Kids Say

“I’ll be right back,” said Martha, excusing herself from her guests to get more cheese and crackers. Martha and her young son, Steven, were entertaining their new next-door neighbors.

“Wanna hear a funny joke?” asked Steven in his most adorable voice. Steven was only five. “Mommy likes to say it and she laughs lots!”

“Sure, kiddo,” said Jake, one of the neighbors.

“Mommy says my daddy’s in the basement!” he said, smiling.

“What?” asked Sammie, Jake’s wife. They both looked at each other, confused and afraid.

“No,” Steven said. “You’re opposed to say ‘can I go see him?’”

“C-can I go see him?” Jake asked nervously.

“No! That’s not daddy. Daddy’s in the back yard!” Saying this, Steven laughed as he’d see his mother laugh telling him that.

Jake and Sammie laughed nervously.

“I hear some laughter,” Martha said. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh, nothing. Steven just told us a funny story,” answered Jake.

“Oh, well, you know what they say. Kids can say the darnedest things. More cheese?” Martha asked, practically begging them to stay.

I’m afraid we have to go now, though. Look at the time! So sorry to eat and run,” said Jake and Sammie as they scrambled to leave.

Martha frowned at Steven as her guests left. He looked up at her and clapped. “I guess they’ll be joining our old neighbors in the basement. And I was so hoping to keep them. They seemed so nice,” she said with a sigh.

Headlines

“Hey there!” I shouted at someone about to walk down a dark alleyway, alone. “Don’t you know that’s dangerous?”

“Well,” the young man stammered.

Angrily, I asked, “Well nothing! Don’t you know there are people in this world of ours who will try to kill you? Haven’t you read the news?”

“The serial killer? Yeah his latest victim was found yesterday in an alley. Gee, mister, you’re right. That last guy was alone too. I just never thought anything like this could happen to me,” the man replied. Finally, someone who listened to my reasoning.

“Yes, and it’s not safe to go home that way alone. I usually go the long way home, but I will gladly keep you company. It’s safer that way, wouldn’t you agree?” I was not about to take ‘no’ for an answer. Everyone in the city knew there was a killer on the loose, and I wasn’t about to have someone get this hapless gent.

“Why, thanks, mister,” the man replied as we walked down the dark alley. The air was thick from the lack of light. My lantern barely illuminated a foot ahead of us.

“Right, not too much longer now,” I said as we slowly walked forward, wary of any sounds. I reached into my pocket for my blade as a cat scurried across out path.

“My word!” the man squeaked, too scared to speak above a whisper.

“Calm yourself. There are scarier things in the world than a cat. Don’t you know there are people who will try to kill you?”

I’m sure he would have nodded in agreement had I not stabbed him in the throat. He should have known there were people who would try to kill people. Some would even succeed.

I cannot wait to see the newspaper tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll be front page news, just like my others. At least this one followed me willingly.

Friends Like These

Julie was afraid, alone, and about to die. On the fateful day, while on her morning run, a lady stopped as Julie went by.

“You!” the woman shouted at Julie as she came running along the sidewalk.

“Beg your pardon?” panted Julie as she skidded to a halt, catching her breath. She wondered what the bedraggled woman wanted.

“You!” the woman repeated, pointing a long, bony finger at her face.

Taking a step back, she decided that she needed to get as far away from the crazy lady as possible. She turned to run, but she was stopped by the woman’s shrill voice.

“Wait!” the lady said as her voice became less crazed and more worried. “You are going to die today!”

Julie almost tripped over her own feet when she head the woman tell her that. Doubting what she just heard, she asked, “What?”

“You heard me,” the woman responded. “Your friends will kill you!” After she said that, the woman ran back into her house before Julie could react.

Julie was rather shaken by everything that had just happened to her. She was superstitious, and knew that she had a party she was planning to attend that night. In fear for her life, she turned around ran straight home. Once there, she locked herself in, closed all the shades, and unplugged herself from the outside world by disconnecting her computer and phones. She even unplugged her television, as she knew someone who worked for the local news.

After some time, she slowly began to lose her mind from her constant state of panic. She began to move everything that was given to her by her friends into her garage, in a neat pile.

Once she had everything from her friends out of her house, she went around once again. This time, instead of gifts from friends, she was looking for the many pictures of her friends. She boxed them up and took them to the garage where she would put them on top of all the other scary items.

Unfortunately, for her, she was in such a panic she never bothered with proper stacking. When she placed the last box, the entire pile came crashing down. However, she managed to move out of the way of the tsunami of gifts.

She wasn’t, however, able to move out of the way of the box of photos. When it hit her, she was knocked backwards and into the window of her car.

The last thing that went through her head before the glass was to wonder if she would have been better off alone.

Friends Don’t Let Friends

I told him, friends don’t let friends go to jail. I told him how I butchered my parents. I wanted approval from my best friend. He lied to me. Lied when he said it was our secret.

He must have been disappointed when he heard that there was no evidence to suggest I committed these crimes, besides his word. They found prints all right. Prints on the knives used to chop my parents up, on the sliding door of the bathtub, and on the door knob both coming in and going out of the house.

All his prints. All from the day before, when I asked him to do some innocuous tasks. But, I stand by my rule. Friends don’t let friends go to jail.

Too bad he’s not my friend anymore.

Foresight

Julie was an average high school student who made average grades, and did average things a normal girl her age would. Well, that is until it came time for her to sleep. Death—now more than ever—filled Julie’s dreams.

