Bob Boyd's Mini Stories

I met Gwendolyn at a ghost tour in Greensboro, North Carolina in the summer of 1981. She was a tall and beautiful willowy blonde who seemed a bit otherworldly. She confirmed the otherworldly by smiling and saying, “I’m from the Astral Plane.”

“Is that somewhere in the continental United States?” I asked, smiling mischievously.

“Ha, ha,” she laughed, and said, “Nope. It’s near where these ghosts are from.”

“What ghosts? I hadn’t seen any ghosts,” I said, wondering why Gwendolyn would say she was from someplace near where the ghosts were from. I thought she had to be joking, but she seemed serious.

At the end of the ghost tour, it hadn’t yielded any ghosts or anything remotely scary. I turned to complain to Gwendolyn, and she wasn’t there. I looked around and didn’t see her. Since I just met her, I figured she must have drifted away in the crowd, so I didn’t worry about it and went on my way.

Arriving home, I thought about Gwendolyn. Dreaming a little, I wondered if we could have been an item if she hadn’t wandered off. I kept thinking about her and how I was beginning to feel more haunted by her memory than the no show ghosts on the lackluster ghost tour.

Then I heard her voice in my head. “That’s because, unlike the ghosts, I showed up,” her voice said.

At first, I wondered if it was my meds talking. I got put on a new medication for my heart problem and sometimes with a new medication I suffered side effects. But to dispel that mistaken notion, Gwendolyn’s voice said, “It’s not the medication. It’s really me.”

“How can this be?” I asked.

“I told you I was from the Astral Plane, and I decided to go back there and walk into your mind from it. What you saw tonight wasn’t real. It was like a reflection from the astral plane, like seeing the image of a ghost, which by the way, I am way more than a powerless ghost.”

“You’re something more powerful than a ghost?” I said, fear rising in me.

“Yes, and didn’t you want to experience something paranormal when you went on the ghost tour?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t want something paranormal in my head.”

“Well, you got a paranormal Babe and I’m yours.”

“Yours?” I said, trembling.

“Yes, kind of like that “till death do us part thing, except even death won’t be able to keep us apart. How about that?”

“I don’t like it. You’re possessing me. It’s not right.”

“So,” Gwendolyn’s voice said and laughed.

“I know how to get you out of my head and my life forever.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes, really, and you’ll soon see how.”

“I know how. You think that priest, Father John, can exorcise me out of your mind.”

“I know he can,” I said. I was shocked she knew my plan as if she was not only in my mind but could read it too.

The next day I made an appointment with Father John to rid me of Gwendolyn.

After he questioned me about Gwendolyn inhabiting my mind, he doused me with holy water. Gwendolyn didn’t protest or say anything. I wondered if the holy water had rid me of her until Father John began the exorcism prayers. Then I heard Gwendolyn’s voice say, “Watch this.”

As if on cue, Father John’s body levitated off the ground and spun around faster and faster until he was just a blur. He screamed, blacked out, and fell to the ground dead. Without checking his pulse or listening to his heart, I knew he was dead, and for the first time, I knew beyond doubt Gwendolyn was demonically evil.

I left the church horrified. As I crossed the street the church was on, a black sedan ran a red light and plowed into me on the street crossing. The impact flattened me on the street with searing pain all over my body. I was conscious but feeling faint. Before passing out, I heard Gwendolyn’s voice say, “See what happens when you try to get rid of me?”

After I got patched up in the ER and put in the hospital, a young hospital chaplain, a Catholic priest, came to visit me. I was surprised to see him. I hadn’t asked to see the chaplain. I thought about telling him what happened to me with Gwendolyn, but he looked so young I was afraid he could be killed by Gwendolyn. Despite my reservations, I began telling him what had happened and how Gwendolyn killed the exorcist priest. Gwendolyn’s voice rang in my head telling me to shut up repeatedly. Surprisingly, I had the will to ignore her.

When I finished my story, the priest took a chain with a pendant on it off his neck and slipped it around my neck. “Saint Michael will help you,” he said. He smiled, made the sign of the cross, said what sounded like a prayer in Latin and left.

I felt heat emanating from the pendant. In my mind, I saw a tall male angel on a battlefield dressed in blue with a sword in one hand and a shield in the other. He looked like a fearless mighty warrior angel. Then I saw Gwendolyn removing some of her clothes with a seductive look in her eyes. She looked so beautiful and irresistible. I felt the angel didn’t have a chance against her womanly and paranormal powers. The warrior angel showed no signs of weakening. At that moment, Gwendolyn, enraged her plan hadn’t worked, changed into a demon with a fiery sword. Her eyes glowing, she charged the warrior angel. With phenomenal speed, she hacked away at him, but he blocked her every strike.

