BAKER’S DENOUEMENT

©2009 by Richard S. Crawford

about 25 words

Given his talents, it was not surprising that Marcus ended up working in the cafeteria. After all, peeling peaches was very much like peeling skulls.

PUSHING DOGS (PART THREE)

©2009 by Richard S. Crawford

about 1,500 words

Download as PDF | Download as HTML

“You don’t act like you’re worried,” Nigel said.

Thelma shrugged. “Why should I be?”

“Well, it seems like he’s been beating you all day. Every time you make a bet with someone, Hank’s there to make sure it goes against you.”

“True, isn’t it?”

“Even when you bet me that I couldn’t make that one guy scream on the Ferris wheel, Hank climbed into the guy’s car and started punching him. Remember that?”

Thelma scoffed. “Of course I remember that. I was there, wasn’t I?”

Nigel nodded. “The point is, Hank’s got you beat.”

“No he hasn’t.”

“You got something special planned? Some secret bet that you know he can’t sabotage?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Hard to tell.”

“You could tell me, you know. We’ve always been good friends.”

“Bullshit. You’ve always been the easy mark, and I’ve always been the one who takes money away from you.”

“Maybe that’s because I’ve been letting you.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Well maybe,” Nigel said, stammering just a little, “it’s because I’m in love with you.”

The two of them stared at each other in silence for a few seconds; then, simultaneously, they burst into peals of loud laughter.

“I would never have thought to bet on your acting skills,” Thelma said, wiping her eyes. “You had me going for a second there.”

“Yeah, that was good, wasn’t it? Anyway, like I said, you can tell me if you’ve got some secret plan to beat Hank at some point.”

Thelma shook her head. “Nah. I like you Nigel, but you’re a sucker, so I can’t trust that you won’t give anything away to Hank if he threatened you.”

“So you do have something!”

“I didn’t say that.” Thelma lit a cigarette and blew smoke into Nigel’s face. “I gotta get back to my cart, there’s turkeys piling up.”

“See ya,” Nigel grunted.

# # #

So the day went. Every time Thelma made a bet with someone, Hank was right there to sabotage it and make sure it went bad for her.

Hank approached her at five in the evening. “Ready to give in? You must have lost a lot of money today, and you’re going to owe me even more tomorrow.” His grin was a mile wide, and looked like it would split his head wide open. He was positively drooling with glee.

“We’ve still got an hour to go before the fair closes,” Thelma replied.

Hank shook his head sadly. “It was nice knowing you,” he said as he shuffled away.

# # #

She was waiting at her apartment already when Hank showed up. He didn’t even knock; he just twisted on the doorknob like he knew it would be open, and stepped on it. His eyes widened when he saw her sitting in her easy chair, as though he was genuinely surprised to see her there.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“Just waiting for you.” Thelma took a long drag on her cigarette. “You’re early.”

Hank checked his watch. “Well, let’s get busy. You got the money you owe me?”

Thelma couldn’t stop herself grinning. “How much do you figure I owe you?”

“Well, I said a hundred dollars, didn’t I?”

“So you did.”

“Plus you bet that amount if you could place a bet that I couldn’t sabotage. So I figure that’s two hundred dollars.”

“That’s some fucked up logic there, Hank.”

“Best kind.”

“You sure?”

Hank snorted. “You got the money or not?”

“You sure it’s two hundred dollars I owe you? I could have sworn it was more.”

“Hey, I’m doing you a favor here.”

“I know you are, and I appreciate it. Well, okay, then.” Thelma took one last long drag on her cigarette, crushed it out in her ashtray, and then folded her hands in her lap.

Hank stood in front of her, nostrils flaring. “Well?”

“I’m waiting for you to pay up.”

“What?”

“Hank, I don’t think you understand here.”

“I understand. You owe me money. I watched you place at least a dozen bets today and you lost all of them.”

“Correction. You sabotaged them all.”

“So? I couldn’t let you win, could I?”

“So… You would say you had to sabotage them all?”

“Yeah. I’d say that.”

“Then pay up.”

“Why?”

“Did you forget the bet that you and I made?”

“Which bet?”

Thelma grinned. Maybe her logic was sound, maybe it wasn’t. But Hank had just expressed a preference for fucked up logic and he wasn’t all that smart to begin with. “I bet that I could place at least one bet today that you wouldn’t be able to sabotage.”

