 
The Devil Still Has My Lawnmower

### & Other Tales of the Weird

A Short Story Compilation by

### Giando Sigurani

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Giando Sigurani

ISBN: 9781476109800

Cover by Kent Mudle http://www.beretcomic.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

# Table of Contents

Title Page and Copyright

Introduction

The Chicken Nugget of Peace

The Panel

8-ball & Ouija Board

The Ancient Persian

A Shot in the Dark

Danny Dizzle

A Marriage of Magic and Science

The Devil Still Has My Lawnmower

About the Author

Also by Giando Sigurani

# Introduction

A loving father and good neighbor ventures into the depths of Hell to retrieve his lawnmower from the Devil himself, or else face a fine by the Homeowners Association. A spectacularly boring man finds the secret to universal peace, prosperity, and happiness in his chicken nugget. A frustrated writer launches her manuscript into deep space in a desperate hope of getting published on another world, accidentally causing an interplanetary war in another galaxy.

These are just a few of the funny, tragic, or just plain strange stories in this collection by science fiction mastermind Giando Sigurani.

The complete collection includes:

_The Chicken Nugget of Peace_ : A spectacularly boring man finds the secret to universal peace, prosperity, and happiness in his chicken nugget. Now he has to decide: is he too uninteresting to do anything about it?

_The Panel:_ Hostile aliens have taken over Earth. An emergency panel at the House of Representatives is assembled to address it. Hopefully, they'll actually get something done this time.

_8-ball & Ouija Board_: By sheer coincidence, a genuinely magical 8-ball and a possessed Ouija board have wound up in the same house and under the same Christmas tree. Now it only remains to be seen whether there is room in this world for both of them.

_The Ancient Persian_ : While cleaning house, a college student finds an old Persian carpet that turns out to be both magic and ill-tempered.

_A Shot in the Dark_ : A frustrated writer launches her manuscript into deep space with the incredibly slim hope of getting published on another world. Unfortunately the aliens that find it take it just a bit too seriously.

_Danny Dizzle_ : A powerful Rudyard Kipling poem about a soldier being hanged... translated into much less powerful Snoop Dogg. (With apologies to Mr. Kipling).

_A Marriage of Magic and Science_ : Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons travel to the middle of a Nevada desert to cast a spell that will end the world. Stop me if you've heard this one.

_The Devil Still Has My Lawnmower_ : Alan is a loving father, good neighbor, and stand-up American citizen, so of course he has no problem loaning his lawnmower to his neighbor. But when it comes time to mow his own lawn, he learns that his neighbor is not who he once believed, and that he must venture into the fiery pits of Hell to get his lawnmower back. Either that, or face a fine by the Homeowners Association.

# The Chicken Nugget of Peace

George Smith woke up in the usual way, with the sun shining into his eyes from the window next to his bed, and against all reason, he smiled.

He knew what day it was. It was the day he had marked on his calendar two weeks previously, the day he looked forward to every time he threw himself upon the lumpy mattress within his tiny studio apartment to catch a few snatches of sleep before the next shift.

It was a Sunday. It was the only day off he would have from both his jobs for a very long time, and he was going to spend it doing something spiritual.

Not spiritual in the same way most people consider it to be. He would not spend his morning going to church, to be followed by donuts in the lobby and a discussion about the family picnic to be held next week, no doubt the sort of things God wanted of him. No; today, George had a much more important goal. It did not sound as significant or profound to other people as it did to him, but he was not in the least bothered by this. It was significant to him for the very simple reason that he planned for it.

He did so when he noticed that the two jobs he had, the shitty retail one, and the _other_ shitty retail one, had coincidentally given him the same day off– Sunday– which had inspired him to rush off to his little black book and crack it open.

The little black book was nothing special. Within it was a list of things he wanted to accomplish in his lifetime. They were not spectacular achievements: about as exciting as British cricket, as one co-worker had put it.

He picked the item that occurred furthest up on the list that was not also crossed out, and marked it on his calendar.

The task was this:

He was going to be first in line at the Chicken Emporium when it opened.

He was going to buy the freshest batch of chicken nuggets.

He was going to take the first chicken nugget made that day.

He was going to dip it in Honey Mustard sauce.

He was going to eat it.

That was it. It was not by any means an amazing feat, but it was special to him in that very same way it was _not_ special to absolutely everyone else.

As it happened, not only did George have among the most boring names in the history of uninteresting nomenclature, but he himself was also a very uninteresting person. Even when his co-workers pestered him to get out more, he would tell them that he had no intention whatsoever of becoming even remotely compelling.

Stamp collecting, birdwatching, chess, even the hobbies that were regarded by most of society to be terribly dull were each shunned by George, for fear that they might interfere with his personal beliefs.

His personal beliefs were another thing that raised eyebrows. They were concerned with everyone's particular purpose in life, including George's. If, George reasoned, there exist those with great, world changing, awe-inspiring purposes (Einstein, Gandhi, Genghis Khan), then there are those on the opposite side of the spectrum that didn't have one at all.

George firmly, adamantly, and passionately believed that he was one of them.

He had explained it, painfully thoroughly, so many times and to so many people that he had very nearly gotten sick of it. It seemed that each time he did, someone would tell him that he had a terribly bleak outlook on life, and each time he would turn his nose up and say that it wasn't the point. George's purpose in life, he constantly attested, was to not have one. He was there to balance the scales. He would be trite, bleak, and plain so that some day, somewhere else down the line somebody else could be fascinating.

When asked if this upset him in any way, he would say no to that as well. Does a bolt get tired of holding things together? Does a hairpin grow weary from keeping hairstyles in shape? Does a hammer, God forbid, ever get sick of having to hit things? No, he would say, they did their jobs without protest, and so did he.

It was for this reason why all the appointments in his little black book were not even slightly exciting to the average person. George did not want any of them to be unique or fascinating for fear of taking the glory away from someone else in the future, and that's how he wanted it to stay. He had designed his agenda so that each seemingly un-fulfilling appointment would make him _think_ he was unique, without actually being so. It was the closest thing he allowed himself to do without getting a hobby.

He grinned widely as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. The Chicken Emporium did not open until 8:00 A.M. and the sun was just starting to rise, so he was safely going to keep his schedule. He showered, brushed his teeth, donned his plain clothes, put on his large plain glasses, and fed what he could only presume to be his cat.

At least, he was pretty _sure_ it was a cat. All he knew for sure was that every now and again the litter box that he kept in the bathroom needed changing, the food tray he kept near the kitchen occasionally empted itself, and the water bowl next to it had to be refilled every once in a while. The cat in question, however, had not been seen for more than two years.

He was fairly certain that it was a black, female cat of indeterminate size and even less determinant breed. He had deduced that it was black because in the summer seasons, when most domesticated mammals shed their fur to prevent heat stroke, he had found black cat hairs sticking to nearly every surface in his apartment that only ever yielded to the industrial-strength vacuum cleaner he often borrowed from a co-worker. He was certain it was female, because on one occasion, when he was cleaning out his closet, he had discovered a box of kittens.

It was unsettling, to say the least, to discover a cardboard receptacle filled with not one but in fact twelve mewing, purring balls of fur that he was certain were not there before. The most interesting part, though, is that they had been there for more than two weeks, and already had their eyes open. He didn't dare throw them out, but on the other hand he couldn't look after them either, so he decided to wait and see what happened.

What happened was whenever he returned from his shitty retail job or his _other_ shitty retail job, they were all still alive, energetic, and well-fed. There were still no signs of their mother as far as he could tell. They were getting their sustenance from _somewhere,_ though, there was no doubt about that.

After a few weeks, the kittens started leaving the box and eventually the apartment, fully-grown adults. There were grays, oranges, whites, and one or two black cats, but still no sign of their mother.

He decided that the cat might be invisible or, as a more logical explanation, only came out when she was certain he was not in the apartment. Eventually, the last kitten left the box a fully-grown feline, and he was forced to leave it as a mystery unsolved.

Now, he just put out the food, refilled the water, and changed the litter box without any questions. It was not a good idea to become fascinated by the whereabouts of his cat. That might lead to himself becoming fascinating, and he simply could not have that.

When the water bowl was filled and the food tray was teetering, he put on his coat and left to stand outside the doors of the Chicken Emporium. The walk was only a few blocks, and the wind was not as relentlessly unpleasant this day as it was the day before, so he figured he had ample time.

At last the drab gray walls of the Chicken Emporium loomed ahead of him. He chittered with glee as he approached his goal, his destiny. Eating the nugget in and of itself would not fill his heart with the serenity he desired. Rather, the very idea that he planned something and got it done is what would do it for him.

He got to the door first, just as he planned. He could see the unhappy employees sponging down the counters as they prepared for the flurry of greedy, messy customers that were surely about to flood the place. George glanced at the windows, noticing with interest the "We Begrudgingly Serve Starbucks Coffee, Because We've Discovered That You Can't Possibly Sell Anything Else To People These Days" sign that accurately summed up the emotional atmosphere of the Chicken Emporium.

At last, an employee came to the shiny glass doors with a ring of keys, and George was free to fulfill his two-week-planned destiny. The girl at the counter was a tragic case of teenaged angst stuffed in a fast food uniform and given a slight acne problem. She gave a horrified sigh and asked him what he would like to order, and he gleefully told her that he would like the freshest batch of chicken nuggets, please. He handed over his money and craned his neck into the back of the shop, where the unhappy fry cooks unhappily fried things. He saw them dump a fresh batch of week-old chicken nuggets into the greaser, noticing the shape and size of the one that touched the grease first. The girl at the counter handed him his change, arched an eyebrow in inquisitiveness, scoffed, and served the next customer. George just stood aside and watched as his fresh batch of chicken nuggets were prepared.

After what seemed an eternity, the fried goods were ready and the cook slid them across the counter in their shiny white box. To George it might as well have been a polished limousine.

He was almost in tears when he thanked the expressionless gentleman that handed it to him, and walked with a steady, majestic gait as he made his way to the eating areas outside. The building blocked most of the wind, and it was a rather cool day.

He glided into his seat and stared at the box. If he were a religious man, he would have prayed. He watched it for a few seconds as he tried to take in the idea that something _he_ did, something _he_ planned for, was about to go right. At last he opened the box.

He peeled off the wrapper on the cup of Honey Mustard sauce.

He took the chicken nugget.

He dipped the chicken nugget in the Honey Mustard sauce.

He opened his mouth, closed his eyes, licked his lips, and prepared as the chicken nugget inched slowly toward its goal–

"Mr. Smith."

The very serious voice came from somewhere above, and George noticed that it was not the least bit inquisitive. It was a voice that knew _precisely_ whom it addressed, and did not like to be ignored. George delayed eating his chicken nugget for just a moment as he beheld the speaker.

He was blocking the sun. In rather the same way the moon looks during a solar eclipse, the front of him was darkened while the edges of him were brightened as the light bent around his large, broad-shouldered backside, revealing that his skin was colored emerald green. He was wearing what looked like a large, hoodless ski parka that looked like it was capable of insulating a delicate snowflake from a direct hit by a solar flare. He was also wearing pitch-black sunglasses and a very solid frown.

He had someone with him, a smaller person with the same complexion standing directly behind him and dressed in exactly the same manner, but instead of looking at George he was looking at the chicken nugget and biting his lip with nervous anticipation, a bead of sweat forming on his brow. The sweat was electric yellow.

"Mr. Smith," repeated the eclipsing figure. "I will be blunt, because I am fully aware you appreciate that sort of thing, and because I don't think I have a lot of time to explain myself. We have come from a very, very long way away on a mission of universal peace, and we would very much like to talk to you."

George's chicken nugget remained poised inches away from his mouth, and as it wavered from his unsteady arm the eclipsing visitor's friend seemed to grow even more nervous. "Er," he said. "You do?"

"Yes, Mr. Smith. As you might be able to tell, we are not exactly from your world. You can understand how the matter we are about to discuss might be a matter of great importance."

George appraised his new visitor from top to bottom, noticing that he had to sweep his head such a wide angle to accomplish this that he felt a painful pop in his neck. The visitor didn't look human. His arms were proportionally longer than they should have been, his head was slightly smaller, and he was more than eight feet tall. The muscles in his neck seemed to have eschewed the basic principles of muscular structure and instead seemed to follow the laws of industrial hydraulics. All these things, even without taking the green skin into account, seemed convincing enough.

"Oh really?" George said. "And who are you? How do you know my name?"

"We are a usually peaceful race from a large planet approximately 19.5 billion billion billion light-years away, Mr. Smith. It was no small feat arriving on your tiny blue-green homeworld. We have developed monitoring skills and information gathering techniques that most races can't even fathom, much less develop. We have been watching you, Mr. Smith."

The chicken nugget wiggled a little more, and the smaller of the two figures winced. "I see," said George. "You're space aliens."

"Yes, Mr. Smith."

"What do you mean by _usually_ peaceful?"

"We are usually peaceful in the same way that your kind is usually _not_ peaceful," said the alien calmly. George thought about this, and shrugged. He didn't pay much attention to the news, but even someone as uninformed as he knew that there always seemed to be at least one disgruntled, heavily armed interest group fighting another disgruntled, heavily armed interest group _somewhere_.

The chicken nugget moved towards his mouth again, and the smaller alien let out a little cry of pain. George frowned, and raised an eyebrow. "So if you're both space aliens," he said, "then how are you talking to me? Shouldn't you be speaking another language or something?" George, like most people, had not been in many situations involving creatures from outer space, so he decided to get a feel for his current one by including as much research he could remember about such matters into the conversation, which for him consisted of the times he flicked to the science fiction channel whenever the local news was talking about something interesting.

"When one's entire culture and technology are devoted towards the integration of every single creature in the universe into a boundless state of universal peace," the alien answered, "one of the first barriers that society learns to break is the language one. It is also, as we have discovered, the easiest."

George nodded again, his chicken nugget following him. The smaller of the pair of creatures looked like he was about to burst. "Why are you wearing those jackets?" George asked.

"This planet is very cold compared to our homeworld," the larger alien responded. "We are much closer to our suns."

"And the sunglasses?"

"It is much brighter here, as well."

"How can it be hotter _and_ darker at the same time? If your planet was so close to the sun, wouldn't it be brighter?"

The alien smiled. "A rather astute observation, Mr. Smith. Our planet is darker because our suns are darker. And we have a lot more birds."

George decided to leave it at that, and waved the chicken nugget around in the air as he spoke, noting that the smaller of the aliens was grasping his head and hopping on one foot. Despite his personal beliefs, he was becoming very interested in these creatures. It was then it dawned on him that a visit from space aliens might make him into a unique or interesting person, so he moved to get rid of them. "So you're on a quest for universal peace," he said. "What does this have to do with me?"

"He's just... waving it around like that!" the smaller alien blurted suddenly.

"We have discovered that the best way to establish universal peace, Mr. Smith, is to first acquire ultimate knowledge," the larger alien said without even acknowledging his companion.

"Is that why you have developed all that monitoring equipment?" asked George.

"Partly, yes. But another part of it, Mr. Smith, is the tracking, documentation, and collection of samples from every single element in the Universe."

George just stared politely. The Honey Mustard dripped off the end of his chicken nugget, and the smaller alien let out a frightened squeal. "All right," he said, trying not to notice it.

"It is very simple, Mr. Smith. The Universe is made up of mostly empty space, and the occasional particle of matter. Empty space and its properties are fairly easy to comprehend. It is the matter, actually, that has proven to be more difficult.

"Through our extensive research, we have been able to understand and collect samples of almost every single type of matter and every single combination of it in the Universe. It was this way that allowed us to develop our superior technology. When one knows exactly how every single particle in a device will function, it is much easier to build it.

"As our technology expanded and our research grew, we became aware of a new type of element, a new molecule we had not yet encountered. The problem was its rarity, Mr. Smith. This molecule, this element, is so rare that in fact only one particle of it exists in the entirety of the Universe. As our research neared completion, we realized that it would not be possible to reach our goal of universal peace without it. It is essentially the center of the Universe."

George nodded. Despite his best efforts, he could not help but find this fascinating. He almost dropped his chicken nugget, but allowed it to only slip a moment. The smaller space alien turned a noticeably paler shade of green.

"We are now proud to say," continued the larger alien, "that we have collected samples of every other type of element in the Universe. When we got that far, we redoubled our efforts for finding this rare element, this incredibly wonderful particle, the last piece to our puzzle, and are even prouder to say that we have found it."