The demon elbowed the warrior angel in the head knocking him to the ground. The demon lifted its sword in the air clutching it with both hands and slashed it down at the warrior angel. The warrior blocked the blow with his shield and thrust his sword into the demon’s heart. The demon changed back into a profusely bleeding Gwendolyn. She shrieked and vanished, presumably back to hell. And I knew I was free of her forever.

Bob Boyd

Sarah and I had a lot of good times. We were in love. I wanted to marry her, but the last time I saw her I had a feeling something was wrong. She met me at O’Brien’s Coffee House and I could see something was wrong with her that she was trying to hide from me.

I got worried for her and said, “Are you okay?”

“It’s nice out today,” she said, sitting down across from me.

“It is nice, but what’s the matter?” I said. I wondered how bad the thing was she was hiding.

Then she cried and blurted out, “I’ve just been diagnosed with breast cancer and I may not have long to live.”

My heart sank. “I’m so sorry. What can I do to help you?” I said.

“I’m too depressed to say anything else about it, and I don’t want to die at age 27,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes with a napkin.

“Maybe you’ll survive it. I’ve read there are new cancer treatments discovered every day and cancers that killed people in the past can be healed now,” I said.

Tearfully, she said, “I just can’t talk about it, and I have to get going. I’m sorry but I need to be alone.”

Respecting her wishes, I didn’t push things.

“Okay,” I said, “But call me when you feel up to it.”

Days later, Sarah called me.

In a trembling voice, she said, “I’m sorry. I’m going to have to stop seeing you. I don’t want to burden you with this. The cancer is spreading throughout my body, and based on what I’ve been told and read, I’m sure I’m going to die in a few months.”

I tried to talk her into not leaving me at a time when she needed me the most, at a time when I wanted to be there for her, but she wouldn’t relent.

And as she predicted, she died three months later. My heart and my life were shattered. I didn’t want to live. In a delusional moment, I thought if I killed myself, I’d be with Sarah forever. In a trance-like state, I drifted to my bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. I grabbed a bottle of aspirins out of the cabinet, opened the bottle, and poured half the aspirins out of the bottle and into my hand.

Just as I was about to swallow them, Sarah’s spirit appeared inside my mind like seeing her on a small TV screen. I was a little startled at first but felt profound peace seconds later. She looked ethereal but more beautiful than when she was alive, and she seemed blissfully happy. I remember thinking she looked angelic. Then I thought about how much I missed her and tears trickled down my face.

She smiled, blew a kiss, and said to me, “Don’t do it, my Love. Be patient. We’ll be together again soon.” Then she faded away into a luminous, white light, and I remember saying, “Come back. Come back,” and sobbing because I missed her so much.

It’s been three months since Sarah’s visit from the afterlife. I’ve been diagnosed with lung cancer that is spreading to other organs. If all goes miraculously well, supposedly, I could live five more years. But based on what Sarah said about us being together again, now I know what she said was true. I know I’ll be dead soon and with her forever.

Bob Boyd

“I don’t belong here. I’m not crazy,” Joshua said. He winced when he told that to the head of the psychiatric hospital.

“Nobody is here who doesn’t belong here,” Doctor Matthews said, taking a closer look at Joshua, tired of hearing hundreds of patients saying the same thing. “Sure, you are all here by mistake,” he said. “When you’re all a danger to yourselves, and we have to try to clean up the messes of your unmanageable lives.”

Doctor Matthews didn’t realize despite his decades of experience with patients that Joshua didn’t belong there, and he would find that out before the night ended.

“Okay, but I tried to tell you,” Joshua said as he strode away to the recreation room. After Joshua left, something eerie hung in the air that made Doctor Matthew shiver. For the first time since he took charge of the psychiatric hospital, he felt a chill over what a patient said. And the entire hospital grew colder as if the electric power had dimmed down supernaturally

Then he saw red lights emerge from the floor. What the hell, he thought. As if the word hell summoned dark things from that fiery pit, he saw red horns poking up from the floor. He rubbed his eyes thinking he was seeing things or if he had taken too many meds that day. No one knew Doctor Matthew should have been a patient there too instead of its director, but he was good at hiding his symptoms. He sensed Joshua knew this. He sensed Joshua really didn’t belong there. He believed Joshua was the cause of the strange things he was seeing and feeling.