“And I sabotaged them all.”

“Except the bet that we made. You couldn’t sabotage it because you had to sabotage all the other bets.”

Hank’s considerable eyebrows furrowed. “What?”

“Okay, I made a bunch of bets today, right?”

“Right.”

“And you said you’d sabotage them all.”

“Right.”

“But you couldn’t sabotage the bet we’d made that you’d sabotage all of the bets, because then you’d lose the bet. Get it?”

Hank hesitated. “I… I think so.”

Thelma nodded. “Good. So pay up.”

“What if I don’t feel like it?”

“You want me to spread the word that you welsh on your bets?”

“You tricked me.”

“So what? Pay up.”

For a moment, Thelma thought that Hank would be able to come up with a counter argument. Or maybe he’d see a hole in her logic. Or maybe he’d just not pay up because he was a thick-headed idiot who was just too stupid to even think about falling for twisted logic. She could see the conflict behind his eyes, in the way he worked his jaw and the way he wrung his hands. But when she the twitch in his left eye, she knew she’d won. He only twitched like that when he knew he’d been beat. She hadn’t seen it very often, just enough to know the sign.

“Right,” Hank said at last. He took his bill clip out of his pocket and pulled out two crisp hundred-dollar bills. “Here,” he said, handing them over.

Thelma grabbed the two bills. She had to tug them hard to get them out of his hand. But he eventually relinquished them, and Thelma put them into her purse.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” she told him.

Hank said nothing. He simply turned and left the apartment. He closed the door behind him, which Thelma thought was particularly thoughtful.

She sighed, leaned back in the chair and lit another cigarette. She could probably have gotten more money out of him, she thought, but she’d been pushing it as it was. Any more money and he would have started thinking too carefully about what she was saying. And she couldn’t have allowed that.

Well, tomorrow it was back to the usual. Pushing dogs. Making bets. Arguing with customers. Maybe shooting the shit with Maureen.

Maybe tomorrow, though, she could make a change. Figure out a way to get off the circuit, get a steady job, maybe settle down a bit.

Maybe.

But she wouldn’t place odds on it.

PUSHING DOGS (PART TWO)

©2009 by Richard S. Crawford

about 1,400 words

Download as HTML

Thelma tilted her head and glared at Hank. “You don’t think I’m not going to pay you back, do you?”

Hank’s voice rumbled throughout the entire apartment. “The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Well, I’m going to. Here.” She took the wad of bills that Nigel had given her from her purse and tossed it at Hank.

Hank unrolled the wad and counted the bills. “You’re short,” he said.

“And you’re ugly.”

“I meant that you don’t have enough money here.” Hank counted through the bills again. “But only fiftydollars.”

“So? I’ll have it tomorrow.” Thelma tried not to show any reaction or any sign that her heart was pounding and her palms were sweating.

Hank glared at her for a few seconds, his jaw working. “Fine,” he said at length. “Fifty bucks just isn’t worth it.”

“So I’m off the hook?”

“Get me a hundred by tomorrow night, and you are.”

“Ten? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No I’m not. And it will double each day until you either pay me back, or it becomes with it.”

“Worth it for what?”

Hank’s grin was positively carnivorous. “You don’t want to know,” he said. He tossed something at Thelma. “You’ll need this.”

Thelma caught the object and looked it over. It was the light bulb from her living room lamp.

# # #

The next day started out easy. Pushing dogs on the turkeys at the fair was always easy, even in the morning. People are always hungry, after all.

She looked around the Midway, trying to find a likely place for a wager. The day before, she had wagered with Nigel at the Ferris wheel that he could keep patrons at the top of the Ferris wheel for longer than ten minutes before they would start screaming, and she’d won. Nigel probably wasn’t going to go for that one again.

She sighed, glancing around again. Ah, yes. Fred, over at the Spooktacular Thrill Ride, should be a good mark. He’d been a dark ride operator for thirty years but Thelma was sure she could think of a way to fleece him out of some of his cash.

There were no customers at the moment, so she closed up the stand and went over to where Fred stood next to the entrance of the Spooktacular dark ride. “Hey, Fred. Got a moment?”