"Really?" asked George, and he simply couldn't hide the fascination in his voice. "Where is it?"

"We detected it traveling through space, passing one of our information probes a short while ago. We got an idea of what direction it was heading, and followed. We have measured its trajectory, taken every single variable into account that might affect its path, that is, wind speeds, gravity, light, heat, popular television shows, local politics, and radio traffic, and we are certain we know exactly where it is."

"Yes? You are?" asked George, excited.

"Mr. Smith," said the alien, "I'm afraid that the last remaining piece to our puzzle and ultimately the secret to universal peace, prosperity, happiness and enlightenment is, in fact, your chicken nugget."

George could not hide the surprise. He nearly dropped his food, causing the smaller alien to cover his eyes in fright. He wondered what on Earth his chicken nugget had to do with any part of this conversation. "What?" he asked, and instinctively lowered the fried food to his napkin, but did not let go. The smaller alien deflated like a balloon.

"Mr. Smith," the larger space alien said slowly, "This rare particle, this amazing element, the one we have been searching for, has just embedded itself in the food you hold in your hands."

George looked at the piece of food in his hand and wondered how, exactly, something so banal and uninteresting could be so terribly important that an entire race of creatures would travel mind-boggling distances just to see it. "But," he said, "This is _my_ chicken nugget."

"We understand that, Mr. Smith," said the eclipse. "And that is why I and my cohort have come to this planet. We are here to negotiate with you."

George idly turned the food around in his hands, and the smaller of the aliens started to sweat again. "You don't understand," he said, "I've been waiting two weeks for this."

"We understand perfectly, Mr. Smith, and we have not come empty-handed. We have vast reserves of knowledge that will take your civilization an innumerable measure of years to achieve. We have technology the likes of which will never be seen in this planet's lifetime. All, Mr. Smith, in exchange for the piece of food you were just about to eat."

"No, you really don't understand. This is something I have to do. I have to eat this, I've been waiting ages. You don't get why I have to."

"I assure you, Mr. Smith, that we are perfectly aware of the situation you are in. All of us have reviewed the black appointment book in which you keep your lifetime goals. All of us understand the pressure you are under. I would like to remind you, Mr. Smith, that we are willing to accommodate you greatly for this reason."

"Really? You've seen it?" George frowned; he didn't think anybody would care about his calendar, of all things. He'd only shown it to a few people, and their interest was not piqued in the slightest.

"Yes, Mr. Smith," the alien said. "We have seen it."

"And?"

"We find everything in it to be terrifically, staggeringly, enormously dull, Mr. Smith. But that is not our concern. We are willing to do quite a lot in return for a very simple service. We beg you to consider what we are offering. Would you like to box worlds? Bottle stars? Leap to distant galaxies in the blink of an eye? Would you like to know the meaning of life? Would you like to know the truth behind the Kennedy assassination? Would you like to know," the alien said, "where your cat is?"

George was listening with quiet interest, but was suddenly caught off guard. "My cat?" he asked.

"We understand you've been taking care of a small quadrupedal feline and have been befuddled about its whereabouts for approximately two years. We know exactly where she is, Mr. Smith. We will share this information with you if you are willing."

George almost let go of the chicken nugget at this. He _would_ like to know where his cat was, actually. Would it hurt to find out? "Yes," he said, "yes, why don't you tell me where my cat is?" He was, he was very shocked to find, very interested in this.

"Your cat has dug herself an alcove behind the water heater," the eclipse said. "We understand that she does not even know you are there. The fact that you haven't seen her in two point three years is purely coincidental."

"She doesn't know I'm _there?_ " George asked, horrified. "Who does she think is feeding her?" He was actually glad that this was the reason. It seemed like an appreciatively dull and uninteresting explanation.

The alien didn't waver an instant. "Your cat believes that God is feeding her, Mr. Smith."

George gaped. "God? My cat believes in God?"

"Yes, Mr. Smith. Your cat does not know where the food or water is coming from. She has put her faith in a higher power so that the Time of the Next Feeding or the Cleaning of the Great Litter Box will occur if she is faithful and virtuous."

"Faithful and _virtuous?_ She's a cat! And she's had kittens, I found them!"

"We understand that the idea of feline sin and virtue does not involve its more basic instincts, but rather more worldly behaviors such as restraining the urge to deface furniture or learning to relieve one's self in the litter box instead of the potted plants you keep by your kitchen."

"Is this... _normal_ cat behavior?"

"We have discovered that when one is faced with an occurrence that they can't immediately explain, it is not unusual for them to put their faith in an omnipotent deity and leave it at that. Your cat, Mr. Smith, is no exception."

George started to rub his temple with his free hand. Here he was, trying to live an uninteresting life, and now he was talking with aliens from outer space who were trying to get his chicken nugget and telling him that his cat was religious. "Look, I've been waiting a long time for this," he said. "It's the only thing I've planned for in years. Can't you just let me eat my chicken nugget and leave?"

"Mr. Smith, I believe I have established that this is a matter of utmost importance," said the alien with a tinge of impatience. "Have I not offered you enough incentive?"

George twirled the chicken nugget in his fingers, much to the chagrin of the smaller of the aliens, who was biting his nails. Ultimate knowledge? Since where did he care about such things?

"Mr. Smith," said the alien. "I would urge you to consider making the right decision. We have been searching for this element for quite some time. Ultimate knowledge. The most sophisticated technology imaginable. The possibilities are endless."

George twirled the chicken nugget thoughtfully. Just this morning his life had been so wonderfully dull, so joyously boring, and now he was holding the secret to universal enlightenment in his hands. Where had things gone wrong? Why should he believe these aliens? Why should he believe his chicken nugget had something to do with universal peace? He had enough trouble as it was trying to believe in his cat's piety

He had been first in line at the Chicken Emporium when it opened.

"Do you need more time to consider our offer, Mr. Smith?"

He had ordered the freshest batch of chicken nuggets.

"We are waiting, Mr. Smith."

He had taken the first piece fried that day.

"We have not been unreasonable, Mr. Smith. We are willing to conform, whatever your requests."

He had dipped it in Honey Mustard sauce.

"Mr. Smith, need I remind you that we are a _usually_ peaceful race?" said the alien sternly.

George snapped his head up, his decision finally reached. "No," he said. "You said that bit already."

He popped the chicken nugget in his mouth, closed his jaws around the secret to universal peace, and swallowed.

The two aliens were far too stunned at this act of outrageous stupidity to move or even speak, and George, who could have known the meaning of life, who could have had unimaginably powerful technology at his fingertips, or who, if he really cared about such a thing, could have been told that there _wasn't_ really a Kennedy conspiracy after all, stood up, put on his coat and walked home.

When he got back, the first thing he did was pull out his little black book and cross out his newly completed task. Next he checked behind the water heater. Sure enough, there was a large, black, and very surprised cat there. She had been wagging her tail slowly and dozing, but froze when he opened the closet door and turned on the light. Her wide yellow eyes dilated in complete shock as George reached down to pat her, to finally reach out and touch the mysterious feline he had been caring for all this time. When his hand touched her, every single muscle tensed in her small furry body, and she darted out of the apartment never, as usual, to be seen again.

He spent the rest of the day rocking in his rocking chair and looking out the window. He drank some water, went to the bathroom, and picked out a few apples from the fridge. He was about to get back to his chair when he heard a knock on his door. Strange, he thought, today seems to be full of surprises.

He gasped when the door opened, and backed up slowly when he saw who it was. "What are you doing here?" George asked.

"You should have found a better purpose, Mr. Smith," the green, eclipsing figure said with menace. "You could have brought greatness to your world, but instead you chose to keep things exactly the same."

George pressed his back against the wall, unable to continue further.

"Don't worry," the alien said. "We'll take care of the cat."

Nobody really noticed anything unusual that night, or even the next day. There was just a brief flash of light that spilled out into the parking lot of George Smith's apartment complex, but that could have been a camera flash, or a light bulb burning out.

The rest of the night was silent, except for the quiet return of a small black cat who seemed to have calmed her nerves enough to return home. It was empty again, which was fine with her. The apparition that had disturbed her peace only hours before made her question things she did not want to question.

She was surprised to find her food bowl full and her litter box clean. This miracle filled her with joy, and she renewed her faith in the higher power that was surely looking after her.

The only difference from before was that this time, she was right.

# The Panel

"The Representative from Alabama has the floor."

Tyler Watson, Senator of Alabama, smiled. He approached the stand, stood tall, and showed no weakness.

He took his seat at the microphone, and smiled. "Good evening."

The Speaker of the House was not fooled by Watson's demeanor. "Senator," he said. "I understand that you have a proposal for the Panel to Defeat Our Hostile Extraterrestrial Overlords. Some input, if you will."

"Yes," confirmed the Senator.

"Well," said the Speaker, "You have the floor."

Tyler Watson smiled again, and he gave his proposal.

The Senate floor was an eruption of screams and emotional torment. Nobody could propose something so horrid. There were not ways to describe it. How could a man, neigh, any creature, propose the _thing_ which Watson was so calmly dictating?

When he finished, tears lined the face of every house member. Some were on the floor. Several had vomited. Watson knew the panel would crumble. After hearing those words, no one could recover.

No government spending on _his_ watch. Not even to save the species.

And then something unexpected happened.

Senator Clyde from Arizona raised his hand.

"Seconded," he said.

# 8-ball & Ouija Board

Spread upon the motor oil stained driveway was a series of rickety tables loaded with junk. In the sunlight, every minute fault of the worn objects on display was lit up as if under a spotlight. There were childhood toys that may have once inspired nostalgia but now did little for their original owner other than take up space and collect dust. Dime store paperback books with their pages lovingly worn down until the corners were round were stacked ten volumes high. On a rack, clothing that would have been old-fashioned in the disco age wafted lazily in the breeze. It was the first time any of the clothes had moved at all in decades.

Steve inspected these objects, trying to find something he wanted. He was always there to support his friend Jim. They had been friends since high school, and now lived only two houses down. Jim said he was having a garage sale, and Steve said he'd be there.

Steve picked up a picture frame, which displayed a very pretty woman in a hilariously 1980s hairstyle and matching out-of-fashion pastel tank top. He chuckled, and held up the frame, which was made with gold-painted brass laid in a pattern that, unlike the woman's hair, had not gone out of style. "Who's this?" he said to Jim, who was surveying his sale with crossed arms.

"That's my mom," said Jim.

"I can't believe people actually wore their hair like that," said Steve.

Jim walked over and took the frame from Steve's hands. "Sorry, didn't know the picture was still in there," he said. He opened the frame and plucked the picture out of it. He gave the empty frame back to Steve. "A dollar for the frame, if you want it."

"Sure," said Steve, handing a dollar over. "They don't make them like this anymore."

Then something caught Steve's eye. It was sitting on a table just behind Jim. It appeared to be a perfectly spherical rock, and Steve was oddly compelled by it. He slowly took a few steps towards it, nudging Jim out of the way, as if in a trance. It wasn't an ordinary rock, as Steve noticed. Someone had painted an 8 on it, and a circle around the numeral. Steve placed his hands on the rock, and felt a spark, as if zapped by static electricity. He picked it up and turned it over, and saw a circular window set in the rock, which appeared to display nothing but blackness.

Then, the window displayed some words:

JUST TAKE ME

HE WON'T NOTICE

"Oh, you don't want that," said Jimmy, smacking Steve on the shoulder so suddenly that Steve dropped his newly acquired picture frame in surprise, spraying broken glass all over the driveway. "No, you don't want that at all," said Jimmy, not noticing or caring that there was now broken glass all over his garage sale. Customers leaped out of the way of the harmful debris.

"Why not?" said Steve. For some reason, he felt very compelled to hold onto the 8-ball at all costs.

"Why not?" said Jimmy. "Well, let me tell you a story about that 8-ball..."

* * *

Two packages under the Christmas tree examined each other psychically from beneath their collective wrappings and tape. Each box had a tag, and each tag had a name. The smaller box, which was perfectly cubical, went to little Jimmy. The larger, which was wider and flatter, was intended for the older and not-necessarily-wiser Sally.

The contents of the two boxes knew about each other since the moment they found themselves within the same vicinity. Each knew what the other was. Each acknowledged the others' existence with detached respect.

It wasn't such a coincidence that both an 8-ball and an Ouija Board were bought for two children who lived in the same house. The coincidence lay in the fact that they each happened to be ancient mystical artifacts with actual psychic power... bought for two children who lived in the same house.

The 8-Ball was in fact a Wiccan death clock crafted by the ancient Druids in the days when Stonehenge was considered advanced computer technology. It had the ability predict the exact time of one's death, which is subject to change according to one's personal habits.

How it had gotten under the Christmas tree involved a complicated series of misunderstandings. After the Druid empire mysteriously vanished, leaving behind only a few choice artifacts, the death clock found its way into the hands of a wandering trader. Over the course of hundreds of years, it spent time as a drum, a weapon, and even a soup bowl. Eventually, a crafty toy maker noticed that the death clock was the perfect shape for a magic 8-ball, and he painted it, filled it with oil and an answer block, and sold it in his shop.

The Ouija board was actually, well, an Ouija board, a real one, made in a time when such things were taken seriously. It was made of the wood from a tree that died of infestation, stained with the blood of a tortured animal, and printed with the ink caps found in a massacred village. The planchette was made from the bone of an extinct sea creature. To top everything off, it was _also_ possessed by a malevolent spirit.

The malevolent spirit was actually a shifty, psychopathic adviser to an Eastern European royal family, who advised exclusively in regard to what he called 'special, sensitive matters.' He was caught for his shady misdeeds and kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. An exorcist was later summoned to the palace after a series of complaints from the royal family that the walls kept leaking blood. The young priest unfortunately ended up banishing the spirit to the nearest spiritual artifact instead, which happened to be the Ouija board. It sat in the palace for several years, spelling out messages promising untold horrors to his murderers if only it could just get out of this spiritual prison, until it was auctioned off to a private toy collector for the modern-day equivalent of three dollars.

The two enchanted artifacts stared at each other from their respective planes of existence. Each were quite well versed on the subject of death. Each possessed powers of divination more powerful than any mortal. And while each had a certain degree of respect for the other, they also hadn't had anybody to compete with until just then.

"Pwesants!" came the voice of a young boy. "Santa came, oh boy!"

There came a dissatisfied grunt from somewhere behind the boy. "Santa is a myth," the voice said. "It's Mom and Dad, putting them under the tree after you sleep."

"Now, Sally," came a third voice, "Let's not do anything to harm the Christmas spirit, Hmm?"

Sally was a brooding teenager with oversized glasses, a semi-permanent scowl and straight blond hair. She kept her hair in a deliberately simple, unimpressive style because of what she called an active rebellion against fashion magazines' impossible standards (but in reality, it had more to do with the fact that she didn't know where to begin when it came to styling her hair properly). She spent too much time reading the newspaper to care. The hair care aisle at the grocery store frightened and confused her.

"Christmas Spirit?" said Sally. "You mean the commercialized system invented by toy companies so they can stuff their bank accounts every year?"

"Watch your language, young lady," came yet another, fourth voice. "Jimmy goes first, he's the youngest."

By no coincidence whatsoever Jimmy reached for the box containing the magic 8-ball. He felt strangely compelled by it, as if it were reaching into his soul, and his deepest, darkest desires were being yanked to the forefront of his mind.

"It's a 8-ball!" He shouted enthusiastically. "Whassit do?"

"You ask it questions," said Sally, "And when you turn it over, a little plastic lump floats to the top with one of twenty pre-packaged and totally inaccurate answers."

"Sally," said her mother. "Please, try to let him have some fun."

"You're spoiling him," Sally said. "He has to learn the way the world is some day."

"Well, you don't know whether it's real or not," replied the fourth voice.

"Come on, Dad-"

"Is there a Santa?" Jimmy asked, shaking the 8-ball. The room went quiet, and the rest of the family stared at its youngest member. For some inexplicable reason, they felt oddly curious about what the sphere would say.

"Well," said Mother, with a little more inquisitiveness than she meant, "What does it say, Jimmy? Is there a Santa Claus?"

Jimmy's face was wracked with perplexity. "It says, ' _I can give you any answer you desire. I am the master of divination. The truth of the world is at your fingertips._ '"

When Jimmy read from the window of the 8-ball, his voice was clear, his tone distinct. He did not sound like the toddler he really was, more like a studious, focused scholar. Mother and Father arched their eyebrows.