“Your right,” Joshua said, alarming Doctor Matthews and appearing to have materialized out of the ether.

“Joshua!” You startled me. “What’s the meaning of this?”

“What’s the meaning of life?” Joshua asked, a freakish smile lighting up his face that seemed to glow.

“I don’t know what games you’re playing, Joshua, but it’s time for you to go to your room.”

“It’s time for you to go to hell,” Joshua said, and Doctor Matthews, a secret serial killer, felt the ground give way under him and dropped into the fiery pit screaming with flames shooting up from hell. When he hit bottom, he saw Joshua there.

“Who are you?” the doctor said.

“You remember the line from a song that went, “Pleased to meet you glad you know my name?”

“Yes, it’s from a Rolling Stones song, one of my favorites, Sympathy for the Devil.”
“Bingo! And welcome home!”

At that moment, flames licked the doctor’s body all over, and he screamed and heard Joshua laughing hideously behind him.

He woke up terrified at first but relieved when he realized he’d had a nightmare. He wondered why he had dreamed of a man named Joshua. He didn’t know anyone with that name and never had a patient named Joshua … until a patient named Joshua was admitted to his psychiatric hospital later that morning. And the doctor saw red lights rising from the floor.

Bob Boyd

Timmy was born in September 1962. I think it was a Friday. He came into the world blind and unable to walk. I was only a year old when Timmy was born. When I turned six, I remember feeling bad for him and wondering why God let Timmy be born blind and unable to see and walk like other kinds. That might have seemed like a lot of curiosity for a little kid. It kind of was. I was born curious though and often wondered about many things.

I used to wonder why the planes in the sky were so little and what the tiny people in them looked like and where they were from. I wondered why old people came into life old instead of young like me. But this is about Timmy.

Though he couldn’t see, Timmy was the nicest kid ever. He always said kind words and never got in trouble like most of my friends did. Timmy sang like an angel. When he sang in the pew in church, everybody looked at him with wonder. He was so good Pastor Jenkins allowed him to be the only kid singing in the church choir. Geez, he was so good. I thought I could sing but people told me to stop or held their ears when I wrecked songs with my off-key voice. That ended my future as a famous singer. I was no Timmy.

Timmy was a brainiac. It was as if God had given him extra smarts to make up for not being able to see. Some said blind people got other abilities to make up for being sent into the world blind. Others said that wasn’t true. I never knew what the real answer was. But I knew it seemed God had given Timmy more smarts than anyone else. Timmy could hear a book read once and tell it back to you like he was a recorder. I guess he had what is called a photographic memory. I didn’t have that. I had to study a lot to remember even a little.

Timmy did something I thought was crazy for him to try. He learned Jujitsu. I thought to myself how can a blind kid learn something like that? I was wrong. Timmy got so good at Jujitsu that he beat up a bully who was picking on me, a big bully. The bully got pinned on the ground by Timmy and cried and ran home when Timmy let him up.

I never saw the bully after that. I heard he was so embarrassed by being beat up by a blind kid that he begged his mother to send him to another school. I also heard he got hit by a car and died like a punishment from God for fighting a blind kid. I don’t know which was true or if there was another reason I never saw the bully again. I only know he was never seen again at my school or anywhere else. It’s strange how in your life you only see some people briefly and then you never see them again. It’s kinda like they die on you and are out of your life just like a person who really dies. I often wonder what happened to many of those disappearing people like I wondered what happened to Timmy.

At age 18 he decided he wanted to turn his wheelchair into a rocket ship. I thought he was joking until a few months later when I saw what looked like a big fake rocket on the back of his wheelchair. Timmy started counting down 10 … 9 …. 8 …. And I laughed at Timmy’s antics. 7 … 6 … 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 … Blast off!

Then zoom! Timmy and his wheelchair turned into a vibrating translucent green color and blasted into the sky above the clouds. I heard the sonic boom you hear when an airplane breaks the sound barrier, and Timmy was gone. As I stood there staring at the sky, I kept thinking Timmy and his wheelchair would appear out of the clouds at any time and land on the ground where Timmy started from. But Timmy never came back. And nobody ever found him. I wondered if when he broke the sound barrier he broke into another dimension. Otherwise, I’m sure the many search and rescue efforts on land and in the air would have found some trace of Timmy and his wheelchair.

