Stopwatch Stories Vol 5: Stopwatch Stories, #5

By M Todd Gallowglas

The fifth volume of flash fiction stories by M. Todd Gallowglas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bard's Cloak of Tales
• Release date: Dec 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781386274377

Book preview

MY KILLERS

As I cleared away the plates from the final course before dessert, I said, I’m glad you could all be here tonight. I hope you enjoyed the food.

All six of them assured me that they had. Great dinner. Amazed I’d gone to all the trouble for them, especially since we weren’t close.

No trouble at all, I assured them. Happy to do it. I love cooking, but cooking for just myself gets tiresome after a while. And I don’t have many friends in this city, so I have people over who I know from just my day to day life. It makes me happy.

As I placed the dessert plates in front of everyone, I said, Now, no peeking until everyone is served.

I’d served every course with the plates covered, with the same requirement, just so that when we got to this point in the dinner, they would be conditioned not to look and spoil the real surprise.

Once I placed the last two dessert plates down, I checked my watch, and when the count-down timer silently reached 0:00, I said, Enjoy.

My guests lifted the covers and looked down with stunned and shocked faces. The plates didn’t have dessert. Instead, each guest looked down at a collage of photographs of all the times they had met in their plot to kill me. They thought I wouldn’t notice, but I’d seen each of them, the barista, the gas station attendant, the bank teller, the high school math teacher, the mailman, and the bus driver, interacting in innocent ways too many times for it to be chance. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Coordinating to get them all here on the same night had been a chore, but I finally managed it.

As Robin Williams so eloquently said in the movie, Dead Again, Karmically speaking, self-defense is quite cool.

And then they all collapsed from the poison I’d been slowly feeding them all night.

I checked my watch, 8:43 pm. Plenty of time before sunrise and bury them in the backyard with the people that had conspired to kill me those other times.

THE GUN WILL NOT BE WEIRD

It’s not going to be weird.

It’s totally going to be weird.

Not.

Is.

It’s going to be awesome.

Look. I’ve got an open mind when it comes to affectations, but come on man, this is going above and beyond. I mean. Why put yourself through that?

Because it’ll be awesome.

"Weird is not