coke to drink.”

“Do you have any carrot sticks?” Alice asked.

“Maybe an apple?” Emily added. My mother pursed her lips and got the snacks.

The next day I caught her trying to teach her granddaughters hammer tag. “This is too dangerous,” Emily said just before I intervened. I shooed them away and they went and sat in the sandbox and pretended they were highway engineers about to build a new bypass.

“I know what you’re doing,” I said. “You’re trying to make they behave badly to get back at me.”

“Are these really your kids?” she asked. “It’s not fair. I had to put up with you and you get two perfect angels.”

“Maybe it’s Trevor’s genes?” I said, referring to my husband.

“No, I’ve talked to his mother and he was a hellion when he was young too,” she said. “It’s just not fair.”

“You just got to accept it. The world isn’t fair.”

“I guess not.”

“Just promise me one thing.”

“Yeah.”

I leaned in. “Don’t try to teach them hammer tag again.”

She was about to accept, then crossed her arms. “How are you going to know?”

“They’ll tell on you,” I said.

She nodded sadly. “You’re probably right.”

9 Comments | tags: children, fiction, funny, hyperactive, Mother's Day, problem child, well behaved | posted in Light

April 27, 2015

My Nightmares Smell Like Pink

By David Stewart

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My Nightmares Smell Like Pink

Damn you, Guinness. Damn your dark, earthy brews and your book of madness that drives normally sane people to the edge of folly. You’ve destroyed more lives in the pursuits of “records” than the Olympics and Extreme Archivists combined. I was there the day it all went down, the day the brightest minds of my town were snuffed out in a wave of pink goo that stuck like the fluorescent taint of horror.

My town of Crockport was a one-horse town; a one-horse, twelve-car, one-drunk-named-Charlie town. It also had a bubble gum factory.

The Trubble Bubble Gum factory had originally been built during the Second World War to make ersatz rubber tires. 1400 chewable tires later, the Army cancelled their contract and Trubble Bubble Gum was born. It was the go-to place for employment in Crockport, the job for anyone who wanted to stay in town and had already gotten fired from the Burger King and the gas station.

The story of that fateful day started when Mayor Rathbone was flipping through a Guinness Book of World Records and saw that the record for largest bubblegum bubble was 20 inches across. He snorted—that wasn’t even as big as his desk. They could do better than that.

Actual largest bubblegum bubble ever

Forget the human factor though; they would do it by machine. The 4^th of July fireworks were cancelled and the money diverted to the Bubble Machine, as Rathbone called it in his mind. 10,000 dollars of development later, they had a hose hooked up to a tank of compressed air. Most of the money had gone to the huge scaffold it was erected on.

We all crowded around to watch as workers from the factory carted out a 400 pound log of gum. According to the mayor, the monstrosity could make a bubble 575 feet in diameter. Of course, he did the calculations on his arm with a Sharpie so no one was too sure of the accuracy of that number. Still, in his words, “It’ll be a sight bigger than 20 inches, that’s for sure.”

The crowd hushed as they turned on the air. The pink bubble blossomed like a time-lapse video of a growing flower. A minute later, it was ten feet across and growing every second.

When they stopped for a break at 120 feet in diameter, everyone agreed it was big enough; everyone except the mayor. “Look how easily we did this,” he said. “It won’t even be a month before someone makes one 125 feet and we’re back to obscurity.” So on went the air and the sticky pink colossus loomed over us.

At around 300 feet in diameter people started to back away. They weren’t fleeing exactly but they had that stealing certainty that whatever happened, this was not going to end well. The bubble made it to 344 feet across when the bird appeared.

It was an ordinary robin, presumably fluttering home to its nest with a worm in its beak. We all watched, horror-struck, as it flew straight for the pink Death Star, like a red-breasted Millennium Falcon stuck in a tractor beam. Soon it was all but lost from sight in that expansive bubblegum background. Then, we heard that tiny noise that signaled doom.

Pop.

There was a startled squawk and a gooey mass burst from the bubble, looking like a seabird caught in a Pepto-Bismol Exxon Valdez spill. The robin was soon forgotten as the record breaking bubble pancaked onto us, blocking out the sun.

The aftermath was like a war movie made by Willie Wonka. Men, women and children staggered through the streets, stuck to cars, light poles, each other. The ambulances came but got stuck in the streets and even after the National Guard was dispatched with giant paint scrapers, it was weeks before the town looked even recognizable.

Crockport is now on the map, at least, although not for the world’s biggest bubblegum bubble. Mayor Rathbone didn’t know that you needed a representative from Guinness there to confirm it. Also, the factory is gone. Still, we now have the leading chiclephobia clinic in the world, so I guess that’s something.