🍂🐀🌕🎃🐍🚪🕷☠️👁🗨⚰
Halloween is my favorite dang thing, and I try to make the most of it. There is not enough October in a year for all the spooky stuff I want to accomplish. But, with a view toward enhancing your Halloween experience, I would like to promote here some of the Weeny things I’ve produced for your enjoyment. Pretty scary, boys and girls!
Tinkerbell cracked her knuckles, and the gruesome popping made me wince. Tinkerbell scoffed at me. She rolled her eyes.
“Ya gonna be a baby? Ya gonna be a baby? Ya gonna be a baby? Cripes. I’m goin’ without you.” She didn’t mean it, apparently: As she spoke, she bumped her hip into my knee. A tiny cloud of fairy dust flew from her wings and landed on my leg. I started to float.
“There’s six hunnid billion human beans on the planet Earth, I’m stuck with this one. Cripes. Six hunnid billion, sixty billion beans, I’m stuck with you. I wanna cry.” Tinkerbell dragged her hands down against her face, mimicking falling tears, pulling grotesquely at her eyelids.
She grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the bench, flapping her sugary wings into a haze, glittering gold under the park lamps. Then we were above the lamps—I could see the whole park—the whole city.
We were so high up my teeth were chattering. “That one. That there. See?” She was pointing into the maze of streets; I couldn’t tell where. “You go in there. Walk in. There’s a guy. You tell him. Say that, say, you wanna see the Death-Bug. You gotta be less of a pansy-pamby though. Act like a real man.”
Tinkerbell flew up into my face and slapped me in the eyeball.
“What, ya gonna cry? Ya gonna cry? Ya gonna cry? Cripes. Ya gonna cry? Whatta pansy,” she groaned, as I rubbed my face.
I probably did cry, a little, as Tinkerbell dragged me down from the sky and onto Westing Street. I was still massaging my eye when she stopped leading me by the hand and flew up to whisper in my ear.
“That’s the guy. Shut up! He don’t see us yet. Shut up! Just tell him, just say, you wanna see the Death-Bug. Be cool about it, kay? Try to be—just—don’t let him—”
Giving up on that sentence, she flew down to my back pocket, and I cringed as she squirmed her way in. Then I felt her elbow me in the buttock, which I assumed was my signal to get a move on.
I approached the figure Tink had indicated, a dark man in a dark suit, standing outside a windowless building. The three nearest streetlights were all dead—I doubted this was a coincidence. I moved in close before I spoke, and hoped that my theatrical glances up and down the street indicated that I valued secrecy as much as he did.
“Hey. I’m here to see the…”
How long should I pause? Am I pausing for too long?
“…The Death-Bug.”
The man’s eyes glittered, and I knew that even in this light he could see my whole face, my falseness, my anxiety, and the tiny red handprint on my right eye.
He snorted. “Tell ‘er Vick said nice try,” he muttered, and then he punched me in the stomach. There was enough fairy dust left on me that I flew all the way across the street, in slow motion, like a crash test dummy.
“Cripes, whatta idiot, cripes, cripes. Cripes, cripes, cripes…” Tinkerbell’s shrieking filled my ears and then faded away as she pulled herself out of my pocket, flew into the air, and disappeared among the stars. Then my head hit the curb; then I blacked out.
🌙
CHAPTER ONE
Heather and Nicole were in love. They sat under the tree shaped like a monster and spoke about the things of love. They got out a knife. They tried to cut their initials into the bark of the tree, but blood came out of the wood.
CHAPTER TWO
Then in Fall when they raked up the leaves that fell off the tree they found Heather and Nancy’s skeletons under the leaves.
The End
A Twitter Novel. By Ryan Veeder. Copyright Ryan Veeder MMXIV.
☽☽☽
Piol of Gich wiped the blood from her pearly sword and sighed.
“I still have so many enemies left,” she wept, “no matter how many I kill.”
Piv, the first moon of Gich, floated overhead. It was yellow-green.
Piol uttered an ancient Gichian curse over the corpses of the Fik-folk she had defeated. Then she looked in their wallets.
“Hmm,” she said.
According to their orbiter tickets, these Fik-folk were en route to Hed, the second moon of Gich.
“You won’t be needing these,” said Piol.
“I’ll use these to fly myself to Hed, where I can kill even more of those Fik-folk,” she said aloud.
“You won’t,” said a voice behind her.
Piol turned around to see Detective Ff.
“I have a warrant for your arrest,” Ff intoned. “You are wanted for 1,213 homicides.”
Piol spat.
“I am authorized to use deadly force should you resist,” warned Ff.
“You can certainly try your best…” Piol smirked, drawing her sword.
Detective Ff, recognizing the weapon, deployed its multimissiles. Piol exploded, her pearly sword shattered to microscopic bits.
“I’m only a police robot,” Ff thought to itself, “so I can never know love. But if I could, what I would love most is blowing up murderers.”
On the horizon, a violet ghost slowly ascended—Fewkalek, the third moon of Gich. Detective Ff collapsed into space and disappeared.
THE END
☾☾☾
Today I revamped the Interactive Fiction section, adding separate pages for each game, because it pleased me to do so. You might go ahead and check out the new format, in a spare moment.
Now, if you never saw the old version of the Interactive Fiction section, you may think that you’ve missed out on something. I assure you that you have not, but I understand your feelings regardless. Let me make it up to you by reproducing a novel I composed on my phone last Friday night:
I wrote this ghost story last week. Please print it out and read it to your friends around a campfire or in another suitable context.
With a gilded finger the sun traced a lingering line up her leg, and her stomach, and across the brass mirror of her shoulder, so that she shone like a reclining Colossus on that dusty beach. All the men gazed on her, and all had to shield their eyes.
“Are you maybe like from Greece or something?” a babbling boy asked.
“No; I am from Montana,” she said, and the crowd hummed in disbelief.
“I didn’t know they had pretty girls in Montana,” another joked, from his seat behind the woman, where he could see down the top of her bikini. From there, he knew, he had no need to fear her frightful glare.
But she twisted her radiant body around like a lithesome cat’s amber tail on her stripèd towel, and fixed him to the spot with sunglass-lenses burning like twin suns: “The girls of the State of Montana are as beautiful as its horses,” she said. “That’s why the girls and the horses get along so well.”
“I’ll tell you all about it,” she said.
2013 marks the twentieth anniversary of the film Groundhog Day, directed by Harold Ramis and starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. Since the movie’s release, the real-life holiday has been inextricably linked with Sonny, Cher, and temporal disturbances. But there’s more to Groundhog Day than Groundhog Day, isn’t there?