Story-A-Day #332: Flashes

FLASHES

The voices had been calling to her for weeks, dark and sinister message of hate and pain.  She wasn't the type to experience such things.  She was a well-rounded 15-year-old who did well in school, had a broad circle of friends, and a loving and supportive family.  She did well in school, played on a number of teams, and didn't fall into the trappings of youth that some of her friends did in time.

She was a good girl, but over the past few weeks, she had started to change.  Her parents had expressed their concern, but she didn't know how to explain the voices.  They would think she was crazy.  Instead, she told them that she was under a lot of pressure at school, trying to get things done under some tight deadlines.  They seemed okay with that explanation.

What was she supposed to do, tell them that there were voices in her head urging her to kill, maim and destroy?  They were non-specific urges, and she didn't really understand most of what they were saying, but it seemed like that was the gist of it.  They were growing more consistent now too, like a constant hum, a chant of destruction.  They kept her awake at night, which made everything even harder to deal with.

She woke up crying most mornings, feeling as though she had only just fallen asleep, which was in fact the case on most mornings.  On a cool morning in October, she wandered down into the kitchen and poured a bowl of cereal.  As she set it on the counter to pour in the milk, she noticed a knife left over from dinner the night before.  She picked it up and shifted its weight in her hand.

It felt good, a natural extension of her arm.  She spun it around in her hand and peered into the cold steel blade.  For a moment, it looked like she could see a bright door reflected in the cold, grey steel of the blade.  An escape.

She raised the blade high over her head and heard her mother call out her name as she stepped into the kitchen.  she turned towards the door and smiled at her mum, then quickly drove the blade down into her own stomach, once, twice, a dozen times.  With each downward thrust, the blade flashed and the reflection of the doorway grew brighter.

She raised it once more, looking for a thirteenth stab, but the blade fell uselessly from her hand and clattered across the kitchen floor.  A moment later, she collapsed next to it.  The voices were gone now.  She lay on the cold ceramic tiles, and stared across the room at her mother as a pool of warm, red blood, slowly grew around her.

"I love you," she managed to mouth, a bubble of blood bursting outwards from her lips as she did.

The sound of her mother's screams filled the silence as the kitchen slowly faded to black.

Story-A-Day #95: Deus Ice Machina

DEUS ICE MACHINA

The bastard had been following me for years, but I had finally got my one up. In the end, it was surprisingly easy, and more satisfying than any other single moment in my life, not that it has been full of particularly satisfying moments. Once I rewired that bastard’s ego, I knew that his crap, his stalker nonsense, had finally come to an end. For any of this to make sense, I should probably go back to the beginning.

I’ve had a rough life. I was the girl with the spots, the ugly redhead, the orphan. I had foster parents, both good and bad, but unfortunately for the good ones, they were the last to arrive on the scene and the bad had already done their damage. I was pregnant at thirteen-and-a-half, at the hands of stepfather number two, and he gave an abortion for my fourteenth birthday in the form of a fifth of cheap whiskey and four kicks in the gut while I vomited out the force fed poison. It was probably for the best.

For the longest while, I thought that I was unlucky. It wasn’t until my twenty-second birthday that I discovered I was a pawn in a game being played by a lonely god. That’s not a metaphor. He was actually a god, and he had been slowly destroying my life since as early as I could remember.

On my twenty-second, I concluded that I had little reason to carry on as I had been. Things were bad, and getting no better, so I decided that on the day I had been born, I would end 22 years of malignant suffering. That’s when he first showed himself, a fat, pompous god of nothing.

I wondered how you could be a god of nothing. I had always understood that gods required followers and believers; they needed tribute. I realize now that he was actually the perfect god: too many people are parishioners at the church of nothing these days.

Anyway, this smug bastard shows up and explains that he is the one who has been delivering the pain. It was a game to him, to see how far he could push me before I broke. Congrats, asshole. You win.

He said that he wanted to be paid tribute to, but that this was not the gift he sought. My life was not worth enough. That was when it dawned on me. If he wanted tribute, he would have it. I would day after day, from scores of miserable bastards, but more importantly, I would provide him a solution that would allow him to proliferate the world.

He argued at first, that such a tactic would weaken him, at least until I reminded him that a true God is omniscient. He latched onto the idea so forcefully that he came up with the implementation. He would fuse his essence to the pop machine in the hotel where I was the maid and every patron who purchased a beverage would take a piece of him with them. The concept was mine, proliferation through tribute, but the implementation was all his.

And the best was yet to come. The following day, I lead him up to the 13th floor of the hotel where I worked as a maid, an uncommon floor in the superstitious world of hotels, and let him into the room. He licked his lips lasciviously and asked me which one. I pointed to the plastic cabinet and he quickly squinted in concentration. His essence became smoky, and with a suctioning pop, he achieved his goal. And so did I.

He had fused with the machine in perpetuity, and in doing so, I had put the bastard on ice. It didn’t dawn on me that he would not know the difference between a pop machine and an ice dispenser, but he had greedily entered the machine where he was now trapped. No coins, meant no tribute, which meant no proliferation, which meant no more smug bastard.

Deus Ice Machina indeed.