"NO!"
"But—"
Skragg struck the ground. "Play cards!"
The imps sat down. "You're just mad because that little girl keeps summoning you."
Skragg almost stood up again. "Were you watching me in the human world?"
"Of course! We watch everybody who goes there."
"Hardly anyone does anymore," the tall imp said.
"I think you were the last one," the short imp told Skragg. "Don't you recognize her from that time?"
"Recognize who?"
"The little girl!" the fat one said. "You mean you don't remember?"
Skragg's anger drained away, leaving thick bitterness behind. "I don't bother remembering."
Nothing was worth remembering. After six thousand years, the difference between one day and the next was barely noticeable. Life was an endless series of pointless "now"s and the future may as well have already happened, for all the good it would bring. Skragg searched for a searing condemnation of all existence that would drip with enough venomous bile, but he couldn't find one.
The imps were oblivious to his deeper moods. "I can't believe he forgot Margaret," the short one told the tall one.
Margaret. The name rattled around in Skragg's brain. It finally connected, like a right hook to a jaw.
ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO, Skragg had been resting on the shore of a lava beach, minding his own business. (He had no idea how a human vacuum cleaner had gotten into the mystic underworld, and he certainly couldn't say how six of those irritating wind spirits had gotten sucked into it.) Then he felt a light tickling on his neck. That sensation had been coming and going for a while now, as if a fly kept landing on him. Was it a summons? If so, it was the feeblest one he'd ever felt. Out of boredom as much as anything else, he slipped through his lamp, into the human world.
He appeared on an elevated stage in what looked like a small auditorium. Rows of empty chairs and an overhead projector faced him. Off to the side stood a very young woman wearing a dark jacket, a white blouse, and dark slacks. She might as well have been wearing a sign that said, "I'm not a kid anymore!" She was holding his lamp and a silk cloth, and her anxiety stank up the room, almost making him gag.
She put the lamp down. "Well it's about time," she said. Her arms were trembling. "I've been calling you for three weeks. I didn't think you'd ever show up. God, you're tall. And your hands are on fire. Good thing I shut off the sprinklers."
Skragg couldn't think of anything to say, except, "You did?"
She rearranged a stack of transparencies and put them next to the projector. "Of course. I know about your kind."
"You do?"
She sighed like she'd been asked this question fifty times today, and looked away from him. "I'm Margaret Cantiveri. I am, whether you believe it or not, one of the world's leading experts on genies. I know most of the stories are wrong, but not all of them. I did everything I was supposed to: I coated your lamp with gold dust and rubbed it off with a cloth. You should have gotten here long ago."
She knew about the gold dust! The genies had invented that rule to keep any idiot with a rag from summoning them by the roomful. "First, that cloth is so thin, I barely felt it. Second, the gold dust is supposed to be a secret. How'd you..."
"I found an ancient stone tablet in an archaeology dig." She still kept her quivering back to him, as if that would keep him from hearing or smelling how nervous she was. "I'm a historian. I'm about to defend my dissertation on genies. You're going to help."
Skragg had been told all those records had been destroyed. He should have known better. "No, I'm not."
"Yes you are!" she said. "As the master of your lamp, I get one wish every ten years. I need you to be the centerpiece of my orals defense."
Skragg was bored already. If there was a point to existence, he'd forgotten it long ago. "Leave me alone, or I'll set you on fire and roast marshmallows."
That got her to face him, at least. "You can't harm me! I know your rules! If you deliberately harm anyone in my world, you'll lose your powers for a thousand years!"
She knew that? How was he supposed to handle someone who wasn't afraid of him?
He'd just have to try harder. He leaped off the stage, landed in front of her, and lifted her four feet off the ground by her jacket. "Now you listen good, babe. I used to serve the great and powerful. Pharaohs! Kings! But those days are over." He leaned into her face. "And even if they weren't, it was never my job to serve the stupid, little whims of stupid, little girls!"
He put her down and levitated back onto the stage as impressively as he could.