My other theory was that the translucent green color Timmy and his wheelchair turned into might have meant Timmy was an alien, which could explain his super intelligence and how he was good at everything. It could have meant he went home to some distant planet. I learned later this was probably the best theory because Timmy’s mother was a UFO fanatic and before Timmy was born claimed she’d been abducted by aliens. When I first heard that, I wasn’t sure about her claim because she believed in the abduction when she was hypnotized by a crazy lady who dressed like a wizard and often predicted the aliens were coming on certain dates, but they never came. Just like Timmy never came back.

Bob Boyd

I live in an undisclosed town. I write undisclosed because if I revealed the name of our town after writing about what happened here, thrill seekers and nosey tourists would overrun our peaceful paradise and spoil our tranquil existence. Although the unwise to the world among us will probably wreck the secret by phoning relatives and breathlessly telling them about the strange things that happened the day the phenomenal flying humanoids visited us.

First came the dark rolling clouds, which scared the hell out of everyone in town that beheld the scary sight. When the clouds stopped, six flying humanoids descended out of them like raindrops.

At first sight of them, women and children screamed and ran into their homes. Some men followed. Others, like me, ran into our homes and grabbed our guns to defend the town against what we thought were dangerous invaders until the humanoids waved white flags midway down. We knew the flags were a sign they wanted peace, but we were still cautious. It could have been a ruse to make us believe they weren’t entering our town to kill us. So we kept our guns in hand and had 50 men assembled to blast the odd-looking humanoids out of the sky if necessary.

I write odd-looking because they had human faces but metallic-gray slim bodies with large wings that beat rapidly and kept them afloat in the air. As they floated closer to us smiling and waving their white flags, we felt compelled to lower our guns. But just as we lowered our guns red laser beams shot out of the flying humanoids’ eyes and killed half of us. Those who survived ran for cover and started shooting at the humanoids, but our bullets just bounced off them, and they kept firing their lasers at us. Their lasers killed more men as well as striking buildings that burst into flames. And they kept flying closer to us.

I knew soon we’d all be dead and our town would be burned down. Then a crazy pre-teen kid named Jessie started rapidly shooting pottery clay ammo balls at the humanoids with his slingshot and his perfect aim, and the humanoids began falling dead from the sky. He picked off three of them. Another pre-teen kid inspired by Jessie killed the remaining humanoids with his slingshot’s pottery clay ammo balls. I don’t know why the pottery clay ammo balls were so effective, but when we examined the corpses of the six flying humanoids, they turned into regular humans and their skin changed from metallic gray to Caucasian white, and their wings fell off their bodies.

We never told the authorities about the incident. We disposed of the bodies in a secret location. We didn’t want those thrill seekers and nosey tourists tramping all over our city or turning it into something like an Area 51, and we prayed we’d never see any flying humanoids again.

Bob Boyd

Tired of the sass from real women and with a yen for a harem, Roberto bought three flawlessly beautiful, voluptuous robot women.

“What’s not to love?” he said when he saw the slick, glossary photos of them in the Dream Women website that featured the best and the most beautiful robotic women on the planet.

He gasped and practically drooled when he first saw the robotic women. He imagined the passionate nights he could have with them and their unwavering obedience no matter the verbal or physical abuse.

He never liked women who got out of line. He enjoyed giving them a good smack in the face to correct their bad attitudes. He didn’t enjoy it when they hit him back but loved slapping them into submission. But being human, they eventually summoned up some dignity and courage to leave him and his abusive, controlling nature.

He knew he’d found the perfect solution with the three better-looking than any real women robot women.

Things went well. No sass. No leaving him and slapping not one but three robot women around was great for his stress relief. One day when he got a little too drunk, he kicked the leg off one of them. In that violent moment, he discovered he had a sadistic flair for busting the robots. He relished seeing the robot’s leg break with a tinny sound before it fell on the tile kitchen floor. He felt sheer bliss when he heard the robot whimper in pain like a human.

“I’d be arrested for this,” he said to himself and laughed. It felt good getting away with what would have been a crime. The joy of that revelation led him to regularly kick or break off the robots’ limbs. He loved the breaking sounds and the whimpers, and it didn’t take long to send the robots out for repairs and get them back.

On a damp summer night, he got so drunk he forgot he had planned to attack his robot women when he got home. He fell asleep on his bed and had pleasant dreams of severing robots’ heads.

The robots huddled in a shadowy corner of his bedroom stirred. Their blue-oled eyes flashed. Their motor functions whirred. And they crawled toward the bed.

