My poetry blog is now at https://bobboydpoems.com A click on that link will take you there.
This blog is now for mini short stories under 1,000 words.
She Met Her on Tinder But Had No Idea What She Had Walked Into
Miranda had been getting lonely despite having a great job and many friends because she lacked a romantic partner. She explored Tinder seeking a girlfriend. She met a woman her age named Aubrey who seemed like an ideal match for her.
They met in person, enjoyed each other’s company, and arranged a date. On their first date, Miranda began having feelings for Aubrey, and they made a second date after which Miranda mysteriously vanished.
Aubrey had taken Miranda to her apartment that she shared with an evil man who identified as a vampire and was the leader of a small cult of three women he controlled, ravished, and called witches. But when the three women learned he was going to find a woman to kill for the sheer pleasure of it, shocked, they ran away from him. They didn’t want to be a part of something that evil and knew he meant what he said.
Tragically, Miranda became that woman. Aubrey and her boyfriend battered her and strangled her to death. They hacked her body into pieces and stuffed her body parts in garbage bags they dumped in a remote location.
Partly by luck, mostly by good detective work, the police caught the two killers a few weeks into their investigation. One is on death row. The other is in prison for life. And it’s a goddamn shame Miranda got murdered simply because she was looking for someone to love and be loved by. And it’s a goddamn shame we live in a world where many women are murdered and so much evil flourishes.
Bob Boyd
Marilyn Farnesworth (1960- )
I met my husband at the University of Maryland. Our eyes locked, and I knew we’d get married.
Sometimes your heart just knows it will be real. He was studying pre-med. I was a Liberal Arts major. We got married while in college. I’ll never forget that day.
I dropped out of college, worked as a secretary To help pay for his education and a comfortable life. A year after he became a doctor, he began to change. I noticed little things at first, bigger things later, and with my woman’s intuition I suspected an affair.
I came home early from work one day and caught him in our bed with another woman. I kicked him out of the house after that. He didn’t care, said I’d gotten boring and fat. I couldn’t control my anger thinking about how I’d given up everything to help him become a doctor who cheated on faithful me. I obsessed and obsessed over what he did to me. It got so bad that when I was out driving and saw him and his girlfriend smiling and laughing, walking along a sidewalk happy and holding hands, I went crazy and plowed into them with my car and drove back and forth over them until they were dead.
Now I’m in the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women wishing I’d never met him, at least he and his slut are dead.
Bob Boyd
Lin’s Revenge
Lin always felt John was cheating on her but had no proof. She’d followed him many times when he was out with the guys, but he behaved himself and wasn’t lying about where he was going. Yet, she still had that awful feeling that she couldn’t trust him, and she was more than a little insecure and a bit unbalanced
Unfortunately, a month later when she followed him, she saw John kissing a woman she knew named Marcy outside a restaurant. She didn’t let John know she saw him with Marcy, but she was smoldering inside and trying to think of a payback for what he did to her.
Out of her mind, she decided to kill him. She bought a gun a day later and asked him if he’d like to go camping in a nearby forest. John, who loved camping, readily agreed.
When they set up the tent in the forest and went to bed, as John slept Lin pulled her gun out of her backpack and aimed it at sleeping John’s head. She pulled the trigger, click, click, click but the gun jammed. Lin thought that was an act of God and put her gun away and went to sleep.
A week later, Marcy was found dead in her apartment, a bullet in her head.
Bob Boyd
Summer Love
Sixteen each, we met at the YMCA dance and I trembled when I got the courage to ask you for a dance. I remember the band played Sixteen Candles. You honest to God felt like an angel in my arms, your beautiful blonde hair heavenly, your sky blue eyes, divine. I think I fell in love with you the moment you were In my arms; it all felt so natural, so true, so incredibly real, like nothing I’d ever experienced.
It was so many years, so many summers ago, I can’t remember who said I love you first. I only remember I meant it forever. I remember I loved you so much I would have died for you without hesitation, without reservation.
And oh my God those kisses on the banks of the pond, the pond waters caressing the shore, my head in you lap looking up at your sunlit angelic face, captivated by your smile and how beautiful you looked, how intoxicatingly sweet your perfume was when I inhaled it with my every breath, and the soft summer green grass like a love nest enveloping us in romantic bliss and how when summer was over it was so hard, so painful to be apart from you, sweet you.