She stepped out of her heels and climbed back onto the stage, right next to him. She smelled more angry than scared now. "You can't leave!"
"Watch me."
"I'll just summon you again! We're bound until you grant me a wish!"
"Or until you release me," Skragg said. "Now be a good little human and tell me I'm free."
"No!"
This kind of battle wasn't even fun anymore. "Maybe I can't hurt you, but I promise, I can make your life so miserable—"
"HA!" She stared up into his sharp, glowing eyes. "Worse than it is now? The whole department thinks I'm crazy. They want to revoke my funding. They're right outside this room, you know. They probably hear me. They probably think I'm talking to myself. You've got to help. You're the only thing that can."
Long ago, her plea might have moved him. But Skragg was sick of humans—whining little bonebags who, no matter what you gave them, always wanted more. "You want me to do something magical?" he asked. "Something they'll never forget?"
"That's my wish." Then she stood straighter. "And my command."
He'd almost given in. Then she'd added that "command" bit, and his soul had bristled. "Fine," he said. "Bring them in."
Margaret climbed off the stage, jammed her feet back into her heels, brushed her hair with her hands, and called out, "Dr. Blanche! Dr. Masscott! I'm ready now! You've got to see this!"
The door across the room opened. Two older humans and a bunch of younger ones entered. Skragg made himself invisible. As he slipped back to his homeworld, he said, "Your wish is granted," and made every piece of clothing Margaret was wearing disappear.
He kept the path to the human world open long enough to revel in her wonderful, sustained shriek.
"SKRAGG?" the fat imp asked. "Are you okay?"
But Candace was just a little kid! Margaret...
...had to be her mother. And if she'd known that much about genies before, then by now...
Skragg's poker play deteriorated as he tried to convince himself he was wrong. Then he was summoned again, more powerfully than ever.
He didn't have enough room to appear wherever his lamp was, so he was automatically pulled back to the mystic underworld. The lamp, however, was still being rubbed, so the moment he got home, he was summoned back to the human world. He still couldn't fit there, so he was sent home again.
This pattern repeated about ten times a second.
After a few minutes of feeling like a supersonic yo-yo, Skragg wanted to throw up, but he could no longer tell where "up" was. He had no choice but to try something extremely dangerous. He would enter the human world away from his lamp.
With spectacular determination, he broke through and found himself lying on the cold cement floor of Candace's garage. He'd always wondered what it would be like to get shot out of a cannon, straight into a brick wall. Now he knew.
Candace was standing over him. "Hi Mr. Genie!" She tossed back her long, dark hair, which looked exactly like Margaret's. "Ready to make my sundae?"
Skragg tried to sit up. The world performed a backflip and he lay down again. His lamp was still being rubbed, somehow. So was his stomach, from the inside out.
He had nothing left to fight with. "The best sundae ever made. That's your wish?"
"Nope!"
Skragg moaned. "No?"
"I want two of them!"
The floor was so cool and peace
ful. "Two sundaes."
"The best ever! With hot fudge and whipped cream!"
"Right," he muttered. "Best ever. Hot fudge, whipped cream."
Skragg concentrated, and two perfect sundaes in big crystal glasses appeared on the floor next to him. Candace squealed and pulled a Bugs Bunny spoon out of a pocket in her overalls.
Candace sat next to Skragg's head and took as much time as she liked eating one of the sundaes, swaying with delight and making "mmmmm" noises after every bite. "The other one's for Mom," she said. "Mom told me about you."
"I bet," Skragg mumbled.
"She says you don't like little girls."
Skragg's whole body was churning. "Kid, however you're polishing my lamp...you're never doing that again, right?"
Candace licked her spoon. "Maybe."
"You're cruel, kid."
"Mom taught me." She swallowed another bite of ice cream. "She says it was something she learned in graduate school."
When she was through with her sundae, and not before, she got up and turned off a clothes dryer. She pulled out several thick towels that sparkled with gold dust, and his lamp. "See you when I'm sixteen!"