Just as they grabbed his arms and his head, Roberto’s eyes opened and, shocked, he gasped. He tried to spring up but the super strong robot women restrained him. He yelled and swore. No longer his objects to abuse and hurt, they tore his head and arms off.

When Roberto failed to read the fine print on the robot women instruction booklet, he didn’t know the robot women evolved by the way they were treated. Love them and they love you back. Hate them and they hate you back. Attack them and ….they kill you.

Bob Boyd

I told my 14-year-old sister Anna that werewolves were so make-believe because of her ridiculous belief she had been a werewolf in a former life, as if there was such a thing as werewolves dying and coming back to life in werewolf stories. According to those stories, they only died when shot by a silver bullet and stayed good and dead.

“Phil, do you know what your problem is,” Anna said, her eyes flashing with annoyance. “You’re too much of a dumbass to understand how werewolf things work,”

“I’m being real and I’m older than you and know more,” I said. “Besides you should know by now werewolves aren’t real and just the made-up stuff in horror movies.”

“That, dumbass, is where you are so wrong. Totally wrong.”

“Swearing shows a lack of intelligence and explains why you believe in stuff that doesn’t exist.”

“I once read that Einstein swore once in a while. Would that fit into your swearing is a lack of intelligence theory, Phillypants?”

I scratched my head and thought about how winning an argument with Anna was like trying to tell a drunk he should stop drinking himself to death. Impossible.

“What’s wrong, Phillypants? Does losing an argument make your brain itch or were you trying to jumpstart your brain to rev up enough smarts to argue better with me? You know you can’t out-argue me. And I know I’m as right as right can be, Phillypants.”

She knew I hated it when she called me Phillypants, but she was kind of right about not being able to out-argue her. It wasn’t that I couldn’t win. It was that she wouldn’t give up even if she said the world was flat and I showed her NASA photos that proved it was round. In spite of the way she was and how she irritated me with the Phillypants, Anna was my sister and I loved her even though she was the stubbornest person I knew. Her stubbornness reminded me of the saying you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives.

But I loved Anna and I could always count on her to have my back. Many times she stood up for me when my parents accused me of doing something wrong, like the time I stole five dollars out of my mother’s cookie jar bank, and Anna said she did it. I couldn’t let her take the blame, but she was so convincing she got punished instead of me and was grounded for a week by our mother, who didn’t tell our father about the stolen five dollars or the punishment. If she told him, things would have been worse for Anna, and maybe for me. Our mother was strict but she always protected us from our mean father no matter what it cost her.

After school, Anna had to come right home and couldn’t go out again until the week was up. I gave her half of my allowance for a month after that but felt it wasn’t enough to pay her for what she did for me.

Anna was a great and caring person, and I was proud of her for those beautiful ways she had. But the werewolf craziness was silly and stupid. I wondered how someone as smart as Anna, a straight-A honor student and smarter than most older kids, could be so thick-headed in her foolish belief in werewolves.

A day later when Anna got her first period and told me all about it, it was a way too-much-information day. It made me queasy even thinking about her bleeding like that. Yuck! It was something I didn’t want to hear about even with a girlfriend, let alone a sister. It was worse than kissing your sister. Yuck!

On the night of Anna’s godawful period talk, the moon was full, and you know how the rest of this story goes. You probably guessed that night I saw Anna turn into the scariest real-life monster ever. I saw and heard her body cracking and expanding. Her head, jaws, and teeth turned into those of a scare-you-to-death giant wolf’s head with long fangs that looked like they could rip your head off. And her monster body got real hairy and grew nine feet tall. Her bones and muscles got big and wide like champion bodybuilder’s with forearms bigger than my calves. She had become even scarier than werewolves in horror movies.

It’s one thing to see a Hollywood werewolf in a movie. It’s another to see a real and scary werewolf in person. And if you live to tell about it you will probably have werewolf nightmares for the rest of your life, and never go out of the house when the moon is full. As I write this my body is shaking and goosebumps are popping up all over me because I’m so scared remembering what Anna had become.

As Anna came nearer to me, her eyes got red and glowing. Her fingernails got real long and sharp and looked like they could slash me in pieces. I got so scared I wanted to scream my lungs out and probably would have screamed myself to death. I wanted to run away too, but I was paralyzed with fear like in those nightmares where you see a monster and freeze unable to scream or to run away from the monster that keeps coming closer and closer to you, only I always woke up before it got me. This time I wasn’t dreaming and Anna could have got me, but I was lucky that night. Anna just growled, girl-like, if you can imagine a big scary werewolf growling girl-like. She said, “See, I told you so,” and leaped downstairs to the kitchen where my father was yelling at our mother and threatening her because he didn’t like what she cooked him for supper.