Fred looked at Thelma, a cigarette danging from beneath his impressive mustache. He blinked his heavy eyelids. “What do you want, Thelma?”

“Nothing in particular,” Thelma said. “Can’t I just come by to say hi to my friend?”

“We’re not friends,” said Fred. “Every time you come by you want something. So what is it this time? More money?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve been friends for years, Fred. Haven’t we?”

Fred shook his head. “Nope. Just tell me what you want, Thelma.”

“Fine.” Thelma looked back at the Spooktacular cars that were lining up at the entrance of the ride. Each one was a tiny black hearse, room enough for three people, topped with a giant gray human skull. “Listen, I want to make a bet with you.”

“Not again, Thelma. I’m no sucker.”

“No, this one’s simple.”

Fred’s face worked for a few seconds. He may try to deny it, but Thelma knew he really was a sucker, and that within a minute, five at the most, he’d cave and take her up on whatever bet she suggested.

And finally he said, “What kind of bet?”

“Just something simple. Something easy.” She racked her brain, suddenly unable to think of anything. Then it came to her. “I bet you can’t get four complete strangers to sit all together in one of those cars.”

“Those cars only have three seats.”

“Exactly.”

Fred smiled. “Yeah, I can do that. How much?”

“Fifty bucks.”

“Make it twenty.”

Thelma winced. “Forty.”

“Thirty-five.”

Thelma stuck out her hand. “Done.” It felt unnatural to take a bet with such low stakes, especially when she owed so much money to Hank. But she knew she wouldn’t be able to talk Fred into betting more. “It’s easy. All you have to do is get four strangers to ride together in one car.”

Fred shrugged and approached the line that was forming in front of the Spooktacular ride. There were definitely more than four people in the line, and there was only one couple that looked like they were talking with each other. As far as Thelma could tell, most of the people in the line didn’t know each other, and were therefore strangers to each other. Thelma knew that strangers would never ride together in a dark ride if they could avoid it, especially if there were more riders than there were seats. It was an easy win.

She yawned and looked back at the hot dog cart, just to make sure there were no customers waiting for her. There weren’t. Then she turned back to the dark ride again, and drew a sharp intake of breath.

Hank was standing next to Fred, helping Fred load up a fourth person into one of the skull cars.

What the hell?

Thelma marched through the line of customers and up to Hank and Fred. “What the hell?”

Hank smiled down at Thelma. “I promised Fred I’d help him out. Said he had a bit of a problem.”

Thelma turned to Fred. “You’re cheating.”

Fred shook his head. “Not at all. You didn’t say I couldn’t have help with it. You owe me thirty-five dollars. Pay up.”

Thelma glared at Hank. “You’re going to do this all day, aren’t you?”

“Do what?” Hank blinked rapidly, feigning innocence.

“Fine.” Thelma opened her purse, took out two twenties. They were the only cash she had left in the world, and she handed them over to Fred. “I need change back.”

“Ain’t got none,” Fred replied.

“Of course you don’t.” Thelma snapped her purse shut and stomped back to her cart. She glanced back, and saw that Hank was following her, hands in pockets, whistling.

She stopped. “Okay, Hank. Tell you what.”

“What?”

“Obviously, you plan to sabotage any bet I make with anyone today.”

Hank shrugged. “I never said that.”

“You didn’t have to. Care to make a bet yourself?”

Hank stared at Thelma for a moment, his eyes squinted. “Sure. What have you got?”

Thelma took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She was going to have to word this very carefully. “I bet the rest of what I owe you,” she said slowly, “that I can make a bet that you can’t sabotage.”

Hank sneered. “Really?”

“Really.”

“That’s too easy, Thelma. You may as well pay me right now.”

“Let’s give it til the end of the day.”

Hank nodded. “Fair enough.”

“Perfect.”

Thelma shook Hank’s hand, knowing that she had this one already in the bag.

PUSHING DOGS (PART ONE)

©2009 by Richard S. Crawford

about 1,400 words

Download as PDF | Download as HTML

“Sorry, kid, law of the jungle. Drop the dog, buy a new one.” Thelma took the money from the little boy’s father and put it in the cash box.

“Ma’am,” said the boy’s father, “he just dropped his hot dog. Can’t you just get him a new one? I haven’t got enough money to buy him another one.”