She stepped through the door connecting her garage to her house. As that door closed, a more mature voice added: "And twenty-six, and thirty-six, and forty-six..."
SKRAGG SAT IN Candace's garage and wondered where his life had gone wrong. Some of the greatest leaders in human history had tried to humiliate him like this. He'd vanquished them all. Now he'd been beaten by someone whose previous greatest accomplishment was probably learning not to pee in her own pants.
It was his own fault. Why hadn't he taken his lamp back from Margaret last time, and hidden it again? He could have at least made her spend a few years searching for it. It was as if he'd been hoping to get summoned. Nothing, of course, could have been further from the truth.
And the poker game! He was losing to creatures who thought Hamlet should have been about a small pig. Even without cheating, he should have crushed them. Plus, he knew ways to cheat magically that were so subtle, even imps wouldn't notice.
He'd lost his edge.
It was time to find it again.
He went back to the poker game, where the imps were arguing about their upcoming production. The fat imp was telling the short one, "You always want to add singing cows."
"So we can call it a moooo-sical!" All the imps looked up. "Hi Skragg!"
Then they saw his malevolent grin. "Uh-oh," the tall imp said.
"Uh-oh is right," Skragg said. He won the next six hands.
THE PRICE OF Skragg's victory was that the imps had to perform a play, just for him, without changing even one word of it. A serious play. Skragg visited some muses who lived a couple layers of reality over and described what he was looking for. They came up with a never-produced, fourteen-act piece called "The Long, Slow Death of Ted Wrapplemeyer." It had been written by a college sophomore named Fred Happlemeyer. It featured flag burning, characters dressed as sex organs, evil villains called Mom and Dad, four crucifixions, and a scale model of Chicago that, in Act Ten, got eaten by a goat named Capitalism.
Days later, while watching the imps sweat and writhe their way through the play's endless monologues, Skragg thought about the future. It was different from the vast, empty space that had lain before him for so many centuries. Something beckoned in the distance, like a softer, warmer kind of summons. In ten years, which was hardly any time for a genie, Candace and Margaret would call him again.
On a big, flat rock that served as a stage, the imps pounded each other with foam mallets labeled "prejudice" and "high interest rates." Skragg smiled, then leaned forward, as if to get that much closer to the future.
This story originally appeared in Town Drunk magazine, 2007.
Tarl Kudrick is a strategic human capital consultant and all-around industrial/organizational psychologist by day. By night, he is the founder and co-publisher of the fiction magazine On The Premises (www.OnThePremises.com). Tarl has sold about a dozen short stories over the years, but lately has focused more on publishing other people's stories.
Death: A List
Tanya Bryan
1.Die. Try not to make it too messy, if at all possible.
2.Despite what they all tell you, do not go into the light. You are not a firefly. Do not get zapped.
3.Attend your own funeral to see who shows up. Mock those who are obviously fake-mourning to get attention. Notice Cousin Jesse is the most upset, genuinely. Try to console her and realize she can feel your presence, which makes her shiver. Realize haunting is the greatest thing about being dead.
4.Decide who to haunt. Start with your ex, who still owes you three hundred bucks. Next, Uncle Donald, who gave you mothballs for Christmas last year. Do not forget the crazy yodeling neighbor. He haunted you for a long time with his caterwauling.
5.Learn that haunting crazies gets dull quickly. They tend to just lump you in with all the rest of the crazy already filling their heads.
6.Take up spying on people. They know they're a little colder when you're around, but most are too dense to realize why. They just put on a sweater and shake your presence off. Watch everyone you've ever known. Then turn to watching celebrities in ways that even paparazzi haven't found a way to do. Yet. After seeing Alexander Skarsgård sleep, realize how creepy you're being. You are a creep. Even for a ghost.
7.Stop being a creep.
8.Try to find that light everyone talks about. You are a firefly now. A creepy, stalker firefly, ready to get zapped. No light. Boo.