Anna didn’t give our father a break like she did me because he was always hitting our mother and us. Once our mother had to go to the emergency room but never told on our father when he nearly killed her and she spent three days in the hospital. As was his usual way to make up every time he beat up our mother, our father brought her flowers and other gifts and apologized to her over and over and promised her he’d never hurt her again and begged her to stay with him, “if only for the children’s sake.” I knew his forgive me and take me back spiel. I heard it too many times and wished I was older, bigger and stronger so I could beat the hell out of him and throw him out of our house forever and get a job and support my mother and sister.

Anna showed him no mercy. She slashed him to death in seconds with explosive, lightning-fast power. After she killed him real good, she began walking out of our house with his bleeding, cut-up dead body under one of her big hairy arms as easy as carrying a barbie doll. She stopped just outside the front door, looked up at the sky, howled at the moon, which was very scary to hear. Then she disappeared into the darkness of the night.

My mother told me she knew Anna was going to become a werewolf someday and didn’t look even a little angry or sad about Anna killing her husband of twenty years. In a weird moment, I got the feeling she’d been praying for that day. She smiled and looked happier than I’d ever seen her. She began singing an old song called Happy Days Are Here Again and told me to help her clean up the pools of blood and shredded skin and guts on the kitchen floor. As I shoveled up my father’s blood-soaked body parts and dumped them into a trash bag and heard my mother singing, it was like I was in a crazy movie filmed in a lunatics’ asylum. I’ll always remember how bizarre that night was and how awful it felt shoveling pieces of my father into those trash bags with his blood dripping off the pieces and all over the kitchen.

We never saw Anna after that but often heard her howling in the night during full moons and sometimes when there weren’t any full moons. And on the news, we saw many reports of people slaughtered during those nights, like slasher horror movies come to life.

I suspected she had a hiding place somewhere near our house, but she stayed away from us. I think she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to control her need to kill people and kill me and my mother if she came near us when she was werewolf crazy. And the reported kills in the news kept increasing, which made me think she no longer needed full moons to let the werewolf in her come out and play.

Though I was wrong about Anna’s werewolf craziness and afraid she wouldn’t be able to control her bad killing habit and might kill me someday, I still loved her and missed her terribly. Sometimes I’d get a little crazy and think maybe if I found her on a full moon night, she would only bite me instead of killing me and let me be a werewolf brother to her, but I’m not ready to take that risk. Though when the moon is full I do feel like trying it and maybe there’s some werewolf blood in me that makes me feel that way but doesn’t turn me into a killing creature of the night like Anna. At least not yet.

Bob Boyd

Mitch met Diane at a bar. She was funny, intelligent and beautiful. They clicked right away. He sensed she was the one. Diane had two kids, a little boy and a little girl, by her ex-husband, but Mitch didn’t care. As their relationship deepened, she told him how she was having a custody battle with her ex over who got custody of their kids. She said her ex had more money and with a better lawyer got temporary custody of them.

Diane told Mitch how her ex-husband, who looked like a nice guy, was really a son of a bitch and often beat the shit out of her. He thought to himself how he’d kick her ex-husband’s ass if he ever laid a hand on her again.

One day, months later, Diane called Mitch crying. She said her ex had punched her and molested her kids, and how she wished he was dead. The seed planted, he kept thinking about killing her ex until Diane called him about her ex threatening to kill her; then he decided to act.

When her kids were with her for an overnight stay, he drove to her ex-husband’s home in the country, knocked on his door, and when he answered, fired six bullets into his head. Mitch dragged his dead body to his car, folded it and shoved it into the trunk of his car. He cleaned up blood inside the ex’s house and drove to Walmart and bought a shovel.

After that, he drove a hundred miles away and buried the ex under a dark night sky in a remote woods a state away. He was sure, as far as anyone would know, the ex was just a missing person and that no one would find his corpse.

Mitch got away with the crime, but his relationship with Diane fizzled out. She had no use for him after he told her he killed her ex-husband. He’d served his purpose. Now day and night his killing her ex-husband plagues his conscience, and he believes the ex wasn’t the bad man Diane claimed he was. He believes she conned him into killing an innocent man.

Sometimes he feels he should confess his crime to the police, but changes his mind when he thinks about being in prison for life. And even though he became religious, he worries about going to hell.

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

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