Stopwatch Stories Vol 4: Stopwatch Stories, #4

By Michael Gallowglas

This book contains the thirty flash fiction stories I wrote in April as part of my quest to write a flash fiction story a day in 2016.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Gallowglas
• Release date: Nov 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386180906

Book preview

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

As I’m putting together this fourth volume of Stopwatch Stories, I’ve started to notice a few themes, overarching ideas, and similar tropes reoccurring through the stories. As this realization dawned on me, I then found myself wondering if I should maybe switch up the order of the days if any of my stories seemed too much like the ones I’d recently written or maybe even scrapping some of the stories and writing another, different story. It didn’t take long for me to scrap those thoughts. I’ve got enough on my plate with a story a day, my other writing, my public appearances, AND NOW grad school. The last thing I need is to put one more restriction on my creativity that’s going to make things even harder on myself to get the work done. So, if you notice some similarities between the stories, it’s the way they came out, so that’s the way I’m presenting them. Hope you are enjoying them.

Cheers!

M. Todd Gallowglas

April, 2016

WHAT FOOLS

All throughout the convention center, geeks and nerds shook their phones, rebooted their phones, held their phones high over their heads looking up at the screens, hoping to get a signal. They had status updates and pictures they needed to post to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pintrest, Google+, Reddit, Vine, Imgur, Snapchat ...

Which they couldn’t ...

Not without internet access.

No one could get a signal.

No one could connect to the wireless network provided by the convention center.

Though none of the con-goers said as much, the posture of over 100,000 geeks and nerds pretty much told the story of what they’d been feeling for the last fifteen minutes: WHY CAN’T WE GET A FRAKKING SIGNAL???

High in the rafters above the Mecca of Media, Robin Goodfellow, the ancient trickster Puck, snickered, giggled, and snorted in his mirth. He half-expected some of the heads below to spontaneously combust as their fury rose.

Then, he stopped blocking the signal. A collective cheer went up throughout the hall. Then more grumbling, as over a hundred thousand devices tried to connect at once. Data moved at a pace that only the early 90s would have considered decent. And then, after only a small percentage of posts uploaded completely, while all the others were stuck somewhere in loading bar limbo, Puck shut off the connection again, and cackled at the reaction.

AFTERMATH

Here I am, locked in an occult library, scouring over the books, hoping against hope that I can find some way to fix our April Fool’s Day fun.

It’ll be funny, he said ...

Load of laughs, he said ...

We’ll laugh our asses off when it blows up in her face, he said.

So we switched it up. Put in different colored candles (red, yellow, blue, green, purple, and orange, but painted so they still looked white.) Traded out the sage sticks for thyme. And to top everything off, we spiked the ritual wine chalice with a dose or three of LSD.

All through the ritual, we struggled to keep straight faces. Then, when the whole thing ended, we were set to burst out laughing.

Only ...

When the ritual ended, we didn’t see any pyrotechnics or warping of space like usually happened when a ritual went wrong. Instead, Suzie turn to face us, her eyes glowing a sickly green color. All of a sudden like, I didn’t feel like laughing, and it felt like I’d swallowed a shot of battery acid with a dry ice chaser.

We backed away, slowly, hoping not to get its attention.

Donny, who came up with this brilliantly funny plan, said, Oh, crap, under his breath.

Suzie soared across the room in giant leap and beat Donny to death with the ritual chalice. Last I saw of Donny, his blood, bones, and brains were splattering the floor as Suzie pummeled him over and