Thelma shrugged. Once upon a time, maybe, she would have felt sorry for the kid, but not today. “Law of the jungle,” she repeated.

The little boy’s father glared at Thelma for a moment, his jaw working as if he were getting ready to let loose a self-justified tirade. Thelma simply glared back at him until he backed down. “Fine,” he said, and he and his son headed off.

“That was cold,” said Nigel from beside Thelma.

“Whatever,” Thelma said. She glanced to the left and to the right. No more customers. Not at the moment, at least. She turned to Nigel and took out her notebook. “You owe me money.”

Nigel took a long drag off his cigarette, then let out the smoke in a long breath, right into Thelma’s face. “Fine. How much?”

Thelma tried not to grin too broadly as she double checked her watch. “They were up there for ten minutes before they started screaming,” she said. “Five dollars a minute for each minute past five, plus the original five, you owe me fifty dollars.”

Nigel leaned against the fence surrounding the Ferris wheel and crossed his arms. “What if I don’t pay?”

Thelma smiled as sweetly as she could, a smile that said she could bake a batch of cookies and feed them to you because you were her favorite grandchild and she loved you more than anything else in the entire world. Except, of course, Thelma had no grandchildren. “Sweetie,” she said, “you don’t want to go there.”

For a moment, Nigel said nothing. Then, perhaps sensing that there was something more predatory behind Thelma’s friendly smile beyond a simple batch of cookies — perhaps they would be poisoned cookies — he took his wallet out and counted out four ten dollar bills, a five, and four ones. “Can I owe you the buck?” he asked.

Thelma felt the corner of her mouth twitch. She needed fifty-five dollars to pay off Hank, and at the moment she only had four. She had counted on the kids on the Ferris wheel to be left up for at least fifteen minutes before they started screaming, and the fact that they had wimped out before then had set her back. “You sure you don’t have it?”

Nigel sighed theatrically, then dug in his pockets. A moment later he produced some coins and handed them over to Thelma. “I need something to eat with,” he said.

“Nothing here you could afford.” Thelma took the coins from Nigel’s grubby hand and counted them out. Five cents over a dollar. She handed the nickel back to him. “But I’ll let you have a dog on credit later on.”

“Fine.” Nigel turned away from Thelma and started attending to the line that had built up in front of the gate.

Thelma put the money in her handbag and turned back to her cart. A line of hungry customers had started building up. And she knew the kind of ugly that hungry fairgoers could get.

# # #

“I’ve wasted my life,” Thelma said to Maureen.

Maureen — a skinny young woman with greasy hair but surprisingly clear, if somewhat sun-worn, skin — lifted the edge of the garbage can and grabbed the thick plastic bag inside. The bag dripped stale Coca Cola and other, less pleasant fluids from the seam at the bottom. Maureen sneered and tossed the bag onto her cart. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you ever get the feeling that you could have done something… I don’t know, something real with your life?”

“Yeah. Sometimes I think I could have finished school and not ended up working as a garbage maid for the damned fair.”

Thelma scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve got your entire life ahead of you. You’re only, what, thirty? Thirty-five?”

“I’m twenty-two, Thelma.” Maureen got back into the driver’s seat of the cart and shifted into gear. The cart lurched and Thelma put her hand onto the dashboard to stabilize herself.

“Well, then,” she said. “Twenty-two. See? Even younger. But me, I’m sixty-five.”

“Really? I had you pegged at seventy.”

“Don’t be a wise-ass. The point is, here I am, at a point in my life when I should be retiring, and I’m working the god-damned hot dog stand at the Fair.”

“At least you’re not cleaning up garbage.”

“Don’t change the subject.” Thelma reached into her purse and took out her cigarettes. She lit one, took a long drag. “The point is, what should I be doing with myself? Surely just peddling hot dogs at fairs isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Maureen stepped out of the cart and went over to another garbage can. “Maybe you ought to go to one of those career guys. Someone who can help you figure out what you’re supposed to do with your life. You know?”

“Did you see one?”

“Yeah. He told me I had an aptitude for landscape design.” She lifted the lid of the can and took out the bag within, then replaced it with an empty one. “Maybe he was right.”