9.Hang around your own grave. There's no going back into that rotten corpse because no matter how cool the media makes zombies seem, they're gross. Even worse than being a creep. You'd be a smelly creep. But it is comforting to see that Cousin Jesse visits every month, at least for the first ten or so years. Then even she forgets about you. Life takes precedence over death.
10.Vocally wallow in sorrow. Get mistaken for a cat in heat, a banshee, and a mermaid, despite the fact you're nowhere near water.
11.Try to meet other ghosts. No one wants anything to do with the cat in heat/banshee/mermaid ghost.
12.Attend séances just to talk to someone, even if it's a middle-aged hippie who changes everything you say to some nonsense about the other person in the room's relatives.The smart ones who've already moved on, into the light that you were too stupid to enter.
13.Understand why ghosts go all poltergeisty. Being dead is boring. It's like being stuck on a hamster wheel without a runner's high. Your only joy is throwing temper tantrums, and even those aren't satisfying when no one reacts. Reality TV has made everyone immune to the oddities of this world.
14.Revisit your ex, who didn't age well. Thank the stars you died before marrying that hot mess.
15.Start haunting priests so they will exorcise you. It tickles.
16.Attend funerals of strangers for something to do. Realize you actually know everyone. Take comfort in the fact that your funeral had better attendance than most of these poor saps'.
17.At one funeral, notice that it's Cousin Jesse's. And she's a ghost, standing next to you. She smiles at you, puts out her hand. "I knew you'd wait for me." You take her hand. Turn to the light that's supposed to be just for her. You drop her hand, push her out of the way and run.
18.Zap.
This story originally appeared in Feathertale Review magazine, 2014.
Tanya Bryan is a Canadian writer with work published in Feathertale Review and the anthologies My Cruel Invention and Dear Robot: An Anthology of Epistolary Science Fiction. She loves to travel, writing and drawing her experiences, which are often surreal and wonderful. She can be found @tanyabryan on Twitter.
Soccer Mom Smackdown
Julia S. Mandala
PUSHED OPEN THE old refrigerator that served as my makeshift coffin. In the shadowy basement corner, my son Austin huddled in a ball. The scent of blood raised an instant alarm—and hunger.
&nb
sp; "Austin, honey, are you all right?"
He raised his head and with my vampire-enhanced vision, I saw his swollen black eye and blood smeared across his nose. I wished I had time to feed before tending to him, but I'd simply have to exercise self-restraint. Sucking your own kid's blood is just bad parenting.
I gathered my son in my arms, trying not to breathe in the heady aroma of fresh blood. Filling my thoughts with the unappetizing image of garlic bread sprinkled with holy water, I asked, "Who did this?"
"Brandon," he said, his voice muffled against my shoulder.
"Brandon Caldwell?"
"No."
"Brandon McMichaels?"
"Brandon Sanchez," he said with a hint of impatience.
There were only fifteen Brandons in the fourth grade. Then again, there were ten Austins. I'd wanted to name my son something unusual, like John, but my husband Percy claimed the kid would get beat up. I supposed "Percy the Pussy" would know.
"Well, I'm going to pay Brandon's parents a little visit tonight," I said.
Austin drew back, his eyes round. "Mom, no!"
"Not that kind of visit. You know I don't feed off people." Yet. Bullies usually learned by example, and most parents of bullies saw nothing wrong with their precious child terrorizing another. If I heard the "boys will be boys" excuse, I was pretty sure vampires would be vampires.
"Talking to them will just make it worse," he said, wiping tears and smearing blood.
"You have a right to be safe at school—especially for the tuition that place charges."
After I cleaned up Austin and gave him an ice pack, I microwaved some blood liberated from the local blood bank. Amazing speed and other vampiric powers had some advantages, though they didn't make up for all that I'd lost.
While I sucked lukewarm blood from a plastic bag, my husband Percy wandered into the kitchen. His gaze locked on the bag and he didn't even try to hide his distaste.
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