Cornconic's Collection of Short Stories

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1.) When Dr. Letz saved his own life, he made himself quite a few enemies. The man’s decision to defect to the side of his country’s greatest adversary in the face of capture during the third Great Resource War caused quite a stir at home.
The assassination didn’t take long, naturally. They found him in a secluded lab in the countryside, surrounded by unfinished, experimental tech. Or, rather, they didn’t find him. Just a teleportation device in his chambers and its last registered instruction.
Distance: 6 feet. Direction: straight down.
2.) ‘Tainted Love’ was playing faintly from a nearby nightclub when I slit my friend’s throat in his truck. It was an “accident”, except not really. That’s what I told the police, though.
10 years later, fresh out of prison, I’m driving my car down a busy street, listening to some tunes on the radio. There’s a caller segment, and suddenly I hear his voice:
“Hey Davey, this one’s for you, buddy!”
Without warning, ‘Tainted Love’ blasts through my speakers, so loud that I don’t hear the wail of an incoming truck’s horn as it plows into my side.
3.) “Mommy! Do you wanna try out my new time machine?”
Kate smiled down at her beaming daughter, covered in glitter and silvery paints. “Sure, sweetypie.” She lowered herself onto all fours and crawled into the box’s opening.
Looking ahead, she was sure that its end seemed a lot further away once she was inside it. She shuffled forward towards the strangely bright opening, eventually emerging.
What was once their living room was now a vast valley of greenery. Kate’s face turned to one of awe, then terror as she was swooped up by a pterodactyl.
4.) This dude hasn’t stopped staring at me throughout this whole lecture. I have no idea why because I’m not really paying attention, just like everyone else here. Still, it’s getting kinda distracting. He’s got this odd look on his face; excitement mixed with trepidation and doubt. It’s like he wants to come talk to me but can’t quite muster the courage. Freakin’ weirdo.
Then I leave the lecture hall, and seeing the topic of discussion on the board, it all becomes blindingly apparent. I laugh and roll my eyes, making sure I’m within his line of sight as I dematerialise.
5.) It appeared briefly and without warning in a field that was empty all but a few days of the year: a spiral of sharp, pinwheel stripes slanted up towards a triangular flag, gleaming a garish crimson. No-one was ever seen putting it up, nor taking it down, and it was never quite the same shape as when you saw it last. There was no advertisement; the only way you knew it was near was by the echo of the ceaseless accordions, which, upon being heard, would conjure one singular thought in the mind:
The Circus is in town.
6.) “Hey, dude? That evil wizard who hates you cast another spell. He said whatever you say is literal now. Y’know, like Amelia Bedelia?”
“Nah, I’m not falling for that one again. You’re full of shit, man.”
John watched in horror as his friend collapsed, feces leaking out of every pore.
7.) Dead zones are an interesting concept in space travel. Theoretically, if you travel far enough out into the void, the rate at which the universe is expanding will outpace the speed you can move. Basically, you become trapped in a bubble of nothingness, never able to go anywhere ever again, only getting further away from everything over time. Even if you travelled forever, you’d never reach anywhere.
Like I said, an interesting concept. I’ve got the rest of eternity to think about it, that and why I thought it was a good idea to nap on autopilot without an alarm.
8.) Swish!
Abigail’s mother’s knife misses her by a fraction of an inch. Moonlight illustrates her sleeping face, eyes closed, head tilted back. She swings again, and Abigail runs to another part of the house. The cycle repeats until the morn, when safety is restored.
Julia sees the darkened rings around her daughter’s eyes and knows she’s not been sleeping. She takes her to Dr. Oswald, who prescribes a bottle of pills.
That night, the last thing Abigail sees before drifting off is the glint of her dormant mother’s knife as she creeps into her bedroom.
9.) The scariest night of my life was on a cozy September evening. Lying on the sofa, my stomach rumbled, prompting me to retrieve a snack from the kitchen.
I opened the fridge, and my mind froze. I simply stared with buggy eyes at the decapitated head on the middle shelf, its face contorted into the most twisted grimace I had ever seen.
I couldn’t sleep for weeks afterwards. Even now, years on, I still shiver just thinking about the experience. Out of all the severed heads I had amassed over the years, none of them had ever smiled before.
10.) I’m peeling a potato. It’s quite a large potato, with lots of little blemishes and imperfections that need removing. You know how people say that their mother’s always better at peeling potatoes than them? It’s kinda the same with me. Kinda.
Anyway, I’m peeling this potato, and I’m nearly finished. There’re just a few little spots left to go. I have to make sure I get all of them, or this’ll be for nothing.
Done. Now I just have two things left to worry about: the blood loss and when the painkillers start wearing off.
11.) There’s something about working in this nursing home that’s been bothering me for a while. It escaped me until recently, but I’ve finally realised: no-one here ever seems to get any older. Not the residents, not the rest of the staff, nobody.
Andrew must have known it was weighing on me, because today, he took me upstairs to the door that never gets unlocked. Once it was opened, we walked out onto the roof. A scorched, empty Earth surrounded us, reduced to rubble. We headed back inside soon after, and I don’t ask many questions anymore.
12.) The art show had been a great success. Critics lauded Marcus’ elegant strokes, his nuanced colour usage, his portrayal of emotion, particularly distress. His works were fetching tens of thousands of dollars, and all that money went towards funding his newly extravagant lifestyle.
Back home, he takes a bucket of slop – mainly food waste – and descends into the basement of his house. The creature is chained up there; it roars as it sees the sustenance he carries. Marcus distributes it across the floor and retrieves the newly coated easel from the centre of the room.
“Exquisite,” he declares, smiling widely.
