Fiction and nonfiction stores under a thousand words, usually offbeat, written daily.
Children kept disappearing. Nobody knew who or what was taking them. Some thought the beasts of the forests. Some believed ancient monsters. Others thought a serial killer. But the brook bubbled on teeming with the hidden bodies of children beneath its murky waters. It seemed to be a ghoulish living thing. That like a pied piper lured children to their doom with its enchanting, bubbling waters. And to this day no one has found the children or suspected the seeming insentient brook.
Bob Boyd
My ex-girlfriend was always oblivious to the dangers in this world, as if bad things only happened to other people and would never happen to her. She took too many dangerous risks, jogged in a nearby secluded park in the dark of night and wouldn’t let me accompany her for protection, a few times got drunk in bars with girlfriends and walked home alone at 2 am.
So it wasn’t surprising when on one of her nightly jogs in the secluded park, a serial killer almost nabbed and killed her. But luck was kind of with her when under a full moon a giant werewolf sprung out from behind a large oak tree and ripped the serial killer to shreds.
Unfortunately for my girlfriend, who thanked the beast for rescuing her, it kissed her on the lips and bit her on the neck, though the bite was gentle, like a love bite, no torn flesh, no blood bleeding.
She came home that night crying and shaking, but with barely a visible sign of the bite, only some reddened skin. It seemed she avoided the usual death by werewolf or the curse of becoming one of those monstrous beasts. I wondered if the old wooden cross she wore around her neck, her superstitious grandmother had prayed over and given her, had saved her life, like crosses are supposed to protect one from vampires.
But, alas, when the full moon lit up the sky a month later, my ex morphed into a terrifying she wolf beast. I heard the cracking sounds all over her body, saw her nails and canines extending, hair sprouting all over her, and her bursting with muscles body growing unnaturally to about eight feet tall. Trying to be manly, despite my heart pounding with fear inside my chest, like a jack hammer pounding cement, I suppressed a scream for as long as I could. Then I screamed so loud the cup I was drinking instant coffee out of shattered. Frozen by terror of what I was witnessing, I couldn’t move or run away. Like I’d often read about when people are about to die, I saw my whole life begin to pass by in my mind’s eye.
There must have been some humanity left in my girlfriend under that baleful, full moon. After she howled as loud as a hound from hell, she looked at me lovingly through demon red eyes, and dashed out of our apartment into the ill fated moonlit night. The next day the TV news reported two men jogging in the secluded park she jogged in were ripped apart, only their torn and bloodied body parts remained. The authorities said the killings seemed to be done by two unusually large wolves.
I never saw my girlfriend after that. I suspect she ran off with that goddamn werewolf who gave her that accursed love bite. At least she didn’t kill or werewolf curse me.
Bob Boyd
My friend Mark and I always wanted to try hunting spirits with a spirit box in Green Hill Cemetery. Mark bought a high quality spirit box that had scans from 76 mH to 86.9 mHz.
Properly equipped, excited, we snuck into the cemetery late one night. Mark turned the Spirit Box on. It crackled and the spirits started poppin’.
But their voices came in spurts and were not quite clear: hello … no … yes … I’m here … dead … not dead … yellow flower …. green grass ….
Then things got horrifying. The dead began talking out of Mark’s head, and Mark dropped the spirit box and, screaming, fled to his car.
I grabbed the spirit box and tried to catch up with him, but it was too late. Mark had vanished somewhere into the night and I couldn’t find him.
The next day I learned Mark had killed himself by driving into a semi-trailer truck. Because of the association of Mark’s death with the spirit box it took me a month before I could use it again at Green Hill Cemetery.
When I turned it on that night, I heard Mark’s voice: “It’s evil! It will kill you! Get rid of it!” Shocked, I shut the spirit box off, threw it away, and never went spirit hunting again.
Bob Boyd
He’d been a minister for ten years. One day he learned a woman
in his congregation had a demon. Her husband had pleaded with him to help her. Confident his walk with the Lord would give him power over the demon, he accepted the plea for help.
He met with the woman, and the demon inside her hissed and swore at him. He rebuked the demon, and after a few prayers, commanded it to be gone. To his surprise, the demon gave up easily and was gone from the woman.
On his drive home, he thought, I must be a natural at this. But then his thoughts and his awareness of himself faded away. The demon who had given up easily had sought and won a greater prize. The demon in full control of his mind steered the minister’s car into an oncoming tractor trailer, and the minister’s car and his body were crushed to death.