Thelma tapped the cigarette over the edge of the cart , letting the ash drop down onto the asphalt. This was getting her nowhere. She’d won a bet with Maureen a few months ago, and getting free rides all over the fair was part of what the young woman owed her as payment, but Thelma wasn’t sure it was worth it. Maureen chattered a lot, and she never really said anything that was useful. “So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“If I went to a career counselor, what do you think he’d tell me?”

Maureen paused just before tossing the full garbage bag onto the back of the cart and stared at Thelma thoughtfully. “I think,” she said slowly, “that he would say you should have been a bookie.”

Thelma sighed and crushed her cigarette out on the side of the cart. “Thanks, Maureen. That helps out a lot.” She climbed out of the cart and made her way to the front gate without even bothering to see if her sarcasm had been noted.

# # #

Thelma pulled her car to a hard stop in front of her apartment building. The building, a low squat affair made of brick, lurked at the edge of So Low like a broken down carousel. It was threatening, but it was home, and Thelma was used to it.

But there was something different about the place tonight. Thelma sat in her car for a few moments, staring up at the building and trying to make out what was wrong, but nothing came to her. It looked the same to her as it always did.

She hesitated a moment longer, then switched the engine off decisively and got out of her car. She stomped upstairs to her own apartment, making as much noise as she usually did, but also paying extra attention to any sounds.

The lights wouldn’t turn on.

Thelma gripped her purse tighter and flipped the light switch up and down several times. Even when she knew it wasn’t going to work, she couldn’t stop herself.

“That won’t work.” The voice rumbled low and throbbed in the floorboards under her feet. “I cut the power.”

Thelma took a deep breath. “Hank,” she said. “I knew you’d come.”

“You owe me money,” Hank rumbled. He stepped forward, his face emerging from the shadows like the moon from behind storm clouds. “I intend to collect.”

THE WALLS OF ELSINORE

©2009 by Richard S. Crawford

about 2,300 words

Download as PDF | Download as HTML

It’s a good thing the medieval Danes were so gullible. Tell them you’re a ghost, and they’d give you run of the castle.

I arrived outside the walls of Elsinore on a dark and stormy night. The sky overhead hung low with heavy clouds, brought to a faint glow by the full moon which lingered behind them. Rain poured onto my poor knapsack, which I knew wasn’t waterproof at all.

I opened the knapsack and took out the parts of the disguise that the ChronoCorps had given me. The burlap sack to clothe myself in. The talc to pour on myself and rub into my skin. The idea was for me to look like a ghost, raise some ruckus, and set the Canon back to right. So I draped myself with the burlap sack and covered myself with the talc, then scrabbled fiercely through the mud and rocks to the top of the papet. Once I got up there, though, I simply walked up to a pair of dopey looking soldiers who were leaning against the wall, gossiping.

I coughed.

They both leaped to full attention and pointed their halberds at me. “Who goes?” cried the one on the left.

I said nothing, just gave them an enigmatic stare.

“By the heavens!” said the one on the right. “It is a ghost!” The one on the left crossed himself. The two of them ran off, shrieking.

“Huh,” I said. It had been almost anticlimactic. And annoying. I wasn’t supposed to just be any ghost, I was supposed to be the ghost of the king himself. Ah well. All I could do was hope that the soldiers would report back to the Prince that his dead father’s ghost had shown up, and get the message that he was supposed to focus all his energies on avenging the death, rather than running the country.

I waited, hoping that the Prince himself would show up so that I could give him the message in person.

# # #

Working at the ChronoCorps was not nearly as exciting as I’d thought it would be when I signed up. I thought I’d have grand fun being sent up and down the time streams, wiping out paradoxes left and right and generally making sure no one decides they’re going to kill Hitler or anything else that would completely undo history and break the canon.

Instead, it was mostly paperwork.

The amount of red tape involved in the ChronoCorps shocked and saddened me. The archives were lined with thousands upon thousands of history books. Most of them contradict each other, but that’s just the nature of historical documents; even the best historians would sometimes come to the wrong conclusion, and it’s been said around the office that if you put two historians in the same room you’d get three different opinions. But some of the books represented genuinely different timelines which had to be resolved, and taking care of them was just a pain. Most of the time, resolving the alternate timelines with the canon involved tracking down the discrepancy and filling out official forms indicating what needed to be done to fix things up. And doing that meant becoming intimately familiar with the hundreds of thousands of books that made up the official canon.