Julie had been in a wreck that, by all reasonable means, should have killed her. After the wreck, Julie rarely slept. When she did, she would dream of how people were going to die the next day. Some were people she knew, others were complete strangers.

She used this foresight to help people to avoid dying, and because of this, she became know as the “Death Girl,” who could tell when someone was going to die and save them.

As a result of her popularity, she was given photos of the people she had saved. She hung them on the wall above her bed as a reminder of what service she was doing. She was helping people cheat death, as she herself had done in the accident. Her mother had saved her, sacrificing her own life to protect her. She literally should have died.

One night, in Julie’s dreams, she dreamt that there would be an earthquake and that something would fall on her head. Waking up, she quickly removed the pictures from above her, patting herself on the back for once again outsmarting Death.

That night, when she slept, the earthquake hit. It was just as she had foreseen. Almost. The quake shook loose a part of her ceiling, which came down on her, killing her. Before she died, she saw a vision of a man in a cloak. He told her that no one escapes him.

Several houses collapsed that night, and many people were killed. Curiously, the newspapers never put together that they were all the people Julie had saved.

Fences

Robert Frost once wrote that ‘fences make great neighbors.’

I don’t think my neighbors are that bad anymore. They used to be loud and obnoxious at all hours. All I really had to do was go and have a little talk with them.

You know, the more I think about it, I believe that Mr. Frost was talking about living neighbors.

Dad.txt

Jacob slammed his door loudly. He couldn’t believe the nerve of his father. Moments earlier, Jacob had gone into the kitchen of his parents’ house where he lived. All he wanted to do was eat, watch television, and surf the internet on his laptop.

His father, however, would have none of that. His son was in his mid twenties, jobless, and still living at home. He demanded that Jacob clean the living room, as was his regular duties, and asked him in a rather gruff tone if he had gotten a job yet—a question to which he already knew the answer was no.

Jacob, tired of hearing the same thing from his father daily, stormed out of the kitchen, leaving behind an open refrigerator and his laptop. As he left, he yelled obscenities at his father, and said he wished that he would just die already so he could go be with his mother in hell.

Jacob’s mother, Molly, had died earlier in the year when the car his father was driving hit a patch of ice and skidded into a ravine. Jacob constantly berated his father, whom he hated for—as he put it—killing his mother. There never was a solid father/son bond between him and his father to begin with, and his mother’s death destroyed what little there was.

Jacob, still fuming and tired from staying up all night playing his online games, went to sleep. When he woke up, he found the house curiously silent. His father usually was noisy at all hours; if it wasn’t his snoring, it was the sounds of him watching television.

Jacob ventured out of his room and called out to see if anyone was there. He poked around all the rooms until he got to the kitchen, where he saw his laptop closed, but still on.

Angry at the thought of his father messing with his computer, he snatched it up and turned on the television. Opening it, he booted it back up and went about seeing if his father had messed with anything.

There, on his desktop, was a curious file titled “dad.txt” that he was sure wasn’t there earlier. Curiosity getting the better of him, he opened it. In moments, he was filled with a deep sense of regret.

The document, which started off with things such as ‘I’m sorry;’ ‘I love you;’ and ‘Goodbye;’ was his father’s suicide note. It described how his wife’s death strained him, and how Jacob’s constant remarks about him and the accident were just too much for him to bear any more.

Cardinal Sins

I can’t go outside anymore. There are demonic beasts everywhere outside my house. I can see them from my window, watching me. I told my wife to be careful out there, and now she’s dead. She died of the illness these monsters carry.

They used to swarm us when we went to our car. She said they were making their home close to where we were walking. I saw the truth. They were attacking us, trying to kill us.

I can see the evil in their faces. Big black mask covering their eyes and their body a bright, bloody red. Their mouth is an elongated cone; the color of which looks like dried blood. This is, no doubt, from their other victims.

I sit here watching them, and they watch me. They are no doubt waiting for me to run out of food so that I will be forced to go outside. That’s when they will kill me.

I will sooner die of starvation rather than die by their clawed hands. It’s funny, though. I never understood as a child, but now I know why they call them the ‘cardinal’ sins.

Bug Man

Diane was home sick with the flu. She reluctantly dragged herself out of bed to answer the door. It was the bug man, who told her that her father had scheduled him to come spray the house.

Something about the man didn’t sit well with Diane, though. His uniform for Bugs-Be-Gon was old, worn, and stained. He also looked no more than in his mid twenties. She also thought his goatee and hair was a bit unkempt for someone who worked such a public job.

She shrugged this off in figuring that she was only 16 and didn’t know him, so she shouldn’t be so quick to judge as her father had always told her.

As he sprayed in her parents’ bedroom, she quickly called her father, just to let him know the guy was there and spraying for bugs. After a few seconds of talking to her father, Diane dropped the phone in terror.

“I don’t have anyone coming over,” her father had said.

That was the last anyone heard from Diane.

Blankets

Dear Susan,
I love you. I sent you out to get some milk because I knew that the monster had finally found us. I can hear him, shuffling about in the kitchen, looking for me. It’s okay though. I’m safe here.

When we were children and we heard the monster, we would go to the only safe place we could find: our beds.

I’m hiding in the one place he can never find me. The monster can only hurt us if he can see us, and I am safe under these blankets.

What’s funny is there’s enough light to write this lett—oh. These blankets are flannel. They’re see-through.

Run. It’s not safe hersgdfhssYOUARENEXT