When the police appeared at the fatal crash, one of them began acting unnaturally, his head jerking back and forth rapidly, his voice deeper and creepy. After he was driven to the ER, he was diagnosed insane and committed to an asylum for the mentally ill, the doctors having no idea that he had inherited the minister’s demon.
Bob Boyd
Decades ago heard a song about not letting the sun catch you crying. Why not? Wouldn’t the heat of the sun dry your tears, and I don’t think it would care one way or the other if you were crying. Did that song mean it would be better to have the moon catch you crying when many people and werewolves go bonkers when the moon is full? I truly doubt that. But what if I was crying then?
Would the tears turn into craziness and cause me to do something totally irrational like trying to fly off a tall building, like some deluded bird man? Or, does the sun have a problem with overly sentimental people who for human reasons cry now and then. Is it some kind of solar condition that makes the sun allergic to tears?
Or is the sun so sentimental that it would cry too if it caught you crying. Is the sun that sensitive, that thin skinned, like some people have skin sensitive to the sun? If I wrote that song, I’d be more concerned about the moon catching people crying, especially a full moon for aforementioned reasons.
Bob Boyd
He was new in town when I met him. Tall, raven black hair, black eyes and a curious, birdlike face. Yet attractive to the women in our town, who were abuzz about him. He told me he’d been a crow in a former life. And, honestly, in a way, he almost looked like one with his raven black hair and piercing, black eyes. He asked me if I believed him. Though I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, still I had to truthfully say no.
His eyes lit up. He smiled and raised his arms in the air. He cawed three times and sounded just like a crow. As if on command, an enormous flock of crows began cawing and flying toward us. So many flew above us, seemingly thousands, that they darkened the sky until I couldn’t see the sun. I swear, it was like a crow apocalypse. Then they flew in a massive circle above us, resembling a gigantic vortex in the sky. I have to admit it freaked me out by the immensity of the crow flock and the way he magically drew them toward us.
The man, whom I now thought of as crow man, smiled at the shocked look in my eyes, said no need to be frightened. We mean you no harm. He cawed three more times. The crows cawed back, their caws reverberating in the shimmering sky. The crow man smiled again, waved goodbye, and began rising in the air. Astonished, I watched him rise up to the crows, morph into one, and take his place at the head of their gigantic flock, and fly away with them. I felt as if I was in the middle of a surreal dream, or an epic movie, but it was real world, and the crow man was never seen in our town again.
Bob Boyd
He always liked the movies where an innocent woman claimed to be a witch is about to be burned to death at the stake and right before the fire consumes her, she curses all those responsible for her death. Sometimes these wrongly condemned women curse generations of those responsible for her death, and in the movies her curses usually work.
He got to experience something like that first hand. He’d been involved with a woman who said she was a white witch, not the bad kind. He liked how she knew about herbs and spells. He didn’t believe in her spells, but he liked watching her do her spells, the cute, serious look on her pretty face.
He got bored with her after a year. He told her it was over. She said, you son of a bitch! you leave me and I’ll curse you. He laughed in her face, bid her goodbye. He heard her cursing him as he left. He thought it was funny and had a good laugh over it.
When he had driven a half mile away from her apartment, Pop! Pop! both his back tires blew out. No way, he thought to himself until he got to his new girlfriend’s apartment, and without giving him any reasons, she said they were through.
When he finally got his tires fixed and made it home, his TV and computer had inexplicably blown up. He figured it had to be her curse, and it was real. But then, despite what she’d done, unbelievably, he started having feelings for her again … right after she had finished a love potion spell.
Bob Boyd
He was on his way home with a friend walking in a park. They looked at the moon, so beautiful and full, unaware that it was a portent. Minutes later, a howl pierced the night. They were surprised to hear a wolf far from a forest. I like wolves, his friend said to him, and he howled back at it.
But when the wolf howled back, louder and terrifying, they saw it came from more than a mere wolf. It stood at least eight feet tall, had the head of a wolf and the body of a giant, muscled up man. Before they could run away, it pounced on his friend who screamed. Too horrified to help his friend and not wanting to die, he sprinted to his car and raced away.