I remembered how we planned to get married when we graduated from high school, and how your heart was so true. And how even though you lived faraway in New Jersey and I lived in Massachusetts you spent your summers in Woburn the city I lived In, and how I went to your prom in Montclair, New Jersey before the summer love faded into a dark frozen winter when all the summer flowers and our love wilted and died. And how I cried and cried and cried.
And you broke what I thought was our forever vow when you cheated on me with some guy going to Rutgers U., and I remember how I never knew I had a heart that could be shattered into a million pieces that would take years to put back together, misspent years of dissipation and dissolution
not caring if I lived or died, such was the agony of the fairy tale evermore love lost.
It was even more painful because I stayed true to you beyond the distance, beyond the seasons, and I would have stayed true to you eternally. Even now decades hence and me like a monk in the world, sometimes I still think of what might have been, what could have been.
But alas we’re not sixteen anymore and Sixteen Candles was so long ago, and you might be dead and I almost was, and if we were to meet again, maybe I’d wake up and see it was only like a dream, and that teenage summer love was never meant to be, and I’d dry my older, wiser eyes.
Bob Boyd
BS about Evil Dolls
I was tired of all the BS about supposed evil dolls. The nonsense about them being cursed or possessed.
When my aunt a foolish believer in all paranormal things bought a raggedy doll named The Evil Victoria, I guffawed at her paying $1,000 for that obvious fake.
When that healthy woman died of unknown causes, a day later, I didn’t entertain suspicious conclusions.
When my uncle took over store and died the same way, I more than began to entertain those suspicious conclusions. And not wanting to see or touch the doll to throw it out, I torched the store right after my uncle died and left it to me. It burned to the ground reduced to smoldering ashes,
But that damn doll remained sitting and smiling in a chair Untouched by the burning flames of the fire.
Bob Boyd
Once in a While I Wonder What Happened to the Little Red-Haired Girl
I was six or seven years old and taking swimming lessons at a community pool and when I was out of the pool standing in front of the swings, I felt a soft tap on my back. I turned around and saw a cute, red-haired girl my age smiling at me.
I was too young for boy girl romantic feelings and the power of flirtations back then, but something in me besides my back was touched. I think it was a budding romantic heart. Before any words were spoken, the red-haired girl’s mother took her hand and walked away with her while she was looking back at me smiling.
I never saw that red-haired girl again, but, curiously, I think about her now and then even as an old man. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d met her again when she and I were old enough to fall in love, and I feel that would have happened.
I wonder how her life turned out. Did she have a full and happy life? Is she still alive? What was her name? But, alas, I’ll never find out any of those things. Sometimes in overly imaginative moments, I’ve wondered if I’ll see her again in the afterlife.
Maybe she’ll be there as a beautiful, red-haired woman and tap me softly on my back, and I’ll turn around and fall in love with her. And for reasons unclear to me, I got a little teary-eyed writing this story.
Bob Boyd
A Bad Day
Some days just don’t go right. I woke up today and my alarm clock had broken in the night. I checked my wristwatch and saw I was an hour late for work. I jumped out of bed, showered at warp speed, shaved so fast I nearly cut myself, dressed as quickly as I could, and called my boss, Hilda, an annoying person to work for.
”You better get your ass in here now!” she said and hung up the phone.
A little pissed from similar abuses by Hilda in the past but more concerned by the face loss of being late, I flew out of my house and dove into my ancient Volkswagen Beetle, a holdover from my free spirit days. I cranked the Beetle on. It shook, sputtered, and coughed. Dark smoke bombed out of the exhaust. Then it made a sound like a death rattle, shook a little, and died. I wondered if that was its last gasp because of how old it was and the repairs it needed.
I called Hilda again to explain to her that my car had died and I was going to call a cab to still get to work.
“Can’t you do anything right?” She yelled. Tired of her abuse, I blew up.
“Screw you, Hilda!” I yelled so loud that my next-door neighbor peered out her window and looked at me like she was looking at a raging lunatic.
“Screw you too, and you’re fired!” Hilda said and hung up.