Sally bit her lip. "Well, that's a bit... uncommon," she said. "Maybe it's telling you to ask it again."

Jimmy frowned, shook the 8-ball, and repeated the question. He didn't get to read the reply, because his father snatched it from him, and read aloud, without thinking: " _Santa Claus was once a real man. He was a toy maker owner in Ireland. The villagers broke into his shop one day and tore open his throat, suspecting him of witchcraft. What you know of as Santa Claus is a mere shadow of this brutalized, tortured man._ "

He looked at his wife. "Dearest," he said in his nice-nice voice, a little more loudly than he probably should have, "I think... Santa... might have gotten the wrong 8-ball, don't you think?"

"I don't see how," said Mother testily, also a little too loud. "Seeing how I... _he_ got it from the same... _workshop_ that... _the elves_ told her to go."

"Is Santa... _sure_ about this?" Father asked.

Sally thought that her parents were behaving oddly, as if their banter wasn't for their benefit, but someone else in the room. "Oh, drop the Santa Claus façade," she said. "I'm going to open my present now."

Both Mother and Father stared into each other, and if anybody had been watching them, they would have thought that the two of them knew something that the children did not. Father placed the 8-ball on the coffee table, where the pouting Jimmy, who had been crying for his new mystical artifact, seized it. He stared hungrily into its glass eye.

"Oh," said Sally unenthusiastically when she was done unwrapping her present. "An Ouija board. As if we don't have enough mass-produced occultist crap laying around the house."

" _Language!_ " hissed her mother. "And didn't you _ask_ for an Ouija board? In _your letter to Santa?"_

"You're referring to the email I sent you," said Sally. "Five years ago."

"Well, I think someone should be showing a little more _gratitude_ to... Santa," said her father. "After all, Santa had to go to three different toy stores... _workshops_ to find one."

Sally recognized that she was going a bit far. She was not a bad person, merely cynical, entitled, and, most importantly, a teenager. She put on her best fake smile. "Thanks, Mom and Dad," she said. "It's great. It's made of wood and everything, it looks really nice."

"Well, what are you waiting for?" asked her father, who had noticed that something was odd about the 8-ball incident, "Ask it something, and see what it says."

Sally laid the board down on her lap, and the whalebone planchette on top of it. She gently rested her hands on top of it. "All right," she said, "What-" she didn't have time to finish, because the planchette suddenly started moving on its own accord, zipping this way and that across the letters like a bouncing pinball. Sally did her best to follow what it said, mouthing the letters as the planchette's single possessed eye moved over them.

"Ah, it must be one of those motorized ones," said her father. "Looks like the technology has come a long way."

"What is it saying, darling?" asked Mother.

The planchette stopped. Sally _knew_ that the planchette moved too fast for her to read every letter, yet still she could see the message in her head, clear as day. When she looked up, she was surprised, perplexed, and offended. "It said, 'Pay no heed to that toy of a billiard ball. You are in the presence of a wizard!"

"Ha ha," said Father. "I wonder why it said that... 'billiard ball,' It can't actually _know_."

"It's magic!" shouted Jimmy.

"It's not _magic_ ," said Sally cynically.

"My 8-ball! It sezzits magic!"

"Of course it says that," said Sally, "It's printed right there on the box."

"It says in the window" said Jimmy. "It says, _'The forces of the Dark are at my every whim. Let us see that useless plank do that!_ '"

"Ah, okay," said Father, "I think it's time to open another present, eh?"

"Yes, let's," said Mother. She grabbed a package with her name on it, and tore it open. It was an attractive golden watch. "Oh, it's lovely, dear!" she said. "And it's probably _not_ magic."

Her husband approached her, and kissed her on the cheek. "Of that, I can guarantee you," he whispered to her. "Glad you like it, babe." He turned to his children "Hey kids, look at this watch that I... Santa brought your mother."

The children would not respond. They were sitting on the floor cross-legged, staring into their spiritual artifacts, utterly transfixed. Jimmy, in a controlled and careful motion very uncharacteristic of a six-year-old, held up his 8-ball, speaking deeply and clearly. " _I will pay no attention to your worldly trinkets_ ," he said in a voice very much unlike his own. " _I seek only the superior enlightenment of the Death Clock of the Lost Druids._ "

"Ah," said Mother. "Well, perhaps you would like to work on that enlightenment with one of your other gifts from Santa?"

" _How dare you insult my abilities?_ " interrupted Sally, watching her Ouija board and speaking in a distant tone. " _You speak of trinkets? Look no further than yourself, you insolent rock._ "

"Kids, you don't have to fight," said Father. "If you want to blow off some steam I'm sure Santa has brought some nice video games..."

" _Ah_ ," said Jimmy, still reading off his 8-ball, still droning in a foreign voice, " _The father. Head of the household. Master of the family. You will suffer a tragic loss soon_."

"That's not a nice thing to say to your father, Jimmy," said Mother. "You take it back."

Father swallowed. "Tragic loss, huh? Very funny, son."

" _Mother,_ " said Sally, reading from the Ouija board, " _Beware of a tainted offer from someone you know. It will lead only to loss and pain._ "

"Kids," said Father. "That's enough. Now put down those toys and open your presents."

For a moment, nothing happened. And then, in a seemingly uncomfortable action, Sally and Jimmy tore their gaze away from their toys. "What happened?" asked Sally.

"Oh," said Mother, feeling relieved but not completely recovered, "You were just having some fun with your new presents. Now, open some more!"

"My turn!" shouted Jimmy excitedly, as if nothing had happened. "Me next!"

"That's my little scamp," said Father.

* * *

Father went to work the next day. He thought idly about the strange incident with the 8-ball and Ouija board, but the incident involving his son and daughter didn't seem as odd, looking at it from the perspective of the next day. Perhaps he just needed a bit of time to clear his head.

When he got to his office, though, he could tell that something was wrong. There seemed to be far more miserable faces than usual. People were shouldering past him loaded down with boxes. Moods and temperaments were sharp and irritable.

One of his fellow co-workers approached him. "Sorry Murray," he said. "We just found out about this today."

"Found out about what?" said Father as two more co-workers filed past him with boxes.

"The company's out of business," said co-worker. "Turns out this place was funded entirely by broken promises and credit default swaps. Classic Goldman Sachs situation. Our CEO just happened to be in the Cayman Islands at the time of bankruptcy, what are the odds?"

" _What?_ " said Father. "Are you kidding?"

"Nope," said co-worker. "It's a tragic loss, I know, but there's nothing we can do about it. Now, you better get to your office before somebody sacks it."

"Tragic loss..." Father repeated.

"What?" said co-worker.

"Nothing," said Father. "Just something my son said to me."

Mother, meanwhile, was having a much less stressful time of things, at least for now. The patients she had seen that day were friendly and cooperative, very much unlike the foul-mouthed alcoholics she was used to dealing with at the hospital. She only had about two semesters left in the nursing program before she could move on to the next phase in her education, which meant she still had a fair share of drunks in her future.

She was about to take a small break, when one of the doctors pulled her aside. "Can I talk to you for a bit, Mary?" he said.

"Sure, Tom," said Mother. She finished washing up her hands and joined the doctor. He led her down the hallway and into a small office. They both sat down, Tom at his desk, Mother in a large leather chair opposite the desk. "Did you hear about how I'm going to be starting my own private practice, soon?" said Tom.

Mother was visibly moved by this news. "No!" she said. "Congratulations."

"Thank you," said Tom. "It's been a long hard road, but hopefully all my work will pull off."

"That's great," said Mother. "What did you need to see me for?"

Tom got up out of his seat. "I'll need some nurses for my practice, of course," he said as he slowly walked toward Mother's chair. "I was thinking of putting an ad in the paper, but I'd rather go with people I know."

Mother didn't know what to do. "Well," she said. "I don't think the nursing program will allow me to work a private practice just yet. I think I need to be at a hospital."

Tom smiled. He sat down on the arm of Mother's chair, crossing his legs and staring down into her eyes. His smile was a little too warm for Mother's comfort. "Nonsense," he said. "I'm sure we can work something out with the University." He reached out a hand and gently brushed Mother's cheek. "There are benefits to working with me, you know."

Mother's demeanor changed from intrigue to alarm. She sprang up out of her chair. "Um, thank you Tom, but I'm married."

Tom did not flinch. He did not even leave the arm rest. "So?" he asked. "That's never stopped me before."

Without another word, Mother sprinted out the door. Visions of that Ouija board flashed across her mind as she pulled out her phone, dialing her husband. He answered on the second ring. "Murray?" she said. "Can we talk?"

Father didn't answer for a few seconds. "Did something happen?" he said.

"Are you all right?" Mother asked.

"Yes. I'm fine."

"No tragic loss?"

"Now," said Father nervously, "What makes you use those exact words?"

"Because I just had to be wary of a tainted offer from someone I know," said Mother.

"Shit," said Father. "Well. My company just went out of business. I lost my job."

Mother didn't say anything for a few minutes. "I think we should go check on the kids."

"Well," said Father, " _I'm_ not doing anything right now. I'll meet you at home."

* * *

By the time the two cars pulled into the driveway, an unspoken consensus had already been reached between Mother and Father. They left their cars and ran to the door.

They flung it open, looking for the kids. The baby sitter immediately sprang from the couch in alarm. "Is there something wrong?" she asked.

"Where are the kids?" asked Mother.

"In their room," said the baby sitter.

Without another word, Mother and Father rushed over to the room that belonged to their children. Just as they suspected, Sally and Jimmy were sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the 8-ball and Ouija board.

" _There_ you are," said Father.

"Kids, step away from the 8-ball and Ouija board," said Mother.

Jimmy held up the 8-ball. " _I see you have met your fates_ ," he said as he read from it. " _We have decided that rather than competing with our powers, we will combine them!_ "

Sally read from the Ouija board. " _We will dominate your family with our mystical abilities. Now, do you fear our power?_ "

Mother and Father exchanged looks. For several seconds, there was silence between them.

And then, they burst out laughing.

"You call that divination?" said Father through tears.

"I had a stuffed elephant that was scarier than you two," said Mother between guffaws.

The babysitter finally caught up and poked her head frantically through the room. "What's happening?" she said, startled.

"Oh, nothing," said Father. "We just got a couple magic artifacts for our kids for this Christmas, and they've turned out to be hardly more terrifying than my first pet will-o'-the-wisp."

Jimmy, who was still holding the 8-ball, said, " _Wait... you knew we were magic?_ "

"Of course we knew you were magic," said Mother. "Why do you think we _bought_ you?"

"For a little while we were worried that we'd left you alone with the kids," said Father. "But I knew my worries were misplaced."

Sally, reading from her Ouija board, said, " _You are not terrified of our powers?_ "

" _Powers?_ " said Mother. "You need to learn a thing or two about scare tactics, friend. When you say, 'beware of a tainted offer from someone close to you,' it better be a little more serious one of your co-workers hitting on you. Although, two hundred years ago, I'd have melted Tom's flesh off his face. But these days I don't draw so much attention to myself."

"And _Tragic loss?_ " said Father. "You think losing your job is a _tragic loss?_ What time period are _you_ from? I was there during the great depression, and, _I was having fun._ "

" _Erm,"_ said Jimmy as he held 8-ball.

" _Well, look here_ ," said Sally through the Ouija board.

"All right," said Father. "You've had your fun. Let go of our kids, or we'll show you some _real_ magic."

"Yeah," said Mother. "You know, we used to use Ouija boards as firewood back in _my_ day. Those castles were cold, and electricity hadn't been invented yet."

Sally and Jimmy looked up, and for the first time seemed to realize where they were. "What's going on?" asked Jimmy.

"Oh nothing," said Mother. "We thought we bought you some important learning tools. Instead they turned out to be hardly more than toys."

"So now what happens?" asked Sally as she stood up. "Do we burn them, or what?"

"Hardly," said Father. "Come on, let's get in the car so we can show you what wizards _really_ do."

"What're we doin'?" asked Jimmy.

"Same thing your father and I did when _we_ were kids," said Mother. "We're going dragon hunting."

"Yeah!" said the kids together.

* * *

"And _that,_ Steve," said Jim years later from his driveway, "is why I can't sell my 8-ball to you."

"Because it reminds you of the day you found out that your parents were wizards?" asked Steve.

"That," replied Jim, "And the fact that it's my responsibility now. Nobody gets away with hijacking _my_ consciousness and trying to take over my family."

"What about the Ouija board?" asked Steve.

"Sally had it framed. Apparently, the spirit trapped inside dealt with what he called 'special, sensitive matters' back in the old days when Russian royal families were still in power."

"What kind of 'special, sensitive matters?'" asked Steve.

"Marriage counseling," said Jim. "Sally keeps it around for relationship advice."

"Rough," said Steve. "Well, if you didn't want to sell your 8-ball, how did it end up in your garage sale?"

"It does that," said Jim. "It's been trying to get away for years. It even tried to hitch a lift in my ex's car when she tried to run off in the middle of the night. Boy, _that_ was an awkward negotiation. In the end, I had to give her my dog."

"Do you think it will ever get away?" asked Steve. "Will it ever be loose on the world again?"

"I don't know," said Jim. "Why not ask it? What do you think 8-ball, will you ever get away from my custody? Or will you forever serve your imprisonment, constantly under my watch, until you've wasted away into a pile of dust?"

Steve shook the 8-ball. A single message popped up on its window:

MY SOURCES SAY

FUCK YOU.

# The Ancient Persian

It was an old rug that I didn't even know I had until I went looking for a computer cable in my storage closet. It looked Persian, or definitely from somewhere in the Middle East, how old, I did not know. It was far too musty and dusty for me to keep around though, so I rolled it up and started hauling it to the dumpster.

That's when it lifted me off the ground and deposited me flat on the pavement face-first.

I couldn't believe that I had tripped over absolutely nothing at all. I had certainly done it in the past, but I thought those days were long gone. I stood up to collect the rolled-up rug, to no avail, as it was levitating just in front of me at eye level. I was not aware rugs could convey facial expressions, but there is something new to learn every day.

It glowered at me.

"Watch it," it said, "You were about to toss out a magic carpet." There was not a doubt in my mind that it was a Persian rug. I could hear the Persian accent, and for a moment I imagined it in a market stall in a crowded Iranian market trying to sell me some broken pots.

I pinched my nose to check to see if I was still conscious. I felt an appreciable amount of pain. "I was?" I said.

"I am older than your grandfather's grandfather's grandfather," the carpet said.

"You certainly smell like it," I replied. As if I'd been prompted, I let out a sneeze.

"You think yourself wise, boy?" said the carpet. "Many feet have trod upon my vibrant fibers. I have had beggars, sultans, kings and diplomats stride across me. Men, women, children, lions, tigers, monkeys, dogs and cats all have graced my surface."

"You didn't mention a vacuum cleaner," I said.

The carpet took this opportunity to sweep low to ground level, knocking my feet clean from under me. "It would not do well to talk back to me, boy," it said. I felt a rushing of wind against my face, as the carpet lifted me up and up into the sky. "All it would take is one flip of my side, and you will never crack another of your jokes again," the carpet threatened.

I nodded in understanding. "I see."

"Let me tell you a story, child," said the carpet as it drifted over the city. The smog, which was trapped over the city by the surrounding mountain ranges, was making my eyes water, and I started coughing. "I've come from over an ocean you couldn't see if I took you higher than these mountains," the carpet said. "I've heard more conversations than you could ever have if given an extra two hundred years to have them. I've heard the best laid plans of mice, men, and women alike, and I've never gotten an opportunity to tell anyone about them."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because jerks like you keep locking me in their damn closets, that's why," the carpet said sternly.

"Well," I said, "I think I might be able to help you with that. But there will have to be some changes."

"What kind of changes?" the carpet asked.

A few minutes later, my carpet lowered me to the ground. I walked straight into the building it had taken me to. "Hello," I said to the store clerk. "I need to buy a vacuum cleaner."

# A Shot in the Dark

Whatever you say about the internet, about the amazing achievements it has garnered on the frontlines of peace, information, or cheap pornography, I will never ever be convinced that it has made things easier for writers.

You see—

"Caroline?"

—The only thing the internet has done for writers is allow the rejection slips to pile on faster, and in greater numbers. Ten years ago, it would have taken my whole life to get rejected by one hundred literary agents, and today, in this modern information age, I've already achieved hecto-denial, and I'm hardly into my thirties.