He reported what happened to the police. They didn’t believe him but searched the park anyway, and, as expected, they found no clues of the beast or of his friend. But when the next full moon rose in the sky, he heard his friend howling outside his house.
Bob Boyd
She made the mistake of getting involved with a dangerous man; she always liked the bad boys. At first he was sweet to her despite his bad reputation. She said he treated her like a queen, but a year later that had changed. After he had beaten her several times, once nearly to death, she took out a restraining order on him. But the restraining order didn’t restrain him.
Someone who knew him warned her he planned on killing her. But mysteriously to many, including the police, fate had intervened. That physically abusive, scheming monster disappeared from her life and was never found. Only she and her brother, a boating enthusiast, knew he was dead, his body weighted down deep in the sea.
Now for sure it was wrong, murder in the first degree, but I’m okay with it. One less scumbag in the world.
Bob Boyd
Celeste had heavenly blue eyes and an unearthly beauty, but she was messed up, more than a little unstable. But Maurice loved Celeste and got married to her despite her craziness and her threats of killing herself after one of their many arguments. To help her become stable, Maurice had an idea about how he could fix her. He had mastered astral travel and thought that maybe he could travel into her body and tweak her mind enough to normalize her behavior as she slept.
After a dozen nighttime tries, he succeeded and began tweaking her consciousness, but that gave her nightmarish dreams of being possessed by an unseen entity. Upon waking she worried that a demon was trying to possess her in her nightmares. She’d wake up shaking and distressed, but he thought it was just a temporary adjustment to his nightly astral healing attempts.
Eventually as his treatments progressed, she woke up shaking and distressed less often, and he, to his surprise, felt like he’d become an integral part of her when inside her, as if their minds and souls had merged. The feeling grew stronger as he felt more connected to her after his astral healing sessions. But everything went awry one dawn when returning to his body, he had become possessed with her craziness and she with his normal behavior. He felt extremely depressed, became quarrelsome and suffered troubling thoughts of killing himself.
She, exasperated, and at a loss to understand his erratic behavior, had no idea she had taken on his normal state of mind. She felt like she had always been the way she had become. Maurice knew he essentially had become the worst of her and had no way to fix himself. He had lost his ability to astral travel no matter how hard he tried to retrieve it. He fell into deeper states of depression. A month later, feeling there was no hope for him, Maurice downed an entire bottle of aspirins and fell dead on their bathroom floor. Though sad that Maurice died, Celeste felt a sense of relief. She went on to have a wonderful, normal life with a new and sane husband.
Bob Boyd
Something about the quaint, old painting of a beautiful woman caught his eye. This is an undiscovered masterpiece, he thought to himself. He took it home and hung it in his bedroom. Her painted rendering was the last thing he saw each night. He fantasized about how nice it would have been if he could have had a woman like her in his life.
His obsession deepened. He imagined he was holding her in his arms each night and thought of her as his wife. As the days and nights passed, his imagined connection with her grew till he believed he’d be with her in the afterlife.
He got his wish at age 50 when, a healthy man, he died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack and found himself in hell with the beautiful woman who was a soulless murderer who killed three ex-husbands, a dozen homeless men and her two children for big insurance payouts before she got caught and was put to death.
Horrified, he struggled to get away from her, but his soul was sealed to her because of his earthly obsession with her. He began to feel the eternal torment, heard screams of souls trapped in hell, felt flames burning him up, and saw terrifying, red-eyed demons tormenting him. Though not religious, an atheist at heart, he prayed to Christ to save him. He vowed to become a believer and atone for all his sins and the many mistakes he had made in his life.
Like an afterlife miracle, he heard a thunderous boom in hell, saw brilliant white light flash all around him, heard the murderous woman scream and vanish. And as if he were an infant, a child of God, he felt arms around him lifting out of hell into heaven. When in heaven and a renewed, saved spirit he spent his time praying for all the damned souls in hell.
Then he woke up on the examination table with a doctor pounding his chest with paddles. And he realized he’d been clinically dead and the painting of the woman he saw as a murderer in hell was more like a dream. Nonetheless he got rid of the painting and eventually found a real and wonderful woman that he became married to.
And after much study and conversations with many people who had had near death experiences, he concluded the hell he saw when clinically dead was just a projection. It was from the many from warnings he’d received as a child about going to hell when he died that had been stored in his subconscious mind and came out.
But he became a believer in God and attended a local church – just in case ….
Bob Boyd