The books of the ChronoCorps’s official canon of human history itself were kept in a special paradox-free room. Reading through them and comparing them with the thousands of history books to find gross or subtle differences was the more boring than I could have ever imagined.

But every now and then an agent gets to go out on a field trip, since there are some deviations that can’t be resolved with a few minor tweaks to the timeline that can be done from the lab. This is why I was covered in talc and burlap and water, waiting to meet up with Hamlet. The Danish Golden Age that Hamlet II had ushered in violated too many tenets of the Canon so I had been sent back to stop him. The best thing to do the Bureau reckoned, was just to make sure Hamlet II would never become king.

So that’s what I was doing in medieval Denmark: stopping Hamlet II from ushering in Denmark’s Golden Age.

# # #

The next night, the weather was pretty much the same, though at least it wasn’t raining by the time the guards returned to their post. I was waiting for them, once again draped in the burlap, and covered in a fresh coating of talc. I kept my eyes wide open and my jaw slightly dropped. In other words, I did my best to look as eerily spooky as I could.

“Who goes?” shouted the first guard as soon as he saw me.

I sighed. Same as the night before. Trying not to sound annoyed, I moaned as low as I could while still remaining legible, “It is I, King Hamlet of Denmark. Wooooooo!”

The guards both cried out in terror and ran off.

I lurked around the parapet after they left, hoping someone else would see me and report me back to the Prince. I was just about to give up and start wandering around the rest of the castle when the two guards returned, with Prince Hamlet in tow. Hamlet looked annoyed and sleepy, as if the guards had pulled him out of bed.

“There it is,” one of the guards said.

“Spooky as all hell,” said the other.

The Prince looked at me through squinted eyes. This is the moment, I thought. If he didn’t buy my disguise, I’d be up shit creek.

“What are you?” the Prince asked at length.

“It is I, your father,” I replied. I thought about moaning again, but decided it would be hokey.

The Prince started, eyes blinking, and drew back. “Merciful heavens, it is my father!” He turned to the guards. “You were right. Oh, my father has returned.”

“Hamlet, my son,” I said in as woeful a voice as I could.

The Prince turned back to me. His eyes were full of tears, and his lower lip trembled. “What is it, oh my Father?”

This was pathetic. I knew Hamlet was prone to superstition, even at the height of his empire, but I’d had no idea he was this pathetic. “I would beg of thee a boon,” I said.

“Anything, Father, anything.”

“My brother, thine uncle Claudius, thou knowest him?”

“Aye, I do.”

“After I did die, he stole my wife and throne.”

“So? When he dies I’ll be king.”

“But my death would not then be avenged!”

“Father, why should thy death be avenged? It was a natural death, were it not?”

“Nay, my son. Thine uncle murdered me!”

Hamlet gasped. “Murdered? But how?”

“While I slept in the garden, he snuck up to me, and poured a bit of poison in my ear. I died in terrible seizures and agony.”

“Nay, thou didst die in they sleep, in the comfort of thine own bed. So did the royal coroner assure me.”

“Ah, but didst thou behold my corpse?”

He looked doubtful. “Nay, I did not.”

“Then who wouldst thou believe? The royal coroner, who art in the pay of the king, or thine own father’s roaming, unhomed spirit?”

“Hm, tough one.” Hamlet rubbed his chin.

“Thy father!” I shouted at him. “Thine own father! I thus command!”

Hamlet cried out and dropped to his knees. “I’m sorry, father! I swear, I will expose thy killer, and see that he meets justice!”

I nodded, sure that my deed was done. I pressed the callback button in my pocket; the temporal transfer would give the Prince and the guards an impressive light show for them to remember. “Avenge me,” I said again, just for verisimilitude. I knew my voice was going to fade for him. “Avenge me. Avenge me.”

And then I was back at the ChronoCorps Headquarters.

# # #

Things were hectic at the ChronoCorps headquarters. No, not hectic. The word for the mood at ChronoCorps HQ when I returned from medieval Denmark was panic.

Mr. Wells came running up to me as soon as I stepped out of the chamber. “Herb!” he shouted. “Herbert! Things are going to hell! What did you do?”

