Bob Boyd's Mini Stories

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

Greensboro Park contains a Vortex, a hotbed of paranormal happenings. You name it, seen it, parades of cryptids passing through – Bigfoot, Wendigo, Spring-Heeled Jack, to name a few, usually in the dark, rare occasions in daylight.

Saw Spring-heeled Jack, a rainy day in May. With high-powered spring heels he sprang up a 30-foot-tall tree and laughed at me; that devil knew I couldn’t jump that high.

Did you know Bigfoot has a twin? Saw them both in Greensboro Park, Christmas Eve 2023. Could be mistaken, but I think they wanted to give me a surprise Christmas present beneath twinkling Christmas tree lights, but I ran away too scared by the size and frightening sight of the Bigfoot duo to hang around for a Christmas present or my death.

The Vortex has a dark side. For some tuition money, a student at UNC, Greensboro, Michelle Burns, sweet, beautiful sophomore, started cryptid tours in Greensboro Park for $20 a head. Tours didn’t feature real cryptids, members of her sorority dressed as cryptids, disrespectful fakes, an affront to the Vortex.

As I foresaw in a dream and warmed Michelle about, but she wouldn’t listen, the Vortex took offense. During Michelle’s final tour, the Vortex opened, the skies thundered, Michelle screamed, the terrifying Vortex swallowed her, and she was never seen again.

Often on moonlit nights in Greensboro Park, like psychics coaxing dead people to go to the Light, I coax Michelle, who was my girlfriend, to come back to the park, and I beg the Vortex to forgive her and release her.

So far no luck; the vortex doesn’t forgive easily and will not be mocked.

Bob Boyd

I never had any paranormal experiences until Mothwoman came into my life. I’d read about Mothman who appeared in Point Pleasant, Virginia in 1966. I saw the Mothman Prophecies Film in 2002 and felt sympathetic toward him. He seemed a tragic figure out of time and out of place. Maybe my sympathy for him drew his daughter to me like metal to a magnet.

She came to me as a rescuer. On a dark, moonless night when I was walking home from my work as an elevator operator, two burly men leaped out of the shadows of an alley and started pulverizing me. They were too big and too strong for me to fight off. They hammered me to the ground and pounded me as I tried to block their blows with my arms which proved insufficient to stop their attack. Just as I felt I was going to pass out, I heard wings beating in the air. The two men looked up, screamed, and ran off. I lay on the ground barely conscious.

A beautiful female with huge moth-like wings hovered above me smiling. Her beauty and her disarming smile eased my fears. Despite her massive, eerie wings, she looked more like a human woman. Surprisingly I found her extremely desirable.

Telepathically, she asked if I was okay. I couldn’t believe she could communicate mind to mind and possibly know all my thoughts. I felt a little embarrassed about how I was thinking about her. I wondered if she hadn’t been tuned into my thoughts when I was desiring her. I also wondered if she was some kind of alien.

“I’m not an alien. Mothman was my father and my mother was human like you. They were hunted down and killed by your government. I escaped many years ago into another dimension that I can move freely in and out of. I came back into this dimension for you.”

“For me?”

“Yes, remember how sad you were about my father? Your compassion and sadness for him drew me to you.”

“Yes, I was and still am sad about his fate. I’m even more sad after what you told me about him and your mother being killed by my government. I’m sorry that happened to them, and I never thought of your father as a monster like others did.”

“Yes. He wasn’t a monster. He had a good heart, but he was reckless in trying to make contact with humans.”

“How so?” I asked.

“He tried too hard to make contact. He thought our species and yours could work together to improve the world, but people just got scared when he tried to make contact. They even blamed him for the collapse of the Silver Bridge back in 1967. He had nothing to do with that. And
the risk always existed that your government would hunt him down and kill him or experiment on him. We were never safe in your world.”

As if those words doomed her, a giant net flew out of nowhere and captured her. She struggled to escape, her net-enclosed wings flopping aimlessly. I tried to get the net off her, but Special Forces soldiers descended upon us and captured me too. They tied me up with cords, and blindfolded me. I heard Mothwoman scream as they hauled her away. Seconds after that I heard the sound of an aircraft taking to the sky. Then only silence remained.

Hours later, I worked my way out of the cords and removed the blindfold. I saw no evidence of the Special Forces soldiers and none of Mothwoman who I had fallen in love with.

Crazy as it may sound, I felt like I’d lost a soulmate until I heard in my mind. “Worry not my Love, I will come back for you.”

Days later, I saw on TV that a group of Special Forces died in a plane crash. Then I heard the beating of wings outside my window.

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

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

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

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

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

Brandon read in a book that if you call the Devil in a forest at night, he will answer. A skeptic and cocky, he took that warning as a challenge. He told his friend Aaron about the Devil warning and asked him if he wanted to debunk it with him.

But Aaron was a little superstitious and worried that to be in an isolated forest at night calling upon the Devil might yield terrifying results a person wouldn’t think possible. Despite Brandon calling Aaron a pussy, he didn’t relent on his decision not to get involved with Brandon’s crazy scheme. And he was genuinely fearful of calling on Satan in a forest at night. He did agree to drive Brandon to the forest and wait for him though.

Brandon agreed to the compromise. On the night he and Arron arrived at the forest, dark clouds floated in the sky, sometimes obscuring the half moon hovering over the forest. Brandon exited the car and fearlessly hiked into the forest. He saw a boulder, climbed up it, stood tall and yelled loud enough for Aaron to hear, “Hey, Satan! Where ya at! Come out and play! Come out and play, Bitch! What? Yeah, just as I figured, ya ain’t real at all!”

The sky darkened, the moon disappeared behind huge, rolling, dark clouds. An ominous feeling pervaded the forest and the creatures of the night fell silent. Seconds later, Brandon screamed three times. Screams that sounded like a person would scream trapped in hell.

Aaron jumped out of his car then stopped from running into the forest despite wanting to save Brandon. He feared Satan or whatever made Brandon scream might still be there. Instead, he yelled, “Brandon! Brandon! Are you okay? Brandon, are you okay?”

But he was met with silence. Because Aaron had a feeling Brandon was dead and whatever killed him could still be in the forest, he phoned the police.

When the police arrived, Aaron felt okay with going into the forest with them. And the half moon was shining again unobscured by any dark clouds. As they ventured deeper into the forest, the police smelled an awful scent, the smell of burned flesh. They found Brandon’s dead, scorched body on top of the boulder with a horrified look on his corpse’s face.

At first, the police felt that Aaron had murdered Brandon and burned his body to death and made up the crazy Devil story. But days later, when during the autopsy, a cloud of black smoke rose out of Brandon’s body and morphed into a glittering, red pentagram then flashed seven times and vanished, there was no doubt supernatural causes were responsible for Brandon’s death. And that maybe what happened to Brandon really was the Devil’s answer to Brandon’s taunts and calls to him.

Bob Boyd