13.) I never liked being an FBI agent. I never liked having to monitor suspected terrorists’ webcams, observing their every moment through yawns and endless caffeine. I liked it even less when they all began looking into the camera and screaming.
14.) Felix approached John with an annoyingly smug look, a bowling ball held against his waist.
“Hey, dipshit! I just beat your high score with a perfect 300! What do you think about that?”
“Blow it out your ass.”
John heard an agonized scream and then a very loud pop, followed by the slumping of Felix’s body to the floor. He considered turning around to look, but decided against it.
15.) Spirits are fragile things. A simple glance from an ordinary human will almost always be enough to dispel them, for a short time, anyway. That’s why they like to hang out in the corners of sight, where the psychic effect is not as strong. It’s like a game to them, seeing how close they can get.
A lot of blind people don’t live alone, but if the ones that do could see, they would be driven mad. So be thankful for your vision. And keep in mind that I said almost always.
16.) Kevin the flea was hopelessly lost. He and his partner Dan had been wandering through the maze of incessant body hair for days. Strangely, the thick, black strands that surrounded them seemed to have warped into an endless arrangement of walls and corridors. It was impossible to make sense of.
“Let’s see…” Kevin said, pulling out a map. “We’re not in the armpit…can’t be on the leg…too far from the face…”
Dan suddenly clapped his legs to his face in horror. “Kev…” he spoke, “You’re not gonna like this, but…I think we’re in the back rooms…” 
17.) Francesca sleeps in the well at the edge of the gardens. I don’t know her real name, so that’s what I’m calling her. It’s a beautiful name, isn’t it? A beautiful name for a beautiful girl.
I hope she comes up to see me sometime. I’ve seen her plenty. She’s a picture of grace, but she won’t talk to me.
I talk to her. I go to see her in the mornings and toss down some food and a little wine now and then.
Maybe one day I’ll go down there. Maybe she’ll look less pale than from up here.
18.) James awoke to find a body in his back garden. He rushed outside and knelt by the beast. It was a huge, foul thing, and it was waking up, two white dots housed within its skull powering on.
“WHERE IS YOUR GOD?” it asked him. James stammered and pointed a finger towards the sky. The thing rose to its feet and launched itself upwards, out of sight.
James awoke the next day, feeling like a corpse. He spent the entire day sitting at the end of his bed, staring up at the hole in the clouds through his bedroom window.
19.) Darkness. Enclosing me. My camp lies nearby, but I can’t tell where in the suffocating black. I’m grasping at the air, waiting, hoping that my sense of direction will return to me. The slaps of my feet against the concrete are accompanied by stifled panting. A second set of breaths is close, out of sync with my own, much more frantic and uncontrolled. I stop and sniff the air. It is caked with the sickly stench of sewage. But that is ordinary. An unfamiliar scent hides behind the façade of rot. While still dirty and rancid, it is very much…alive.
20.) I live in an area with ravens. They’re smart animals, apparently. Befriend them, and they’ll repay you in coins, bottlecaps, and random bits of whatever else they can find.
I hate ravens, though. Have done since I was little. They’re harbingers of death, and they took my family away from me. That’s why I recruited the help of some…unsavoury powers. I guess you could sum it up like this:
Some people have birds that bring them dead things. I have a thing that brings me dead birds.
21.) There’s a voice in my head that tells me he’s a completely different person. Says his name is Emile, that he’s lived in London for just over 20 years, and that he’s not supposed to be here with me. He begs and pleads with me to help him all the time, non-stop. I know his address, all the people he claims to know, basically everything about him at this point.
It’s insufferable at times, but I know from experience that it won’t last forever. I can’t wait for him to realise that he never actually left his body.
22.) My son runs out into the garden. He kicks away the discarded Amazon package and starts spouting off some conspiracy nonsense, as per usual. Something about an invasion of invisible alien spaceships here to enslave us. Thank God I’m losing my hearing. Not like it matters much. I’m so happy playing with my new drone that I almost don’t notice it bouncing off a portion of the sky.
23.) It’s the strangest thing, y’know. As of late, we’ve all started seeing these weird entities in each other’s cubicles. I did say this job would drive us mad, but I didn’t mean it literally!
Craig’s got a clown that’s pretty harmless. Harry’s got this anthropomorphic lizard. They can’t see their own entities for whatever reason; none of us can. That’s probably for the best for me.
My name’s Victor, and apparently I have this fuzzy, gelatinous blob with bulging eyes. They tell me that it gets a little closer every day. Let’s just hope I get laid off soon.
24.) I was homeless. One day, two men in suits came up to me and asked if I was interested in making some money. They took me to this weird facility and gave me a VR headset. It was a simulation of being homeless. In the simulation, two men in suits came up to me and asked if I was interested in making some money. They took me to this weird facility and…
I have no idea how many layers deep I am now. All I can hope is that next time, I have the courage to tell them no.
25.) “Don’t you think this format is getting kind of old?” Yumi the jockey said to John.
“Hmm, kinda. I suppose at this point, we are beating a dead horse.”
Yumi screamed as they suddenly found themselves by the side of her deceased stallion, Jupiter, lead pipes in hand. John silently and awkwardly left the barn as she knelt by the animal’s side and wept.
26.) It’s been almost 80 days since we’ve seen the sun in the Antarctic. It gets tougher every year, but some of us handle it better than others. Theodore, our boss, is one of those people. He’s a hardy kind of guy, ready for anything. The only thing he can’t bear is the smell of Alexander’s garlic curry.
He’s superstitious, too. When he’s out on an expedition, he’ll never reenter the base without someone letting him in from inside. It’s peculiar, but harmless, I guess. He must have some difficult work for us, because he said we’d be feeling ‘drained’ soon.
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