"Caroline?"

" _What,_ Mark?"

Mark is my roommate. He was holding our mail in his hands. He usually just leaves the mail on the bar stool so I can knock it over on my way in from work. That's when I pick it up, toss the debt collection bills into the garbage, throw out the junk mail, and read the one or two pieces of actual mail that I get, only to discover that they were actually _more_ debt collection bills cleverly disguised as letters from my mom.

"You've got a letter from... NASA?" said Mark.

"Really?" I said, surprised. "That was fast... here, give it up."

I looked at the envelope. Yes, it was indeed from NASA. I had been so wrapped up in my digital exercises in futility that I had forgotten that I had recently used the physical post office to send a real letter to some actual astronauts. I didn't expect them to reply. After all, agents or publishers don't, and most of their work is done right here on planet Earth.

"So... what is it?" asked Mark.

"I asked them a question," I said. "It was a joke, really. I was a bit tipsy, and I had a few first class postage stamps, and I hadn't used my typewriter in a while."

"What was that question?"

"I asked if they could send one of my query letters off into deep space."

Mark blinked a few times. "Erm," he said. "You mean those letters you send asking people to publish you?"

"Yeah," I said.

A query letter is the staple of the publishing industry and the bane of writers and agents alike. In three hundred words or less, it is the job of I, the writer, to summarize my ninety thousand word novel in a way that is both enticing and easily understandable, and then follow it up with a polite request that they, the agent, ask to see more of my work. Most query letters on Earth are written by people who can't write a proper sentence, let alone a ninety thousand word novel. Then, when these people are asked to condense their novel into a single page, they end up turning out literary pieces worthy of... well, the third grade, maybe.

That might sound like good news to people like me, who _can_ arrange words on a page in a way that doesn't trigger peoples' gag reflexes, but it's not. Because you see, it is only by the time the agent has waded through six hundred query letters written by self-important and linguistically handicapped people, that they finally wander, bleary eyed, numbed by the onslaught of bad queries, onto mine. And they're not in the mood to hear about my kitschy, tongue-in-cheek detective thriller.

Form rejection.

"It's kind of funny," I remember telling Mark over a dinner of microwave pizza with my mouth full, his fussy girlfriend annoyed by my presence during their special movie night, "Agents hate it when you mass query them, you know? That's when you use the same query letter to copy and email a hundred of them at a time. But they all use the same form rejection letter. _Every single one of them_. Agents that work in different agencies... live in separate states... who have probably never even _heard_ of each other... they all use the same damn letter to tell you that they're not interested in your novel. And that's _if_ they reply to you at all."

"That's... er... that's great," said Mark.

"No, it's not. Anyway, it's just an observation."

Meanwhile, back in the present, Mark was trying to ask me something that he didn't want to. I could tell because he was biting his lip and scratching the inside of his ankle with his shoe. It must be incredibly painful every time he does that. I bet if he just learned to be confrontational, he wouldn't be missing so many layers of skin on his leg. "So... Sasha's coming over," he said.

"So you want me out of sight," I replied. "All right, I'll stay in my room."

"Thank you... er..."

"One of these days," I cut him off, knowing that an apology was coming, "I'd like to have free reign of my own apartment."

"Get a boyfriend. Then you can have free reign of his."

"That's Sasha's method, not mine," I said. "All right, I need to send more queries anyway. Have fun."

I went into my room, and tore open the letter.

" _Dear Caroline Jones,_

We have read your proposal to send your letter out into dark space, and have agreed that it is a reasonable request. As it happens, we are in the final stages of preparing our Hermes Space Probe, a small vessel that we hope could reach very near the speed of light with a combination of gravitational slingshots and a revolutionary particle drive. But that's all science stuff, which we're sure you don't care much about.

Anyway, the probe will be holding a gigantic cache of digital data, the most data ever sent out to space by any agency on Earth. On board will be music from great artists like Elvis Presley, oceanographic discoveries like the wreckage of the Titanic, anthropological data like human anatomy diagrams (don't worry, we'll make sure they include vaginas this time)—

"Erm," I said aloud.

"— _And various other miscellaneous material sent in by people like you. Granted, you'll be sharing hard drive space with people that didn't think we really landed on the moon or who think JFK was assassinated by the Kool-Aid man, but that's the beauty of the amazing human imagination, is it not?_

"Depends on your definition of 'amazing,'" I said.

" _Enclosed is an email address that you can send the final query letter and full manuscript to. We here at NASA want to assure you that one day you will get that book published, even if it's not on Earth, and not for a few million years._

Sincerely,

Jordan Myers,

NASA secretary and rock-star receptionist,

_Washington, D.C_."

"Holy shit," I said. "I mean... they're really going to do it. They're going to send out my query letter into _space!_ "

I was more excited about this than if I had gotten a full manuscript request from an agent. I sat down at my computer immediately.

" _Dear Intergalactic Space-faring Cosmonauts_ ," I wrote. " _I am seeking representation for my humorous detective thriller,_ _A Shot in the Dark_ _, Complete at 91,000 words..._ "

I smiled. The name of my novel was quite fitting. We would be firing a small silver projectile at the speed of light into the space between galaxies, literally the darkest place in the Universe. I finished up my query letter, and went to bed.

* * *

For a several days, I couldn't stop thinking about space. Mark couldn't help but remark upon my giddiness. In fact, he thought it was a refreshing change from my usual brooding and complaining that I still wasn't published.

"I mean," I said one time over coffee, "what if space aliens _really_ exist?"

"Chances are they don't," said Mark, ever the realist.

"But let's say they _do_ \--"

"--Which they probably _don't_ \--"

"Shut up, Mark. Anyway. What if my novel is the first taste they get of a culture from another galaxy?"

"Well, what did you put in it?" asked Mark. "Would they _like_ our culture?"

"Depends on if they have a sense of humor," I said. "It's a funny murder mystery. I hope they don't think that everyone in our culture kills each other all the time."

"--Which we do," said Mark, with one of those smug grins he put on when he knew he was being incorrigible. I playfully punched him on the arm.

The next day I checked my email. Three new messages. They all read like exactly this:

" _Dear Author:_

Thank you for sending our agency your query. We'd like to apologize for the impersonal nature of this standard rejection letter..."

I closed my browser, and went to work.

I think it's about time I specify how I feel about this book I wrote. I don't want to be a professional author or anything. I don't want fame or fortune, or for my name to be a household one. I just want to get the damn thing that I spent two years writing out in the public space somehow. I put work into it; I think I've earned a return. Even if it's only fifty cents, it's still _something._

It's not too much to ask, is it?

I tell my writer friends about my feelings on the subject, and they reply, that's how the industry works. That's just how it goes. You spam agents until one of them relents, and wait for them to close the deal with publishers. You can't get published without an agent, and agents don't usually take you unless you're published. Get in line like the rest of the common muck... there's nothing you can do about it. So chin up, you're a big girl!

And then I tell them that yes, that's how it goes, but I don't have to like it. Just \because things _happen to be_ a certain way, doesn't mean they should be. And however "it goes," at the end of the day I'm still not published, and still not happy about it.

Things changed on the day I got my two-hundredth rejection. Well, they didn't change for _me_ , and not right away, but they still did. I was staring at my email screen, hitting the refresh button so quickly my finger was getting tired and the key was about to fall off. This was it. I was depending on this last agent. I had made a pact. After two hundred rejections, I would:

1)Get very, _very_ drunk and

2)Give up.

I had come to the conclusion that two hundred query letters is enough letters to make my publishing efforts no longer worth it. If I sent any more letters out, then no matter what minimal compensation I might get, it wouldn't be enough to pay back all that time I lost hearing no after no after no.

And then it came:

" _Dear Author:_

Thank you for sending our agency your query. We'd like to apologize for the impersonal nature of this standard rejection letter..."

I screamed. I really did. All the excitement I had felt about my manuscript going out into space evaporated instantly, replaced with the cold, hard, judgmental realization of my failure. After all this time, after two years of typing and researching and reading about submission requirements and personally addressing letters, it had only ended in utter rejection. I couldn't comprehend my own sadness. I had never spent so much time doing something with absolutely zero results. Even my past boyfriends didn't add up to such a wasted amount of time. If you would have told me as a little girl that I was to spend two years laboring for something that will give me absolutely zero return, I would have punched you in the mouth. I was cool like that.

Mark burst into the room. I already had my coat on, and was putting on my gloves when he crashed into the room, saying, "Is everything all right? Are you okay?"

"No. Come with me. I'm buying. We're getting drunk. Or at least I am."

"What happened?"

My eyes were watering. The gravity of the situation was starting to hit. "I'll never get published... never... ever."

"Don't say that," said Mark.

"Don't say ' _Don't say that_ ,'" I replied in a mock high-pitched tone. "That's it. That's number two hundred. I give up. If the world's going to put up so much resistance to publishing the decent, cheesy work of a thirty-three year old secretary, then the world doesn't deserve me. Let's go. You want wine or liquor?"

"Beer," said Mark.

"Wuss," I said.

The bar was a pseudo-classy place with hardly any tables and even less dance space. It was near a fancy hotel. It's not the sort of place that college kids go to get blitzed on cheap beer. It's where you go while wearing your little black dress if you want to get laid by someone who keeps a yacht in their private lake and won't call you the next day.

I put aside quite a bit of money for this day. If I _did_ have success with an agent, it would have been enough to get drinks for most of my friends. Since I hadn't, it was enough to get me and Mark so trashed that the police would probably get involved. I put down two glasses of the House Shiraz before long. The bartender gave me a worried look as I ordered two more.

I don't like to drink so much. One might say I'm a little too forward when I'm sober. But when I'm drunk, all my social barriers come crashing down, and I become embarrassingly candid about myself, my friends, and the world as a whole.

"I really tried," I said. "After a while I started pasting my picture into my queries."

"What fer?" said Mark. He talks really funny when he's drunk.

"I was desperate," I said. "I thought that the agent would think, 'Oh, look! She's witty! She's cute! She's blonde and wears glasses! Let's publish the hell out of her."

"I should probably call Ssssassh... Sasha," said Mark. "She'll want ter know when I am..."

"You need to drop that bitch," I said.

Mark was utterly surprised. "What?" he said.

"She's a bitch. She manipulates you," I said as I took another sip of the Shiraz.

"Ch...aroline! How can you say that?" said Mark.

"She controls you. You buy her food and clothes, and she thinks she owns our apartment when she's there. She demands attention and respect and sulks and throws fits when she doesn't get it." I almost covered my mouth. I had crossed that magical line in the sand about disrespecting a roommate's romantic interest.

"Thash.. _not..._ a nice thing to shay!" said Mark.

"And she steals my tampons," I said, figuring that I might as well clinch the deal with evidence.

"What? No she... doven't!"

"Oh, so _you_ keep better track of them than me, huh?"

Mark got up. "Yer drunk. I forgive you. Em' goin' home."

He pushed the door to the bar open and staggered home. It was only a block away. I dropped my head to the bar. The bartender came over. "You all right?" she asked.

"I'm such a bitch," I said to the counter. "I tell that to people, but nobody ever believes me."

"You're not a bitch," said the bartender.

"There," I said, pointing to where I thought her head was without lifting my own. "See what I mean?"

I heard some music. It took me a while to figure out where it was coming from. Then I felt something move in my pocket. I reached in and grabbed my ringing phone. "What?" I said into it.

I don't know how to describe the sound that came next... and I think of myself as a halfway decent writer. It sounded like... well... like a chain-link fence being tossed into a blender that was made out of small furry rodents.

I hung up the phone. If I had been sober, it probably would have disturbed me greatly. But the alarmingly large group of wine glasses next to me told a different story.

My phone rang again. I took a little bit longer to answer it. The noise came back again, but it was much softer. After a while, I heard voices.

"...forgot to turn on the Empathetic Translator, you idiot."

"Is that her?" said another voice in the background.

"Um," I said. "Hello?"

"Is this Caroline? Caroline Jones?"

I sat up. For one fleeting moment, I thought that this might be The Call. The notorious call from a literary agent who wishes to represent you. But then, even through the tremendous quantities of alcohol, I remembered that no agents had asked to see my work, and therefore wouldn't know enough about my manuscript to think about representing me. "Yes," I said. I sighed. Must be another debt collector.

"Hi... wow... this is kind of exciting. I mean, this is only the sort of stuff you see in movies, you know?"

"You mean somebody paying their overdue bills? I've heard of it..."

"What are you talking about?"

"Never mind. What do you want?"

"My name is G'nurrlgaaath." It sounded like yet another incomprehensible noise, like someone vomiting and sneezing at the same time.

"Look, I don't have any money, all right? I never do. I can't pay you."

"No, you don't understand, miss," said G'nurrlgaaath. "We picked up the Hermes space probe. The one from NASA."

"Oh, you're from NASA," I said. "You got the email I sent, right?"

"Email? No, I mean, we got the space probe. We have your manuscript and your query letter!"

"Is this some kind of joke?" I said, hurt. "Look, don't you guys have space stations to build or something? Don't you have more important things to do than pick on some poor woman because she can't ever get published?"

"Miss Jones," said G'nurrlgaaath, "We're completely serious. I'm a literary agent. And I would like to publish your book. Now, we're pretty far away, about twenty-five thousand light-years, actually, but we like what we see and our people would be thrilled to read the work of an alien from another galaxy."

"This isn't funny," I said. My eyes were starting to water again. "I wasted two whole years trying to get published. It was horrible. I've never felt so worthless and incompetent in my entire life."

"Miss Jones," said the voice, sounding somewhat desperate. "I'm really serious. We're aliens from another galaxy. We teleported the Hermes space probe to us when we saw that it was heading our direction at a velocity approaching the speed of light. We didn't know it would be a first contact probe! And such a wealth of information... we spent several months trying to get it to work with our computers, but it was absolutely worth it!"

I didn't say anything for quite a while. "If I believe you," I said, "What does that mean for me?"

"Well, that means you'll get published, of course!" said G'nurrlgaaath. "We can't really compensate you, unfortunately... we're so far away and we don't use currency. We never quite got the hang of it, you see. Anyway, we just want your permission."

"Oh of course. Why would you offer me money? It's not like you're a real publisher or anything." I rolled my eyes. "Fine, go for it." I remember thinking at the time: What was the harm in giving a prankster astronaut permission to print my book? "How did you get my phone number?"

"Did you hear that?" said G'nurrlgaaath to some unheard people near him. "She said yes!" There came a huge noise. It sounded like the digestive tracts of every single whale on Earth making simultaneous bowel movements. It took me a minute to find out that it was cheering. At the time, I still thought it was an alcoholic hallucination. "Anyway," continued G'nurrlgaaath, more excited than ever, "You printed your phone number at the bottom of your query letter. It was just a matter of hijacking a communications satellite. We had to send the signals back in time so they could reach you in the present, but we thought it was well worth the time and effort."

"Uh huh," I said. I was just humoring them at this point. "Look, don't you guys have better things to do? It's not right harassing me like this. I could call the police. It wouldn't be the first time they've put an astronaut behind bars."

"No, you don't understand!" said G'nurrlgaaath. "I mean it! We're really creatures from another planet! Another _galaxy,_ even!"

"Sure," I deadpanned.

"Well, we've got one more question, Miss Jones," said G'nurrlgaaath. He was practically giggling with joy. I was infuriated.

"Go ahead. Fire away," I said through gritted teeth.

"Do you know how we can reach this Elvis fellow? We'd like to sign a few albums..."

"Fuck off," I said, and hung up the phone. Then I slammed it on the counter so hard the screen cracked. It was an interesting little crack: like an aloe plant, or a fern.

"Who was that?" asked the bartender.

"Just some jerks at NASA making fun of a failed writer," I said. "Another Shiraz, please."

"Actually, I was thinking of getting the bouncer to walk you home," said the bartender. "You've had enough."

"Will you also let him have sex with me?"

I felt a pair of hands on my shoulder. "Not while I'm on the clock," said the bouncer. "Besides, I don't swing that way. Now let's get you home."

And to think, _I_ had to hold _Mark's_ head over the toilet when I got back. I had a lot to look forward to.

* * *

The next morning I woke up with the sort of hangover that can only be adequately described with the assistance of several medical journals. I crawled on the floor to the bathroom, pulled myself to the counter, got out a couple aspirins and swallowed. Then I inched my way into the kitchen, tripping over Mark, who had curled up under the table.