With that glorious weight off your shoulders feeling, I strolled into my house and at peace for the first time since I started working for Hilda. I retrieved some Moose Tracks ice cream from my refrigerator and sat down in my plush easy chair. I turned on my TV and watched a sci-fi movie about an eccentric young guy from Erie, Pennsylvania, who willingly got abducted by aliens and volunteered to live on their distant planet to escape the insanity of the human race only to be served on the alien planet as a rare, tasty delicacy.
When the movie ended with the human screaming as the aliens ravenously feasted on him, I heard the mailman arrive in his mail truck and drop off some mail. I marched out to the mailbox to see if I got anything besides bills and those unending advertisements that I received almost daily. I saw a letter in a pink envelope. It was from my girlfriend, Rhonda. I wondered why she sent me a letter instead of phoning or emailing me. Who sends letters nowadays? And why a pink envelope?
She wrote she was leaving me. To make that bad news even more disturbing, she said she had fallen in love with Hilda’s brother, a jerk with shifty eyes and a grating attitude. I felt like punching the hell out of the mailbox, but I let that thought go. No sense in beating up a mailbox over the loss of Rhonda. I didn’t need her around anyway. The relationship had nosedived, and I was tired of listening to her complain about me not making enough money, which told me what she saw in Hilda’s brother who had recently won a million dollars in a lottery. She’ll go through that quickly I mused, and it will serve Hilda’s brother right. Good riddance to Rhonda and good riddance to Hilda the Annoying.
Relieved that ill fated day was over, I went to bed hoping to enjoy a restful sleep and maybe some sweet dreams of hot women to take the sting off my debacle of a day. Just as I began to fall asleep, the ground beneath my house started to crumble. I charged out of my house seconds before it plunged into a sinkhole. I thought to myself, maybe tomorrow will be a better day.
Bob Boyd
Hunting Spirits With a Spirit Box in Green Hill Cemetery
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
Love Can Find A Way
Al and his wife Eleanor inhabited a tiny house off grid in mystical Tao’s, New Mexico. For a while their lives were idyllic, living free and easy on the Taos desert land before a ragged band of zombies began invading the desert, their origin story unknown, as mysterious as UAPs.
Long before the news caught up with them, the band of zombies roamed Taos rabidly killing scores of human prey.
While Eleanor was tending her garden of prickly pear cacti behind her and Al’s tiny house, the sun ducked behind a dark cluster of clouds in the New Mexico skies, and a pitiful, little zombie girl shuffled toward her crying and growling.
Not suspecting a zombie, but thinking the child was in shock, her body in tatters, perhaps from an awful auto accident, Eleanor, a woman of great compassion, worried for what she saw as an innocent little girl in a crisis.
Eleanor invited her into her house to console her and dress her wounds and drive her to the Holy Cross Medical Center for medical attention.
Al wasn’t home at that time, hiking in the environs, enjoying his relaxing time in nature on that cloudy day.
As Eleanor was helping the little girl, she moaned and growled and bit Eleanor on her jugular vein. After a few gurgling screams, the wound fatal, blood running down her body, Eleanor died.
The little zombie girl feasted on her for a few moments, her young appetite easily sated, and shuffled away at an astonishing fast pace for a zombie.
A little later, Eleanor’s eyes popped open to the world again. She was pretty much brain dead and totally zombified.
When Al returned home and saw Eleanor’s zombified state, he was shocked and horrified; he’d seen enough zombie movies to know Eleanor’s irreversible, dark plight.
Not wanting to share her fate, he locked Eleanor out of their house and prayed for a miraculous restoration of the woman she had been before the zombie bite.
After a week of Eleanor scratching and pounding on their front door, Al missed her desperately despite the deal breaker of her walking dead disease.
Still loving her like the in sickness and in health marriage vow they solemnly shared in a little Methodist church in Idaho,
Al opened the door.
Despite knowing he was doomed, out of love he held her in his arms while she bit into his jugular and ended his free spirit life.
Somehow Eleanor’s romantic instincts and her wifely loyalty survived her undead deactivated mind.
When Al returned to life zombified, she hugged him and kissed what remained of his face. And they walked withered hand in withered hand to some distant living dead neverland, proving even for the zombified – love can find a way.
Bob Boyd