Losing the Weight

Diego looked at himself in the bathroom mirror after his shower. "I wish I'd lost twenty pounds." He squinted at his reflection as the mirror suddenly fogged up again, and the fog took on a purplish cast.

"GRRRRRANTED!" boomed a voice. Diego looked around, saw nothing, and turned back to see the mirror had cleared and now reflected him and a swole man with a broad, bearded grin and no shirt. Diego looked around again and saw no one.

"Are you only in the mirror?"

The genie shrugged. "I'm trying a new thing!" he boomed. "Look, your twenty pounds is missing!" He paused while Diego gasped in awe. "It is truly lost!"

"Oh my god, thank you!" He turned to shake the genie's hand and realized anew that he was only in the mirror. "Is there... um, anything else I should know?"

"PRRRRRROBABLYYYYYY," echoed the genie as he faded into purple mist and then evaporated entirely.

Diego defended the surprise genie to his friends for years until the day he most unpleasantly discovered that what is lost can also be found. It's hard to impress an investor when twenty pounds of adipose tissue come spilling out of the liquor cabinet.

He Said, She Said

From his perspective: The car screeched to a stop alongside him halfway down the block. "Get in!" she said, all brusque business. Bullets spanged off the far side of the sedan, he threw himself in screaming, and she peeled away. Then she explained.

From her perspective: She pulled up as he turned the corner and said, "Get in."

"Uh, no?" He looked around.

"You're in danger. We can help."

He walked faster. When she paced him in the car, he ran, then ran into a bullet.

She reset.

She waited an extra thirty seconds, but this time gunfire rang out as she turned the corner and she only caught up with his body.

She reset.

She came earlier, but coasting along the street weirded him out and chased off the shooters. He said no.

She slowed down just a notch, but traffic trapped her, leaving her slamming the horn as he got gunned down.

She tried a different route, but it took so long she didn't even turn onto a street now crowded with police and EMS.

She reset, she reset, she reset.

By the time she got to the one he'd remember, she had no room left for "nice."

A Locked Door Genie Mystery

Lieutenant Gerhardt looked across the crime scene. Three bodies, two of them shot, one crushed by a couch that the other two were on, the door barred from the inside, and no gun. "Jesus, I wish I was like Sherlock Holmes."

A purplish mist rose in the crime scene. "Grrrrranted!" boomed the voice of a muscular, bearded man wearing no shirt who appeared in the room, grinning.

Gerhardt put a hand on his gun, as did the two uniforms on site. He felt sweat prickle at his skin. His frustration transmuted into a nameless fear gnawing at his bowels.

"No," he said. "When you show up, things go wrong." He pulled his gun and pointed it with quivering hands. "You just leave, all right?"

The genie was already fading into mist. "It is already doooooone," he echoed through the room. "You are like Sherlock Holmes!"

"Then why don't I know who did it?" Gerhardt holstered his gun on the second try and pulled a handkerchief to wipe his paling brow.

"People forget Holmes also had a heroin habiiiiiit...."

One of the uniforms elbowed the other. "Call the union rep, yeah? I think he's going to need some help with this."

It's So Easy

"Dammit, Jimmy, did you leave your soda can in the car?"

Jimmy froze halfway from the car to the front door, halfway between his father glaring at him while locking up and his mother unlocking the house. She was still now as well. Jimmy looked over his shoulder at his father, his soft brown hair and eyes lost in the glare of the motion-sensitive light illuminating the path, late as it was after the dinner out.

"I'm sorry, Dad. I'll get it."

"No," Dan snapped. "I'll do it. It's so easy to put things where they belong, but you never bother, do you?" He opened the car, and Jimmy hurried inside as his mother beckoned. "It's not like we have a bin just for recycling or anything," Dan said to himself. He slammed the car door and walked around the corner to the bins, away from the light. He waved, but this motion-sensing light didn't come on.

On this cloudless, moonless night, the faint and distant stars provided all the light he needed to make out the third of the four silhouettes against the wall, for compost, trash, and recycling. Dan casually tossed the can in only for it to bounce off the rim.

"Fuck." He got on his knees, crawling between bins to reach where it had fallen. When he put his hand on it, the light clicked on. A red bin towered over him, previously hidden behind the blue and green bins he was now crouched between. He stood, slow and cramped between the bins, until he could see the writing on the front. Where the green read "Yard Waste" and the blue "Recycling," this read only "Dan." The lid was open.

As he stared, the fourth silhouette unfolded into something more limbs than body and more fingers than limbs. It grabbed Dan's legs and toppled him into the bin, the lid clapping shut over him. He yelled, but no one could hear him. At least, no one came. Before the thing wheeled him away, he heard the faint clink of a can dropping into the recycling bin.

Clean to the Bone

He turned on the heater. Ants swarmed out. They ate him clean to the bone. He was rather surprised.

His soul came to a place of judgment, a great black rock. He climbed atop it. Ants swarmed up the rock and devoured his soul. He was surprised again, not least that his soul could feel agonizing pain.

His consciousness returned in a small glade surrounded by deep woods. Centuries-old trees loomed over him. Ants swarmed out from around the nearest tree. Not quite as surprised, he tried to run. They swarmed over him and devoured him anyway.

It was the same when he woke in a remarkably bland office, riding atop a city-sized cat, and walking on the moon. He screamed and ran and rolled and tried scraping them off, but nothing worked. Ants devoured him atop an endless cliff, in the claws of a flying eagle, and floating in the ocean (where they reclaimed surprised by floating up in a big ball). A neon-lit, rain-soaked city street, a wind-swept desert, and in the open mouth of a giant, patient panda bear.

He stopped fighting. The ants didn't stop devouring him. "Maybe life is being devoured by ants," he said.

The Most Frightening Imaginable Thing

With a dozen wounds bleeding and a blade buried in his heart, Vincent gurgled a bloody laugh. "You think you've beaten me," he rasped, "but you haven't even seen my true form." His skin rippled and bulged, something beneath it writhing with inhuman power no longer restrained.

"Can't really be scarier than a genocidal maniac, though, can it?" Vera sounded bored, and she caught the sword by its grip as the transformation forced it out of the once-man's chest.

"It will bring you terror as you have never before conceived." Its voice now resonated with the echo of a dozen inhuman mouths.

"I don't buy it," she said.

The shape-shift stopped.

"I mean, humans are the real monsters," Vera said. "You're monstrous, sure, but the true abomination is a human, as Vince here was before you came along, slaughtering billions. I can't personally imagine anything more frightening than a real, mortal human with the will to murder the entire globe."

"Then that," the monster intoned, "is what you shall face." Its shape-shift changed course, returning to the familiar form of Vincent.

Vera's sword promptly removed his head from his body.

"Luckily, humans are much easier to kill than extra-dimensional monstrosities."

One-line Film Review: Death Wish 3 (1985), starring Charles Bronson

This film takes the vigilante wish fulfillment to a new level with cops endorsing Bronson's vigilantism, locals cheering on daylight extrajudicial murder, and a 32-year-old blonde chasing 64-year-old Bronson just so she can be killed after they hook up.