"Oh god," he said. "Oh god oh god oh god..."

I hoped he hadn't remembered what I said last night. But I also hoped that I had planted a seed of doubt in his mind. Maybe one that would blossom into the act of him dumping Sasha. I really didn't like her, mostly because I thought Mark was such a good guy and didn't deserve the belittling presence that she had.

I helped him up, with great effort. I couldn't exactly stand myself. I had to hold onto the sink for support. When we were both standing, we stood, wheezing, holding our heads with one hand and bracing ourselves against the kitchen counter with the other.

After a few minutes, Mark spoke. "You're right," he said.

I didn't know what he was talking about. "I'm sorry?"

"Don't be. You're right. Sasha's a bitch. I need to get rid of her."

"Oh, you remembered?" I said.

"Yeah," I said. "That's really all though. There was a _lot_ of beer. Good beer, however."

"Only the best for you, roomie," I said, giving him a pat on the shoulder.

"Besides," he said. "I've always wondered why she stopped sending me to buy her tampons."

I handed him my cell phone with the cracked screen. "Make the call," I said.

"What happened here?" he said. The screen itself was fine, but the plastic covering it had a large split traveling right down the middle.

"Some jackass astronauts at NASA called me last night and said they were aliens who wanted to publish my book."

"Ouch," said Mark.

"I was pretty upset about it. I'm glad I took it out on my phone and not the bartender."

"Well," said Mark, typing Sasha's number into my phone, "How do you know it _wasn't_ actually aliens from another planet?"

"Because they haven't launched the probe yet, dummy."

"The Hermes? Yeah, they launched that almost a year ago. You don't remember?"

I shook my head. "I thought they would have sent me an email or something, at least."

"It didn't get that much coverage. It's just a probe. Nobody really cares. It's like how hundreds of satellites go up every year, you know? It's just another launch."

"Well, I still thought it was in bad taste," I said.

"Hey Sasha." Mark had apparently reached his soon-to-be-former girlfriend. "There's something I've got to tell you. Can you come over?" He nodded a few times. "No, it's just important, that's all. Can you make it?" He closed his eyes tightly. "No, I'm not trying to trick you. You don't have to come by if you don't want to." He rolled his eyes. "Oh, you want to come over now? That's great. See you soon." He hung up the phone and looked at me. "Now, this time, you probably _should_ get lost."

"Should I lock my possessions in my room?" I asked. "Some stuff might break."

"I don't think so. But you should probably close your door."

I smiled. He smiled back. Then I put on my coat and left.

I spent the evening in an internet café looking over my piles and piles of rejections. Most were forms. Some were personal. All of them said the same thing: We're sorry, we really are, we just don't want you to send us any more of your work. It doesn't get any easier the more you see that. My book wasn't a groundbreaking work of literary fiction, by any means. It wasn't going to win any awards. But it still didn't make me feel great when I was all finished with my final draft, staring at the query letter that I put months of work into and saying to myself, how could anyone say no? How could someone look at this and truly say, No, I'm not interested, not even a _little_ bit? Only to find out that, not only _will_ someone say no, but _two hundred_ someones.

Of course, when you're the writer, you've got a bigger stake in your letter than any agent. You have an emotional attachment to your work, so you're looking at it through a biased lens. But still, you think to yourself, _someone's_ going to like what I write. This thought is especially prevalent as you're walking through bookstores, watching the latest teenaged heartthrob mythological creature mashup selling dozens of copies per day. _Someone's_ going to want to buy my work! It's better than _this_ stuff.

I thunked my head on the desk. A few surprised people jumped in their seats. The girl behind the counter shook her head disapprovingly. I wanted them all to go to hell. And then come back so I could kick them. And then go to hell again.

The door opened. I don't know how I did this, but I just knew there was trouble. It didn't open with any more ferocity or noise than usual. I just got some really bad vibes. A chill went down my spine.

And then a voice that I was not too happy to hear said, "This was _your_ idea, wasn't it?"

I looked up. It was Sasha. And she wasn't too happy.

"Oh," I said. "It's you."

"You gave him the idea didn't you?"

"Are we really doing this?" I said, not in the mood.

"You told him to do that, didn't you?" Not a tear. No emotional fragileness usually tantamount to someone who had just been dumped. Just good, old-fashioned anger.

"You're just upset that your free clothing, food, tampon and gravy train stopped coming."

"I liked him," said Sasha.

"You liked his wallet. He's better than that. I'm going. Don't follow me."

"You can't tell me what to do!" Sasha called after me as I left the internet café.

"The police can," I called back.

I went home. Nothing was broken, and nobody was dead. "Hey," said Mark from the couch, still massaging a headache. I was impressed. It's not easy to dump an emotionally manipulative partner while nursing a hangover.

"Sasha came to see me," I said.

"Oh, boy."

"She just shouted at me a bit. Didn't even follow me home." I plunked myself on the couch next to him.

"So, I was thinking," said Mark. "Since you were so nice to me and bought me drinks last night..."

"Don't count yourself _too_ lucky. You were just there," I said.

"Well, anyway, I was thinking I could return the favor and buy you some dinner tonight."

I looked over. "Sure," I said with a smile. "I'd like that."

Needless to say, I married him three years later.

* * *

The wedding reception was incredibly small. We only invited close friends and our 'favorite' relatives. We didn't believe in the big, white, expensive Christian weddings where nobody knows each other and everybody feels jealous and bored. It was a small function between people who cared greatly for each other's company, and more importantly, for the bride and the groom.

It's also much more socially acceptable at smaller weddings for the bride and the groom to drink so much alcohol that their blood becomes flammable.

Mark was quite a good swing dancer, which is fine and all, but I'm not. It's actually quite easy to follow in swing dancing when you're drunk. It's easier to toss around a woman weighing forty pounds less than you when her reflexes and joints aren't putting up a fight.

At last, it was time to retire to the hotel room for the last, and arguably the best, part of the wedding.

Here is where things got odd. Not with Mark, but my cell phone. First of all, I _knew_ I had turned it off. Secondly, I hadn't even brought it with me. But still it rang.

My purse was sitting on the nightstand. I reached inside and pulled out the new phone I had bought the previous week. I was so startled that it was even there at all, that I dropped it. When I picked it up... perhaps it was the alcohol that made me see this, but the screen was cracked again, just like my old phone. I'll be damned if the crack didn't look just like an aloe plant, or a fern. Furthermore, the number that was displaying on the screen wasn't a number at all, but a series of odd symbols that I knew my phone didn't know how to display.

In any other circumstance I would have just shut it off and continued my business with my new husband, but these strange situations compelled me to answer it.

"Hello?" I said.

The voice on the other end was quite troubled. "Miss Jones?"

"That's _Missus_ Jones," I said. When Mark and I got married, he actually got my name. He knew who wore the trousers.

"Er... well," the voice continued. "This is G'nurrlgaaath. Your agent."

I didn't know what to say. "You're that jerk from NASA again, aren't you?"

Mark smacked his forehead with his palm and made a reach for the phone. I pulled away.

"No, Caroline. This is G'nurrlgaaath again. Your agent from the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy."

I thought about that for a good two minutes. There were too many odd happenings for me to keep believing that this was just another corny prank. The crack on the screen. The symbols when the call came in. The fact that the phone was not supposed to be there in the first place.

"Well... what can I help you with, G?" I said.

"Missus Jones, there has been a... problem. Your book... well, it's selling quite well, you see. Astronomically so. Nothing else in the galaxy sells quite like it."

"Well, that's good, isn't it?"

"Well, the _reason_ it's selling is... because, well, there are a lot of different, shall we say, _interest groups_... with different interpretations of your work."

"You mean, like teachers using different study guides?"

"More like genocidal maniacs and their armies."

I rolled my eyes. "It's a cheesy detective thriller about a senator who's murdered with a bow and arrow while he's having sex with his mistress in a crappy hotel room. How could _that_ possibly inspire an entire war?"

"Er... well," said G'nurrlgaaath, "That's the thing... you're from another _galaxy._ Not all of your words translate perfectly. And while we're a small galaxy, we've got more than a billion different dialects and languages..."

"Okay, I see it. But it's not any reason to kill people over."

"Well, you're not really from here, you see." G'nurrlgaaath was starting to sound genuinely frightened. "Money, religion, power, government, heck, even literary agents... we've never had them before. Your book introduces all these things to us and, well... some people are overcompensating."

I sat down on the bed. "My book is... killing people?"

"Of course not," said G'nurrlgaaath. "People are killing each other over your book."

Mark was looking genuinely puzzled. He ran his finger though his hair, and flopped down prone on the bed. "Not how I 'spected m' hunneymoon to start," he muttered.

"So... so what do you want me to do?" I said. "I mean, I didn't want any of this. I was just trying to get published."

"I need to know..." said G'nurrlgaaath, "Why was the senator engaging in sexual relations with another woman while he claims to be a champion of family values? It's very important that I know the true answer to this."

I shrugged. "Well, he's a scumbag hypocritical Republican male. They do that."

G'nurrlgaaath didn't say anything for a very long time. I could tell that my answer had made him unhappy.

"No... no..." he said with a trembling voice.

"G?" I said. "What's going on? What did I say?"

"We... made a pact. My people, that is, and a neighboring planet. Whomever's interpretation turned out to be correct would take the other population as prisoners. It was the only peaceful solution we could come to."

"But... G!"

"I'm sorry, Caroline," said G'nurrlgaaath. He was making an odd noise. I think if I were to equate it with anything, it would be whimpering. "I'm going to go with my family now. We're going to be on a slave world but at least we'll be together."

"Wait!" I said.

But G'nurrlgaaath had hung up.

I put down the phone. I didn't know what to think, or say. Mark sat up and put his hands on my shoulders. "Who was that?" he asked gently in my ear, making a great effort to articulate his words. "I thought you weren't going to bring your phone today."

"I didn't."

"But it was right there. In your purse."

"I know," I said. "I don't know how it got there."

Mark processed that for exactly five seconds. "Well," he said. "However that phone got there, we still have a wedding to finish up."

I smiled. "I suppose we do," I said.

* * *

The next thirty years of my life were terrifically uneventful. I skated by performing minimal amounts of work at my job as an orthodontic receptionist, generally making little if any impression on the world save my office chair.

My marriage to Mark didn't last as long as I thought it would. I didn't ever think that children would be an issue. Over the course of countless political debates that we had, I thought I had made it abundantly clear that I did not wish for children: not only did I dismiss the possibility of having some of my own, but I wasn't crazy about adoption either. During those conversations, about which usually concerned overpopulation or some other huge social situation we could hardly comprehend, he had made mention that perhaps one day he would like children of his own, but wasn't completely sure.

As the years progressed, something flipped in him. He smiled more when children were around, sometimes nudging my shoulder, to which I would reply with a curt smile and a polite shaking of my head.

The highlights of our marriage were when we went traveling. Mark had quite a hefty trust fund stashed away from when his favorite uncle died, so we went on cruises, backpack hikes, and good, old-fashioned road trips. But each time we got back, there was that same park in front of our house with increasingly aging children playing in it. And Mark would whimper like a dog.

He wanted to spread his seed. That's understandable. The urge to reproduce clamped on the back of his brain with the ferocity of a badger and just as much unwillingness to let go. He left me to go find a fertile woman that didn't openly revile children the way I did. We were friends for years after that, until he got hit by a bus in his fifties and died.

On my sixtieth birthday, there came a horrifying noise from the sky. The sky flickered from pale blue to electric pink, green clouds spontaneously formed, and huge black silhouettes with the persistence of cataracts hung in the air, eclipsing the sun like a shattered moon.

And then, the sky itself seemed to speak.

"CAROLINE JONES?"

I had been walking my dog in the park, enjoying the lack of screaming crotch-fruit playing on the jungle gyms on account of it being a school day. I paused, not believing what I had heard.

"CAROLINE JONES?" the sky repeated.

My dog started barking. I didn't move my head, guessing, rightly so, that if whomever was trying to address me knew how to rig the sky into a custom sound system, then they probably didn't need me to point my voice at them directly. "Er... yes?" I said.

"CAROLINE JONES OF SAN FRANCISCO STREET, ARIZONA, UNITED STATES, EARTH, MILKY WAY GALAXY?

I blinked a few times. My dog continued barking. I wanted to kick him. "That's... that's me," I said.

"OH GOOD," said the sky. "FOR A SECOND WE THOUGHT WE HAD THE WRONG PLANET."

One of the cataracts descended from the sky, landing ring in front of me. And from it stepped... things.

No matter how much science fiction you may have read, no matter how many UFO believers you've met, no matter how many acid tabs or other illegal drugs you may have ingested in your life, there is still nothing to which you could accurately compare the things emerging from the space ships. They were alien, plain and simple. They weren't carbon based, bipedal, gray skinned, or even arguably solid. They defied physical description of any Earthly kind. They were creatures from another galaxy, and this was abundantly, irrefutably clear.

One of them oozed to me. "Caroline Jones?" it asked me with a series of squishes and gurgles.

"Yes," I said. Whatever doubts I once had about extraterrestrials ended there. My life became extraordinary that day, and had always been so.

My dog hid her eyes under her paws.

More creatures emerged from the space ship. They, too, were indescribable. They were amazingly diverse in size, shape, density, and presence. An entire ecosystem of otherworldly creatures.

Except for the last one. He- and it really was a he- was wearing a blessedly familiar blue pinstripe suite. He was bipedal, had green skin, two eyes, and ten fingers. The only thing that was terribly off-putting about him was that he had a single ear that sprouted from the top of his head and coiled like a snake around his crown, much like a beehive hairdo. He smiled. It was a genuinely warm smile, which came from a human-looking mouth.

I knew exactly who he was. He came up to me and extended a hand. It was G'nurrlgaaath **,** my extragalactic literary agent. "Nice to finally meet you, Caroline," he said.

"Likewise, G," I said, taking his hand. He even knew how to shake hands properly. "So what's going on here?"

"We're here to end things," said G'nurrlgaaath. "The war is over. We've put aside our difference and forged an alliance, and the first thing we decided we should do was come to Earth to see you."

"What for?" I asked.

One of the oozes piped up. "To arrest you for war crimes, of course," it said.

I dropped the leash for my dog. She took the opportunity to sprint away as fast as her tiny paws could carry her. "What was that?" I said.

"Many of our people have died," continued the ooze.

"And mine," interjected another.

"Don't forget me," said something that appeared to be an absence of light and mass.

"Planets have been shredded to pieces," said the ooze. "Entire populations have been displaced. Trillions of people have died."

I didn't know what to say about this. "I'm... I'm sorry," I said.

"And all because you had to get your novel published," said the ooze. "Did you think about the consequences you might bring?"

"I..." I said. "No. I'm sorry."

"Well, now you know," said the ooze. "We're here to bring you to your hearing."

"But... I mean," I tried to defend myself. "It's not like _I_ started those wars! It was just a novel. You didn't have to kill yourselves over it."

"It doesn't work like that, Caroline," said G'nurrlgaaath. "Maybe in _your_ world, it might, but we treat the written word very differently in the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy."

"I was just trying to get published," I said.

G'nurrlgaaath laid a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. He smiled. "I'm sorry, Caroline," he said. "You've got to come with us."

I nodded. I was an old lady. The past thirty years of my life had been nothing but taking calls, scheduling appointments, looking for variation in my life, and utterly failing to do so. Now I didn't do these days but collect retirement checks and knit. And there were only so many pattern books in the world. "Okay," I said. "Take me away."

The next thing that happened, I couldn't have predicted if I'd been given a thousand years to do it.

My phone rang.

A shrill ringing of music punctuated the air. The aliens stopped dead in their tracks, puzzled.

I picked up my phone.

"Is this Caroline?" said a voice on the other end.

"Yes," I said, thinking it might be another debt collector. "I've paid all my bills. I'm retired. What do you want now?"

"No, you don't understand. My names Janet Smith."

The name sounded vaguely familiar, but it didn't exactly boggle my mind at the time.

"I'm a publisher," said Janet.

I didn't say a word. I just let her go on.

"I've got your novel, _A Shot in the Dark_ _._ It's been sitting in our slush pile for over two decades, but I don't know why it hasn't been picked up yet. It's _brilliant!_ It's funny, and I love your characters, and the plot glides along like a—"

"Are serious?" I said. "Are you _fucking serious?_ "

"I know, it's very exciting," said Janet. "But we'd like to talk about a deal here. Do you have any other manuscripts you can show me? We could work out a three-book contract."

"Thirty years!" I said. " _Thirty years!"_

"Sorry, hon," said Janet. "Sometimes it takes that long. It's how the game is played."

"Did you know that my book started a war in another galaxy? And that it's _over_ now? _"_

"Is that what all those black dots in the sky are?" said Janet. "I thought to myself, there's probably a _reason_ why the sky is pink right now..."

"Go to hell," I said. "Go right to hell and take the rest of your stupid industry with you."

I spiked the phone on the ground. It bounced at my feet and ricocheted off a wall. It slid away from me and landed a few feet away from the black cataract ship.

"So," I asked G'nurrlgaaath, "What's it like on this world I'm going to?"

"It's beautiful," said G'nurrlgaaath with a smile. "We've got four and a half suns. There's nothing quite like watching those blue stars shine through emerald green mushrooms twelve stories tall... leopards the size of commercial buildings lounging on beaches of purple sand..." His eyes grew distant as he thought about his homeland.

"That sounds lovely," I said. "I know I'm a prisoner of war and all, but can I wander around a bit before the execution?"

"I don't see how that's a problem," said G'nurrlgaaath. "I'm sure they'll let you hang around a bit. I bet you they might even let you do a book signing. There are plenty of people out there who loved your book, and didn't even kill anybody over it."

I found myself briefly imagining what it would have been like if Jesus had held a book signing for the Bible.

"Missus Jones," said one of the oozes, "We should go now. No need to bother this galaxy any more than we already have."

G'nurrlgaaath took me by the hand and lead me to the prison ship. I noticed a something on his hand that didn't look like it belonged. I thought it might be a glove he was wearing, or some kind of birthmark I studied it more closely, and then laughed out loud when I saw what it was.

It was a dark green tattoo on the back of his hand, in the shape of an aloe plant, or a fern.

# Danny Dizzle

Based on "Danny Deever" by Rudyard Kipling

With Apologies to that same Rudyard Kipling.

"Why's that bass beat playin' so loud?" said Posse-On-Patrol.

"To get your asses to show up," the Shot-Calla said.

"What makes you looks so pissed, so mad?" said Posse-On-Patrol.

"I don't wanna watch, he was my boy," the Shot-Calla said.

"They're killin' Danny Dizzle, son, they're layin' his ass down.

"They're pourin' out his forty an' he ain't gonna make it out.

"They're celebratin' his demise with a bullet to the brain.

"They're wastin' Danny Dizzle, son. I told you they weren't playin'."

"Why the ones in the back all pantin' and sweatin'?" said Posse-On-Patrol.

"It's cold outside, it's cold as ice," the Shot-Calla said.

"That mutha in the front just fell down," said Posse-On-Patrol.

"It's just the sun, it's still real bright," the Shot-Calla said.

"They're pastin' Danny Dizzle, son, they're laughin' in my face.

"They're putting him in a fuckin' pine box, buryin' him without a trace.

"He gots no service, he gots no priest, no fuckin' eulogy.

"They're killin' Danny Dizzle, son, just to fuck wit' me."

"His hangout pad was next to mine," said Posse-On-Patrol.

"He's sleepin' in the ground tonight," the Shot-Calla said.

"I liked to drink his fuckin' beer," said Posse-On-Patrol.

"Danny's drinking alone tonight," the Shot-Calla said.

"They're cappin' Danny Dizzle, son, remember where you at.

"He killed a homey in his sleep, 'stead of shooting him in the back.

"He dead as saints and all because he broke some fuckin' code.

"They're icin' Danny Dizzle, son, t'make sure all y'all get told."

"Why do I here gunshots now?" said Posse-On-Patrol.

"Danny's making one last stand," the Shot-Calla Said.

"What was all that screamin', loud?" said Posse-On-Patrol.

"That's Danny gettin' what he earned," the Shot-Calla said.

"They've gotten Danny Dizzle, son, they shot him in the head.

"He killed a rival homey, and they made sure he got dead.

"They hunted him, an' flushed him out, like a cock'roach in the sink.

"Danny Dizzle's dead now, son--

"Now let's go get some drink."

# A Marriage of Magic and Science

It was a perfect union of the most advanced of sciences and the darkest of magics. A spell book, written by the late Aleister Crowley, provided the incantation. We were going to burn it if the spell didn't work, lest someone asked why the magical symbols in it so strongly resembled famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, or the Great Wall of China.

There is a reason, of course. Aleister, the brilliant old coot, knew that a circle of power for a spell that relocates an entire planet would of course have to be as large as one, if it was going to work. So Aleister created his own magical language in which all the letters resemble things that humanity has conveniently already built. That's why the diagram looks more like a world travel guide than a spell of dark magic.

My part in the plan was simple, at least for me. I'm a scientist. Jack Parsons is the name. I've been a pagan for as long as I can remember. I once wrote a spell that was supposed to turn me into the Antichrist so I could destroy Christianity. Instead I got a formula for rocket propulsion. Oh well. When life gives you a rocket propulsion formula, become a rocket scientist, I guess.

We had set up the final stage of the spell in a desolate desert in Nevada. And by "We," I of course mean myself, Jack Parsons, rocket science occultist, and L. Ron Hubbard, drug-addled science fiction author, con artist, and boat thief.

Aleister Crowley was with us, despite being, as I have said, long-dead. And I'm not just saying that he was in our hearts. I mean his spirit was being channeled through a small hand mirror. His ethereal figure didn't look old, as I had expected, but it certainly looked like it would rather be anywhere than in the middle of some desert with nothing but L. Ron Hubbard's chubby face to look at.

"Tell us," said L. Ron. "Tell us what it's like on the other side."

Aleister sighed heavily. This would be the fifth time explaining this. L. Ron's short-term memory was on the fritz, as usual, because he was on drugs, as usual. "I can't tell you what's on the other side, you fool."

"Why not?"

"Partly because there isn't much. Partly because don't I want to. But mostly because I had to sign a very strict non-disclosure agreement."

"But, I have to know," said L.Ron. "I'm thinking of starting a religion."

This enraged the ancient mystical master. "What did you just say?"

"I want to start a religion. I've seen the sort of money it can make. I want in."

Aleister couldn't turn purple. He would need blood for that. But he could still look more pissed off than a mere mortal could manage. "You fool! As if this world weren't poisoned enough by those petty superstitions. Now one of my own students is betraying me!"

"But didn't you call yourself The Beast once? Didn't you start your _own_ religion _?"_

"I did that to piss off the Christians, not because I believed it. No, I will not have you spreading more lies about angels or demons or whatever-the-fuck."

"Actually, I was thinking frozen volcano ghosts," said L. Ron.

Aleister's spectral eyebrows furrowed. "I forbid you!"

L. Ron shrugged. "Fine with me."

I was tightening up the last bolt of the firing device. This was my part. It was my job to provide the "switch" for the spell. Circles of power—in this case, sphere— are sometimes "activated" when a candle marked with runes -usually carried by the spell caster-crosses a certain point in the circle. This was such a spell, and since it was designed to compress an entire planet and transport it, it was going to need a big candle. When I told Aleister I was a rocket scientist, he smiled, and told me to get to work. And thus, my rocket-candle was born.

When my glyph-encrusted rocket passes under the magical symbol of "Transport" (which by no coincidence looks like the St. Louis Arch), the spell will begin its dark work. First, our world will be reduced to the size of a grape, then, it will perform the magical equivalent of a quantum leap, and the next thing everyone knows, Earth will be wiped out by L.Ron Hubbard's digestive fluids.

It makes sense. The harshest environment scientists can find is the human body. At the bottom of the ocean, the only problems are high pressure and freezing cold. In space, there's merely no air or atmospheric pressure. In the human body, however, if one wanted to survive, they would have to find a way of staving off huge fluctuations in temperature, rampaging viruses, E.Coli, hungry white blood cells and a violent immune system. Nothing would stand a chance, not even Planet Earth.

"Master," I said. "The rocket is ready."

"Why do we have to destroy the world anyway?" asked L. Ron. "It's not so bad. There's boats, and drugs, and other people's wives to enjoy."

At this I ground my teeth.

"Humanity is a festering wound upon this Universe," said the late Aleister Crowley. "If life elsewhere is to survive, our kind must be stopped."

"What do you mean, 'life elsewhere?'" I asked. "Surely you don't mean there's life on other planets?"

"Is there a Galactic Federation?" asked L. Ron.

"Shut up. Of course there's life on other planets. I'm dead. The afterlife has a huge interplanetary database."

"You weren't this angry at humanity when you were alive," I remarked.

"Of course not. The human body can't possibly contain enough rage when there's all that flesh and blood weighing it down. I can see things so... clearly. And one of those things is the blight upon our Universe that we humans happen to be."

"It can't be that bad," I said.

"It's all the thetans," said L.Ron.

"Shut your stupid fat face," said Aleister. "I know what I've seen. In a hundred years humanity will reach other planets. In a thousand, they'll be wiping them out for their resources. Time works differently here."

"Well, I'm not arguing, sir," I said. "But there's a lot of ways this spell could go wrong."

"Of course there is, it's magic," said Aleister. "One cannot _tame_ the forces of the dark, especially in such quantities. For all I know, my spell might end up turning this planet into a bowl of pudding."

"So, what's the point?" I asked.

"The point is, we've got to _try._ I've seen what can happen if we don't."

"Okay," I said. "L. Ron, get in the space suit."

"Why?" he asked.

I sighed. I had done my share of repetitive explaining as well. "Get in the space suit. You've already agreed to this."

I couldn't stand the guy, not after all the girlfriends and wives he'd stolen from me. But we still had to have some way of keeping him alive as he floated through the void of space, his drug-fueled gastrointestinal processes wiping out life as we know it.

L. Ron put down the hand mirror, much to the enjoyment of the master of mystics. In his other hand was a Dixie cup, one of those old fashioned ones decorated with tacky orange mountain ranges, white sky, and yellow clouds. It contained, against all odds, water. We were in a desert, after all.

L. Ron fiddled with the various buckles and knobs as he got onto the space suit. In about half an hour, it was on, the life-support system hissing as it pumped pure, narcotic oxygen. As if the bastard needed to get any higher.

"Now," recited the old master, "you must step into the hexagram."

We had painted the hexagram with chalk. This was basically the "coordinates" of the teleportation spell. L. Ron would stand here, so the planet-sized sphere of power would know where to put its planet-sized cargo.

"I don't know what's going on," said L. Ron. "Why am I in a space suit? Is the Galactic Federation coming to get me?"

"Shut up, you dumb fool," Aleister drawled . "Just step into the hexagram."

L. Ron did as he was told, lifting up the visor for the space suit and taking a sip from his Dixie cup.

"Now," Aleister said, this time addressing me. "Start the engines. When the rocket leaves the desert, I shall begin the incantation."

It was funny, I thought. The spell actually required an otherworldly being to recite the incantation. It was if the old coot knew he'd be dead when it came time for him to say it.

I primed the fuel-injection pump, and pulled the lever. The launch sequence had begun. At last, the explosion struck the blast plates, and my long-range rocket was off. Within a minute, the thing would be in St. Louis, and the spell would begin. Now, all that remained was making sure that L. Ron stayed put. I turned to the chalk Hexagram...

...From which L. Ron Hubbard had wandered off in a drug-filled stupor.

I clutched my hair, nearly tearing it out. "Stupid!" I screamed to myself. "Stupid!" I shouldn't have taken my eyes off him for a minute. Aleister had already begun the incantation, and would be too engrossed in concentration to hear me.

L. Ron was about fifty feet away, stumbling awkwardly and muttering to himself. I ran the fastest I had ever run in my life. If I could get him to turn around right now, I might be able to get him back to the hexagram by the time the rocket reached St. Louis.

"You idiot!" I hissed. "What are you doing?"

"Galactic Federation," mumbled L. Ron. "They know I know about them."

"Listen," I said, "We have to get back. We need to get you to the Hexagram before..." I stopped dead, in horror. "L. Ron," I said. "Where is the cup?" The Dixie cup was nowhere to be seen.

"Dropped it," muttered L. Ron. "Dropped it and now I'm running from volcano ghosts."

I was so angry, I was literally vibrating. "Look," I said, shaking his shoulders. "Did you drop it in the hexagram?"

"I don't know, I don't know," muttered the drug-addled spaceman.

I tried to lug him back to the hexagram, to no avail. His weight on its own was impressive, but when compounded with the space suit, I could barely get him to stumble at a very slow rate. In seconds, the rocket would reach St. Louis...

And as I approached I discovered, much to my horror, that the drugged-up fool did indeed leave the Dixie cup exactly in the center of the hexagram.

"I don't want to go in," he muttered. "'Can't make me..."

I put all my might into trying to get L. Ron into the magical marking, but it was too late. There came a tremendous noise, like the rending of spaceime itself. Dark energy blotted out the sun, and I felt like my body was being pulled through a strainer.

"Volcano ghosts!" screamed L. Ron. "They're here!"

The colors of everything went wrong. Black became white. Brown became electric blue. I could smell sounds and hear lights as Earth shrank to a size no life-bearing planet should be.

When I came to, I was in a pool of my own vomit. My head was still spinning as I stood, my legs wobbling unchecked. The hexagram was empty, save a small burn mark in the center where L. Ron's refreshment once sat harmlessly. The sky looked... wrong. It was still blue, yes, but off in the distance, as if submerged underwater, I could see undertones of tacky orange mountain ranges, white sky, and yellow clouds. The events of the previous minutes slowly connected in my brain, and I realized the new, horrifying truth:

Planet Earth was in a cup.

Thanks to L. Ron Hubbard and his imbecility, Earth's atmosphere was now partially leak-proof, cut-resistant, and recyclable.

"You fool!" screamed Aleister. "What have you done? Why isn't life being wiped out?"

"Dropped my cup," said L. Ron. He seemed sober now. I guess that's what exposure to huge quantities of black magic can do to a guy. He was scribbling furiously in a notebook, grinning madly. "Now we're in a cup."

I stared at this bewildering figure. I hated him so much. It wasn't enough that he stole my wife and my boat, and hundreds of thousands of dollars that he promptly spent on drugs. He had to go and lie to my own students, until I had to resign in disgrace from the very post Aleister Crowly himself had appointed me to. I decided I couldn't rest until he was dead. When Aleister came to me in a dream and told me how he planned to end the world, I jumped at the chance. If there was one man I wanted to die in the vacuum of space after the world ended, starving to death and defecating in his space suit, it was he.

It was my fault the spell went wrong. The man was incapable of even standing in one place without fucking it up. And I had recommended him.

I looked at the notebook he was scribbling in. He had given it the odd title of "Dianetics," and was apparently taking his notes of the experience and blaming it all on frozen volcano ghosts.

"How are we going to end the world now?" Aleister hissed.

L. Ron didn't even look up. "Don't worry," he said. "I've got that covered."

# The Devil Still Has My Lawnmower

"Hi Lou," Alan said as he retrieved his newspaper from the driveway. He was clad in a bathrobe and waddling in slippers, blinking at the sun.

Lou, Alan's neighbor, was standing in his yard, visibly upset, inspecting his hedges critically as if demanding his shrubberies to explain their unkempt state.

"My yard needs work," said Lou. "My shrubs are looking ragged, weeds are taking over and my lawn's overgrown. I thought I was a better caretaker than this."

"Better fix that before the Homeowner's Association gets word," said Alan.

"My thoughts exactly," said Lou. "I tangled with them last week, and they fined me. Dealing with them is worse than hell."

"I don't doubt it," said Alan. "I hear our HOA's got lawyers for their lawyers. So what happened last week that they fined you?"

"Some damned kids performed a satanic ritual on my yard."

Alan blinked a few times. "And the Home Owner's Association fined you for it?"

"They've never been lenient in the time _I've_ known them. Didn't matter that it wasn't my fault."

"So... what'd they do?" asked Alan with a humorous smile. "Draw a big pentagram on your yard? Cover it in trash? Sacrifice your lawn ornaments?"

"They built a stone altar and burned a lamb alive on it," said Lou. "And to top it all off, they broke my lawnmower."

There were a lot of answers Alan had been expecting, but that had not been one of them. "Uh," he said. "I'm sorry, Lou. I wish I would've been there to stop them. I've been working a lot of overtime lately."

Lou sighed. "What can you do?" he said. "When kids get an idea in their heads, they just can't get 'em out. It doesn't bother me so much that they found me; the part that bothers me is that Levitcus 1:9 clearly states that burning lamb entrails creates a pleasing odor for the Lord. I guess they got the wrong Lord."

"It says that in the _Bible_?" said Alan.

"It says a lot of things in the Bible," said Lou. "It's three-quarters of a million words long. Depending on the translation."

Alan and Lou lived in a gated community with dozens of cookie-cutter houses exactly like each other. It was extremely unlikely that any kids could break in and desecrate a lawn, but not impossible. The past few days, a doomsday cult had left its usual concrete compound and had been camping out just outside gates proclaiming the end of the world, and Alan would not put it past them to sneak in and pick on a poor guy like Lou.

"Do you think it has anything to do with those doomsday whackos?" Alan asked.

"Maybe," said Lou.

"Bunch of crazies, the lot of 'em," said Alan. "No reason to take it out on guys like you and me."

"I wouldn't write them off so soon," said Lou. "Someone's always proclaiming the end of the world, and you never know, maybe the world will end one day."

"Do you think so?" asked Alan.

"One day the angels of demons of the world will get bored with life as we all know it," said Lou. "And on that day, we're all in for it."

"Er, okay," said Alan. He was about to go back inside, when he caught a glimpse of Lou's lawn. It was, indeed, in a pitiable state. "Your lawn does look pretty unkempt. I haven't seen it that shaggy before."

Lou shook his head. "Those kids broke my lawnmower, and my warranty's expired. I knew I should have bought the extended coverage. A friend of mine got his tiller in 1802 and they still covered it when it broke last year."

Alan chuckled. "Nothing's built to last these days. Tell you what. Why don't you borrow my mower?"

"That'd be awful swell of you," said Lou.

Alan shook a warning finger at Lou. "But you better give it back. My wife doesn't want me lending out any of my garden tools. And my twelve-year-old son needs to earn his allowance somehow."

Lou smiled. "If you want it back so badly, why don't I get in writing?"

"Oh, that's not necessary," said Alan. "You've been my neighbor for- what is it- two years now? I know you're good for it. Besides," he added, "I know where you live!"

The two neighbors laughed at the corny joke. Lou reached into his back pocket. He pulled out a piece of typical notebook paper and a pen. He started writing. "No, I insist," he said. "I'd like to get it in writing. I sign a lot of contracts at my job, and I swear by them."

"No fine print, right?" Alan joked.

"Those days are behind me," said Lou.

Lou placed the piece of paper in Alan's hand, and Alan went out to drag his mower from the garage. He didn't even bother reading the piece of paper Lou had given to him, and simply tucked it into the pocket of his robe.

Alan retired to his living room to have his morning cup of coffee and read the paper. His wife, Betsey, trotted in moments later. "Lovely day out," she said, giving her husband a peck on the cheek. "Good way to start the weekend."

"Can't say the same of our neighbor Lou," said Alan as he took a sip of coffee. "Poor fellow has a lot of yard work to catch up on."

"Poor man. I heard about the trouble he had last week with the altar. Some kids come by and wreck his lawn, and not only does he have to pay to fix it, but he had to pay the Association as well."

"That H.O.A.," said Alan, "I tell you, they work for the Devil. Charging a young guy like Lou for something he didn't even do."

"Money is the root of all evil," said Betsey. "I think it says that somewhere in the Bible."

"I wouldn't doubt it. It's three-quarters of a million words long, you know. I loaned him our lawnmower, by the way."

Betsey looked upset. "What have I told you about loaning our expensive tools to neighbors?"

"It's all right," said Alan, pulling out the slip of paper from his bathrobe. "I made him promise to bring it back.I got it in writing."

"Oh?" said Betsey. "He actually signed a contract?"

"I insisted," lied Alan. "Now he is required by powers far greater than myself to return my lawnmower."

Betsey smiled. "Well, good," she said. "I'm glad. Thomas will get to the lawn later, then. I don't want the H.O.A. fining us. Anything good in the paper?"

"Just another interview with those apocalypse nuts camped outside the gates," said Alan.

"That's nice, darling," said Betsey, and went out of the kitchen.

* * *

Alan watched Lou perform his yard work. He would have offered a hand, but he was far too tired. His joints were not like they once were.

Lou started with the hedges, pulling out a pair of sharp-looking shears. He gently trimmed each leaf with the care of an experienced botanist, sometimes measuring branches with a ruler. He took ten steps back to admire his work, and took a short break. After a few minutes, Lou emerged with a glass of lemonade in his hand. It was shortly after this time when a black car pulled out in front of Lou's yard.

The man that got out of the car to talk to Lou was... unique. He had a slick Hugo Boss fashion sense, a wide-brimmed black fedora, and a dominating swagger in his step. But there were things about that seemed off to Alan. His skin did not look right, in fact it didn't looked like skin at all, as if a talented artist had painted on a convincing mockery of flesh.

The man tapped Lou on the shoulder, and Lou almost jumped from surprise. The tall man began to speak, and Lou sipped his lemonade with one hand and put his other in his pocket, listening attentively. The two had a conversation that became progressively more heated with every moment. Lou started shaking his head violently and gesticulating so rapidly with his lemonade that he spilled most of it on his as-yet unmowed lawn. Finally the tall man quickly spun around, walked aggressively to his car, got in, and pulled away. Lou, obviously still upset about the encounter, began the process of weeding his lawn before the mowing.

"Dad. What are you looking at?" came a voice.

Alan jumped at the interruption. In his doorway stood his twelve-year-old son Thomas, leaning against the doorframe and glowering.

"Good morning, Thomas!" said Alan cheerfully, folding up his newspaper and pretending to look at a story on the back page, which was in fact a full-page grocery store spread.

"You're spying on the neighbors again," said Thomas.

"I was just staring into space," said Alan defensively. "I wish you would say good-morning to your father, Thomas."

Thomas walked over to the refrigerator and violently plucked it open. "Whatever," he said.

"Maybe you should be a little more appreciative of the people who house and clothe you," said Alan gruffly.

Thomas withdrew an entire quart of orange juice and started drinking straight from it. He walked over to the bay window in the kitchen, through which Alan had been watching his neighbor do yard work. "What's so fascinating about Louis anyway? He's just so boring."

"Watch how you speak about your neighbors!" snapped Alan. "And don't drink from the carton either! What's wrong with you?"

Thomas threw out his arms, almost spilling the orange juice. "Why do you have to talk to me like that, Dad? You're antagonizing me."

"Stop talking to me like that!" Alan said.

Ever the angry pre-teen, Thomas turned around and resumed watching Lou. Alan angrily resumed reading the paper. He wished the child-rearing books that Betsey had made him commit to memory had mentioned this. Thomas has a mean comeback for everything, it seemed.

Thomas giggled. "What's so funny?" asked Alan, still gruffly.

"Looks like our neighbor has a bee problem," said Thomas. "They're all over the place."

"You're laughing about that?" said Alan angrily, getting up from the kitchen table. "That's not funny! He could get really hurt!"

"They're not stinging him," said Thomas. "It looks like he's talking to them."

"Oh, don't be ridiculous-" said Alan, but he stopped. It was true. Lou was indeed talking to a swarm of bees.

The conversation seemed just as unpleasant to Lou as the one with the tall man in the Hugo Boss suit. The swarm of bees maintained a cylindrical pillar shape. It contracted and expanded in controlled ways as Lou spoke, its bees displaying a wide range of flight patterns. The bees flew in graceful spirals and drifted into lazy loop-the loops; then progressed into urgent swoops and again into angry, jagged vibrations. If Alan didn't know better, he would have thought that the swarm of bees was trying to express itself.

Lou, apparently no longer willing to be buzzed at in such a rude way, angrily strutted towards Alan's lawnmower. With a single, powerful pull on the rip-cord, it roared to life. The swarm of bees, recognizing the battle cry of its natural and hated enemy, dispersed in a state of panic.

"Dude," said Thomas. "That swarm of bees was fucking pissed."

Alan resolved not to discipline his son for such harsh language. "Poor Lou. First, an overgrown lawn, and now, bees."

"Isn't that our lawnmower?" said Thomas.

"That's right," said Alan sternly, looking over at his adolescent son. "I've loaned it to him. The only thing preventing me from sending you out there with it to do our lawn is that Lou's broke last week."

"Wow!" said Thomas, excitedly. "Maybe he's not so bad after all. Thanks Louis!"

"Watch it how you talk about people!" snapped Alan.

"Sorry, for being mean, Dad," said Thomas, who turned around and started walking out of the kitchen, orange juice carton still in hand. "I'm going to go play video games!"

Alan sighed as his son left the room, and resumed watching his frustrated neighbor drag the lawnmower back and forth across his lawn.

Lou shook his head angrily, gritting his teeth as he forced the lawnmower across his lawn. The visit from the tall man and the swarm of bees seemed to make him quite angry indeed, angry enough that he was missing entire rows of grass with the lawnmower.

Alan resolved to give Lou a helping hand to cheer him up despite his aching joints, but he wasn't about to do so in his bathrobe. He went to his bedroom and changed into a pair of ruddy jeans and a stained T-shirt. When he went to the back yard to get his straw hat, he heard the lawnmower stop. Lou must have stopped to empty the grass-catcher.

Alan walked through the house and into the front yard, whistling cheerfully as he went around the hedge and into Lou's yard. It wasn't until he was halfway down the lawn when he realized that both his neighbor and his lawnmower were nowhere to be found. He looked left, he looked right. There was simply no way that Lou could have managed to sweep up all the grass clippings from the sidewalk, put away the lawnmower, and go back inside in the time Alan had taken to change into work clothes. Furthermore, the lawn was not by any means finished, and the missed rows of grass were still mockingly untrimmed.

Alan walked up to Lou's door and knocked. There was no answer. He waited a minute or two and knocked again. Still nothing.

Alan walked back into his house and continued his day. Perhaps Lou had an urgent errand to attend, and had stashed away Alan's lawnmower in the backyard until he was finished. In either case, Alan was sure that his lawnmower was safe, and whatever was bothering his polite and unassuming neighbor would surely be resolved.

* * *

A week later, Lou was still missing, and Alan's own lawn was now starting to look like it needed attention. Alan knocked on Lou's door, and was treated with the same silence he had experienced the weekend before. Nothing seemed to have changed, except a notice from the Homeowner's Association taped to Lou's door notifying him that if he didn't mow his lawn soon, he would be faced with a fine.

Alan turned around. Lou's lawn was still unmowed, and in fact, since it had been a week, was now even worse. He went back to his house and woke up his wife.

"Dear," he said, "have you seen our neighbor?"

"Lou?" asked Betsey. She was still groggy with sleep, and rolled over to rub her eyes in protest of the unwelcome consciousness.

"Yes," said Alan. "I think something might have happened to him. I haven't seen him since I loaned him my lawnmower."

Betsey frowned. "I told you not to loan out our tools. I told you. Our yard has to be done this week, or we'll get fined. You should call him."

"I've tried. He didn't answer. He also didn't finish. His lawn is still terrible."

"Well, that's not our fault," said Betsey. "Get our lawnmower back. Thomas needs to do some yard work if he's going to get an allowance from us this week. Maybe Lou's at work."

"Where does he work?" asked Alan. It occurred to him that while Lou had lived next door to him for nearly two years, he knew very little about him, save the fact that he was polite, handsome, and seemed far too young to own his own house. Shouldn't he at least know what Lou does for a living? "Do you know?" he asked Betsey.

"Some office on... Oh, I don't know, I think it's on Seventh Street next to the behavioral therapist that we took Thomas to that one time," she said. "The one with the ugly architecture."

"All right," said Alan. "I'll check it out."

Alan knew right away when he had found it. While the surrounding buildings were easy to look at with a pleasing desert motif, this one was painted a bright, obnoxious red. Alan walked up to the building and paused at the glass door, chuckling at the address printed on it: six sixty-sixty, Seventh Street.

He went inside. The lobby was completely and alarmingly bare. There wasn't even any furniture to sit down in while waiting to be seen: Just a single desk and a single chair, occupied by a single receptionist.

The room was red. The desk was red. The paintings hanging on the walls had red frames and held nothing but canvases painted solid red. The receptionist had red hair, and was even wearing a red dress and a pair of red glasses. No matter which direction he turned, Alan was reminded of flames. He felt like he had walked into a kiln.

He walked up to address the receptionist. "Um, hello," he said.

The receptionist responded with burning silence.

"I'm here... um..." Alan continued. The receptionist pursed her cherry-red lips and her thin red eyebrows started to sink into a frown. "My neighbor works here. I just wanted to see if I could talk to him. He's borrowed something of mine, and I haven't seen him."

"If he does work here," said the receptionist rudely, "and it's doubtful, I promise, then you can't see him because he's busy."

"Um..." said Alan, "Well, I need to see him. It's kind of urgent."

"We're all busy," said the receptionist. "We have a deadline we're trying to make with the firm on seven seventy-seven, Sixth Street."

Alan could not remember anything about the office complexes on Sixth Street as he passed them by on the way over, other than the fact that the buildings were all painted blindingly white.

"His name is Lou," said Alan.

"Definitely not someone who works here," said the receptionist.

Alan hung his head forlornly, and reached into his pocket for his car keys. He felt something in his pocket that he was sure he hadn't put there. He pulled it out. It was a folded piece of paper: the contract that Lou had signed a week prior, stating that he promised to return Alan's lawnmower.

Alan handed the paper over to the receptionist. "He gave me this," he said. "Do you recognize the signature?"

For a moment the receptionist did nothing, but eventually she reached out and snatched the paper from his hands. With complete disregard for the condition of the document, she unfolded it roughly, read the first few lines, and let loose an unearthly shriek of terror that no human had ever had the misfortune of witnessing before.

It was like the sound of a thousand damned souls crying from the very bowels of Hell in simultaneous and incalculable surprise. It was over in an instant, but in that small moment Alan's mind felt like it had been dragged across hot coals and lashed with whips. Alan jumped two feet in the air from the sound of the sickening noise, and stared at the receptionist in sheer astonishment. She still had the document in hand, but her eyes were darting back and forth across the page in excitement. Something was bathing her face in light, and it took a few moments for Alan to realize that the light was coming from the contract itself.

The receptionist snapped her head up. Tears were building in her eyes and threatened to rain down. "Where did you get this?" she asked. Her voice was a strange cross of hopefulness and desperation. Alan, still thoroughly perturbed by the shriek, found the receptionist's question odder still: it was just the written promise to return a lawnmower, yet she was treating it like it was the salvation of the damned.

"I told you," sputtered Alan, searching for some trace of normalcy in the conversation. "I got it from my neighbor, Lou. I loaned him my lawnmower, and he promised to return it. In writing."

"Lou?" asked the secretary. "Why do you call him Lou?"

"That's his name," said Alan with a shrug.

The secretary got up out of her seat. There was a brightness in her eyes, and it wasn't a figurative one. They burned with the intensity of exploding stars. Alan thought he might go blind. "Well, your neighbor is not named Lou," the secretary said fiercely. "He is Lucifer, the First Fallen, the Last Saved. He is the Prince of Darkness, the Father of Lies, and the ruler of Hell! Your neighbor, sir, is the _Devil!"_

Alan stood his ground. He thought about Lou, how he seemed so young and so successful. He remembered the tall man with the fake skin and the Hugo Boss suit, and the swarm of bees that could talk, and the fact that Lou had vanished without a trace and had taken Alan's lawnmower with him. And for these reasons, Alan thought, it made absolute, one hundred percent, perfect sense that his neighbor, Lou, was actually Lucifer, the Devil, the Prince of Darkness.

Even so, there was a lawnmower at stake, and he had to get it back, or face the Homeowner's Association.

Alan put his hands on his hips. "Well," he said authoritatively, "I'll have you know, ma'am, that the Devil still has my lawnmower."

In response, the receptionist escorted Alan to an elevator that revealed itself when a regular-looking bit of red wall slid away. The secretary shoved him in roughly, and glowered at him. "Please hurry up," she said. "We're almost done preparing."

"What for?" asked Alan.

The receptionist just smiled, reached into the elevator, pressed a button, and the elevator door closed.

The elevator was also red. It had two red buttons, oriented vertically, without labels. The elevator only stopped two places, it seemed:

On the top floor.

And on the bottom one.

After the door closed, and the elevator started its descent.

It seemed to take hours. No fewer than ten times did it seem like the elevator would finally stop, only to accelerate again.

Alan realized that he wasn't particularly concerned that he was descending into Hell. He was more worried that he'd be rocked to sleep like a baby. He wondered how many other people had gotten to ride it. He pondered the logistics and practicality of building an elevator to Hell.

What did heaven have? An escalator, maybe?

The contract was still in his hand, and it occurred to Alan that he'd never even read the thing himself. What had the receptionist seen in it that had caused her to scream like the damned of Hell?

He opened up the contract.

If Alan had any doubts that his neighbor Lou was actually ruler of Hell, they vanished at that moment. When he had first been given the contract, it was scarcely larger than a typical sheet of folded notebook paper, yet when he opened it, it unfurled to the width of a tapestry and unrolled all the way down to his feet like an ancient scroll, complete with fiery, crimson tassels.

Additionally, the words inscribed on the parchment were made entirely of fire. Alan read them aloud.

" _I, Lucifer, Lord of the Nine Circles, the First Fallen, the Last Saved, the Abaddon, the Leviathan, the Antichrist, the Lawless One, the Serpent of Old--_

_\--Do Solemnly Decree That I Shall Return My Neighbor Alan's Lawnmower Upon Completion of the Mowing of My Yard._ " Alan read it over and over again. When he saw Lou scribble the contract out, it hadn't taken more than half a second. How he had produced such an enchanting legal document was beyond Alan's comprehension.

He nodded, folded up the contract, and put it back in his pocket. Once again, the document assumed the form of a regular sheet of folded notebook paper. He put it back in his pants pocket just as the elevator finally came to a rest and opened its doors into the yawning depths of suffering and misery that was the final resting place for the Souls of the Damned.

It was pleasantly warm, actually.

Alan, confused, stepped forward. The elevator closed and ascended behind him. He turned around and stared back at it. "Hey!" he shouted as it disappeared into the blackness above. "Come back here!" He accidentally bumped into something. It was a stalagmite. It had an elevator call button on it. "Oh," he said.

Hell, it seemed, was not how most people let on. It looked like a reddish, well-lit cave. There were rocks and stalagmites everywhere. And not much else.

He was expecting lakes of fire from which legions of tortured hands protruded, their owners forever burning, screeching, reaching for the heaven they had been denied. But there were no screams, nor was there anybody to make them.

"Hello?" called Alan. Nobody answered. He walked forward. "Hello?" he called as he walked. "Is anybody there?"

For ten minutes he walked, until he finally met someone.

It was a janitor.

He was dressed in a blue jump suit and had a white mustache that could sweep the cave floor as efficiently as the broom he was holding. "Um, excuse me," said Alan. "Do you know where everyone's gone?"

The janitor stopped his sweeping and stared at Alan alarmingly. "What're you still doin' here?" he asked. "Everyone's gone. Yer late."

"Where've they gone?" asked Alan.

"Don't act like you don't know," said the janitor, and resumed sweeping.

"Look," said Alan, withdrawing the contract from his pocket. "I'm Alan. I've got a signed document here from your boss."

"Boss ain't here," said the janitor. "I'm just sweepin' up after everyone so when they come back it'll be nice an' clean."

"But where have they gone?"

"You work here," said the janitor. "You must've gotten the memos."

"No, I don't work here," said Alan.

The janitor paused his sweeping again. He stood up and looked Alan up and down. "No," he said. "You _don't_ work here."

Alan once again offered the signed document, and this time the janitor took it. He unfurled it, and read the fiery letters. A faint smile could be seen under his enormous mustache. "Lord," he said. "You must really want yer lawnmower."

"Not really," said Alan. "I'm more worried about my neighbor. He disappeared one day. He never told me he was the Devil." There was a note of disappointment in Alan's voice as he said this.

The janitor folded up the document and handed it back to Alan. "Yer a good man," he said. "Nobody ever worries about the Devil. Who says he don't need lookin' after from time to time?"

"Well, where's he gone?" asked Alan.

"Same as everyone else here," said the janitor. "Off to purgatory to fight the Apocalypse."

"The Apocalypse?" asked Alan. "You mean that group of religious nuts camping outside my neighborhood was _right?"_

"There's always someone proclaimin' the Apocalypse," said the janitor. "One of em's gonna be right eventually. Can't beat _them_ odds."

"Well, then, if they're fighting the Apocalypse, what are you doing here?" Alan asked. "If it's the final battle, they aren't coming back, are they?"

"Oh, they never actually get around to it, y'know," said the janitor as he swept. "Somethin' always comes up, and they get interrupted. Then, they come back and wait till the next End of Days."

"Something always happens?" asked Alan. "What are you talking about?"

"Well, if I'm readin' that there document correctly," said the Janitor, gesturing with his broom handle towards the folded contract in Alan's hand, "Looks like this time, that somethin' is you."

Alan thought about this for a good long while. He nodded, and put the contract back in his pocket, knowing what he had to do. "Well, then," he said, "Can you tell me how I get to Purgatory?"

"If I didn't," said the janitor, "I'd be out of the job."

* * *

The written directions from the janitor were both well-illustrated and tirelessly explicit. He had clearly drawn them much, much earlier. Either that, or he had the same time-defying hand as Lou. It wasn't that far-fetched.

As Alan walked, he passed many things that he thought didn't belong in an eternal pit of suffering at all: A courtyard with chess tables, a Squash court, even an arcade with pinball tables and a popcorn machine. But as fascinating as he found these, he had somewhere to be, and therefore didn't stop to inspect any of it. He looked down at the directions the janitor had given him:

Turn left at the stalagmite that looks like it has a big bite though it. Check. Keep walking twenty paces until you find a stalagmite that's twenty feet tall and looks like it's covered in dragon claw marks. Good. Now spin left three times, close your eyes after the second turn, and say--

" _Too bad for Heaven, too good for Hell;_

" _What place can there be for a soul like me to dwell?_ "

As Alan said the words, he felt some kind of disturbance, somewhere between a headache and a gust of wind. And then there was a door.

It was the plainest door that Alan had ever seen in his life. It was inoffensive, unobtrusive, and unspectacular in every conceivable way. It must have taken a group of twenty bureaucrats to design such a door, and not one of them must have been allowed to have a hobby.

Alan reached out and opened it. He couldn't see what was on the other side. It was just a blinding glare of shapeless, white light. He had to go in.

He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and entered Purgatory.

At last, he could see the denizens of Hell. He was expecting pitchforks. He was expecting forked tongues, flaming eyes, mangled flesh and burnt hair. He was expecting impossibly ugly creatures a thousand times stronger than men, he was expecting the smell of rotting flesh and the screams of mortal torment. He received none of these things. The Denizens of Hell were no more remarkable than any other random sample of the human population. Hell is where regular people go; it never occurred to Alan that they might _remain_ that way.

Alan pushed his way through the throngs of standing bodies. He must have been somewhere outdoors, though it couldn't possibly be anywhere on Earth. It was amazingly hard to navigate, since that there was no way whatsoever to tell where he was going. The ground was gray. The sky was gray. There were no stars in the sky or markings on the ground. There wasn't even a breeze. He tapped a demon on the shoulder.

"Can I help you, mister?" asked the demon. He was an elderly, cheerful man with a sparkle in his eye and the blues in his voice.

"Yes," said Alan. He held up the contract. "I need to find the Devil."

The demon eagerly grabbed the document and read it. "My stars," he said. "You're him! You're him!"

"I think... yes," said Alan. "I'm me, last time I checked."

The demon held up the contract for all to see. "Bless you, man! You came!"

Other demons started turning their heads. Their eyes went wide, and their mouths opened with smiles and laughter.

"It's him, man!" the demon continued, this time shouting so that everyone could hear. His voice was clear and could be heard all throughout Purgatory, as it was no longer constrained by the pesky laws of physics. "I got 'im! The Contract Holder! _HE'S COME AFTER ALL!_ "

The demon pressed the document back into Alan's hand. "Go on, son," he said. "Go and sing your song, man."

Alan felt hands pushing him and shoving him, guiding him and leading him. He drifted through the crowd, awash with smiles and shouts of excitement. Whispers of positivity drifted all across Purgatory.

And finally, Alan could see something ahead. A small hill right in the middle of the crowd. The Epicenter. The start of the Apocalypse.

The last gentle hand escorted Alan to the base of the hill, and he was on his own. He looked up. The hill was tall and steep. He couldn't see the end of it. But as he started climbing, it was easier than a set of stairs.

Finally, he reached the top, and was greeted by several figures. The first was a blond man clad in white, with blue eyes and a melancholy look on his face. Standing behind him were two more white-clad figures, equally solemn.

It surprised Alan to find a pair of figures he recognized: A tall man in a wide-brimmed black fedora, and a swarm of bees in shape of a column. The last figure at the top of the hill was Alan's long time, cheerful neighbor, Lou.

Lou, as it was now powerfully clear to Alan, was the Devil.

Lucifer was a powerful, imposing figure, who emanated might with every inch of his body. When he moved, his muscles danced and writhed like hungry snakes. Lou turned to Alan, the ground trembling with every tiny step, and smiled.

"There you are," said Lou. His voice thrummed the very air itself. "I was wondering when you'd get here."

"Is this him?" asked one of the men in the white robes.

Alan looked over the man in white robe's shoulder and tried to find Heaven's army, but all he could find was a small, pathetic group of people in white robes near the base of the mountain. There couldn't have been more than a hundred people, and not one of them looked happy to be there.

"Alan," said Lou, gesturing towards the taller of the white-robed people, "I'd like for you to meet my good friend, the angel Gabriel." He pointed to the other two white-robed figures. "And here's Ezekiel and Elijah," and at last introduced Alan to his own cohorts. "And here's the Tall Man, and my second-in-command, Beelzebub."

The Tall man nodded once, and Beelzebub buzzed, "Pleazzed to mzzeeet you."

"Have you got something for us, Alan?" asked Gabriel expectantly.

Alan smiled. "Yes," he said holding out the contract to Lou and giving Gabriel a smile. "I think I do."

Lou opened up the document, and showed it to Gabriel. Gabriel practically wept with joy.

Lucifer turned to the denizens of Hell. "My friends!" he shouted. His voice boomed and roared loudly and clearly, thundering across the skies of Purgatory. "We have gathered here to initiate the final battle at the end of the world. We have waited century upon century to raise our swords and lay waste to the human world."

There was a steely silence from the army of Hell. Each end every one of them was listening with all their might. Lucifer continued talking.

"And as much as I'd love to give the word and start the Apocalypse--" Lou held up the contract and unfurled it, its fiery letters shining like a beacon upon the armies of Hell.

And he finished. "--But I'm afraid I can't. Because I have to return a lawnmower!"

And with those words, there came a hellish cheer.

* * *

Alan pulled the last bit of crab grass from the yard, surveying his work. There wasn't a weed in sight. Not even a dandelion. He dared the Homeowner's Association to find something wrong with the yard.

Lou emptied the grass-catcher into the garbage can. "It sure feels nice to get something done with my own two hands," he said.

"What we obtain too cheap," said Alan, "We esteem too lightly."

"Thomas Paine," said Lou. "He's a good man. A bit racist, but he's just as smart as everyone thinks he is."

"Named my son after him," said Alan. "Maybe that's why he's such a smart-ass."

Lou laughed. "Well, if it's any consolation, the real Thomas Paine isn't the most humble human being in Hell either."

"He's not in Heaven?" asked Alan.

Lou grabbed the garbage can and shook it. The grass clippings settled at the bottom of it. "Getting into heaven is a tough gig, Alan. Hate to break it to you."

"Why is that?"

"The rules are... well, a little outdated," said Lou. "Not everybody's a saint. But everyone's a sinner. Someone gets into heaven maybe one a millennium, but that's it."

"That hardly seems fair," said Alan. "Have you talked to God about it?"

"Would if I could," said Lou. "But He's not been around since before the Bible was written."

"Why not?"

"Perhaps He's grown up, perhaps He's moved on." said Lou.

"You're saying God was a child when he created the world?"

"Not necessarily," said Lou with a knowing grin, "But I like to think that our world is just sitting at the bottom of the Lord's toy box."

Alan wiped off his dirty hands on his trousers. "So since nearly everyone goes to hell, everyone gets punished?"

"Only the bad ones," said Lou. "We still have to follow all of God's commandments. We weren't given free will like you lucky humans. Though, as you can see, some of read between the lines."

"Sorry about that," said Alan.

"No need to apologize," said Lou. "It says in the Bible that Hell is a place of fire. It's a bottomless pit. There is the gnashing of men's teeth. There is weeping and misery and sorrow."

"Hmm," said Alan.

"But," continued Lou, "There is also swimming and ping pong. There is chess and Subbuteo and shuffleboard and skydiving. There is a lending library with every book in the world, and the tallest rock climbing wall you've ever seen."

"So even the damned get to play ping-pong from time to time?" said Alan with a chuckle.

Lou looked deeply and seriously into Alan's eyes.

Alan felt the ages crash into his mind. Staring into Lou's eyes, Alan felt, just for a moment, like the pitiful mortal he was: a worthless smear of protein staring into the eyes of this powerful, ancient deity. He felt insignificant. He felt helpless.

And then his mind started correcting all these revelations and assured him that he was an important and productive member of American society, and that he mattered more than he knew to a great number of people.

Lou eventually spoke. "Eternity is a long time, Al," he said sadly. "Not everyone who goes to Hell deserves to suffer for that long." He looked down and inspected his hedges. "There are kids down there, you know."

Alan felt a tinge of discomfort and embarrassment. "Well, I can rest easy knowing that at least God says you can play ping pong in Hell."

"Not exactly," said Lou. He smiled warmly, cheerfully, and earnestly. "He just didn't say I _couldn't_."

Lou and Alan laughed. Then they both looked at Alan's lawnmower.

"So once I get this back," said Alan, "What's to stop you from starting the Apocalypse?"

"The window has closed now," said Lou. "The Apocalypse can only be fought when every member of each army has completed all their obligations, and there is nothing left for them to do but fight the battle at the end of the world. You and your lawnmower prevented that this time. And while we were doing yard work, the Denizens of Hell started borrowing and trading and doing favors. It won't be another thousand years or so until all of us have got no obligations left."

"What happens then?" asked Alan. "Are you going to borrow a shovel?"

"It's not my turn," said Lou. "It'll be up to Gabriel."

"What do you think he'll do?" asked Alan.

"Hopefully," said Lou, "There will still be Homeowner's Associations. And they will still be bastards."

* * *

Alan wiped his feet on the welcome mat. He opened the door, went inside, and washed his hands.

"How's Lou?" asked Betsey, who was cooking a stew.

"Not too bad," said Alan. "I'm glad he didn't have too much pride to let me help with his lawn."

"Is he going to be fined?"

"We managed to avoid the end of the world," said Alan.

"As long as we got our mower back," said Betsey.

"Of course, dear," said Alan, pecking his wife on the cheek.

Alan wandered into the living room, and collapsed into his favorite chair. He heaved a sigh of relief. He was exhausted.

"I wanted to help," said Thomas. He was lying on the couch with his Game Boy. "But Mom said you didn't want me to bother you."

"Oh?" said Alan.

"Yes... I wanted to make up for being a..." Thomas swallowed. "For being mean to you earlier."

"Oh, it's all right," said Alan. "Lou and I were just catching up. We had a little guy time while doing the yard."

"I still think he's boring," said Thomas. "I mean, it's not bad or anything. He just seems so dang _normal_."

"Oh, he's actually quite interesting," said Alan with a chuckle, "Once you get to know him."

-End-

# About the Author

Giando Sigurani likes to write things. He has a website/blog he frequently neglects located at http://www.giandosigurani.com. He lives Oregon.

# Also by Giando Sigurani

Mister Mercury: A Modern Greek Myth

The Greek god Hermes has spent thousands of years in a mountain prison for disobeying Zeus. Emerging in a new world where the gods have been nearly forgotten by humankind, he hatches a plan straight from the comic books to revive the glory days of Olympus. As Mister Mercury, caped hero, he'll fight to put the Fear of the Gods back into the hearts of mortals everywhere— whether they realize it or not.

Available in print or as an ebook at http://mistermercurybook.com