I shook my head in confusion. “What? I didn’t do anything. I just did my job, distracted Prince Hamlet from founding the empire by forcing him to focus on avenging his father’s assassination.”

“Well now the history books are showing that the Danish Empire had control of all of Western Europe, including England, as well as parts of Russia, as late as 1799. Do you have any idea what this does to the canon?”

“I swear, I did exactly what the plan called for. No deviations.”

“Yeah, well, now history records that you showed up to three soldiers and to some guy named Horatio who claims you showed up in full armor. You were only supposed to appear before two soldiers. Horatio said that this warrior apparition inspired Prince Hamlet to great leadership.”

“But that’s not what happened. This Horatio person must have been lying.”

Mr. Wells quivered like a nervous rabbit. “Well, you have to go back. Fix this before it gets too complicated. The canon states that Norway invades Denmark, and Hamlet capitulates. He isn’t supposed to fight them off and build an empire. You have to go back to distract him again.”

“But how?” It would be impossible for me to go back and replay that scene on the castle wall. The laws of temporal transfer would prevent it.

“We’ll send you to a point near that moment. The deviant record shows that Prince Hamlet had a conversation with his mother that made him forget his mission of revenge and get back on track. You must sabotage that meeting.”

I nodded. “I’ll do the best I can.”

“You’ll do better than that. You’ll do it right!”

I shook my head and rolled my eyes. Then I turned and went back into the temporal chamber.

# # #

Prince Hamlet was already in his mother’s room when I returned to Elsinore, having a tearful conversation with her. I could tell she was trying to comfort him, and that he was already beginning to think more clearly.

I found myself tangled up in a curtain. The temporal teleport had gone wrong, and I was mostly insubstantial. I shifted about and cursed, knowing that I was almost entirely inaudible as well.

But the curtains shifted anyway. Hamlet jumped up from where he was sitting and cried out, “A rat!” He drew his sword and lunged forward. I shut my eyes instinctively, certain I was going to get stabbed, but it turned out Hamlet was aiming right next to me.

“Ahh!” cried a voice. The curtain I was tangled up in shifted, and out fell an old man, balding, with a long gray beard.

Hamlet looked down disdainfully at the fallen old man. “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool,” he said. “That’ll teach you to spy on my mom.” Then he looked up and straight at me. He paled. “My father!” he cried out.

I realized that despite my insubstantial state, the prince could see me.

“Hamlet, my son,” I said.

“Son, who are you talking to?” asked Hamlet’s mother.

Hamlet ignored her. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re off track,” I said. “Remember my murder? You’re supposed to be carrying out your revenge.”

He nodded contritely. “I’m sorry, father. Of course, I’ll get right back on it. Claudius must die for what he’s done!”

“There’s a good boy,” I said. “And be good to your mom. She’s had a rough time.” Then the temporal bond faded, and I was brought back to the 25th century.

# # #

“Had to do a little damage control,” Mr. Wells told me when I met him the next day for debriefing. “That conversation with his mother… What did you do?”

“Just what we talked about. I showed up all ghostly and told him to get back on track.”

“Yes, well, after that he still went on to become King. Then Emperor. Emperor Hamlet the Terrible, he was called. It was a bloody reign of terror for fifty years after that conversation with his mother.”

“Is that part of historical canon?” I asked. It didn’t sound familiar.

“Hardly. We had to take drastic measures.”

“Meaning what?”

“We had an agent go back and assassinate Hamlet in his youth.”

“But there’s a record of Hamlet,” I protested. “He’s part of the canon.”

“Well, not anymore. Not as such, at least. The canon now shows that Hamlet was just a character in a play by William Shakespeare.”

“Shakespeare?”

“Hack playwright from Renaissance England. He wasn’t part of the canon until we attempt to resolve the Hamlet divergence. Apparently Prince Hamlet is some sort of a causality nexus; he has to be in the canon somewhere.”

“But at least the canon’s fixed, right? There’s no golden age of Denmark? No Danish Empire?”

Mr. Wells smiled, then gave me an awkward pat on the shoulder. “Well, sort of. The canon is going to need some adjusting but on the whole, you did good.”

I sighed with relief. I’d been afraid that I’d screwed up the mission completely. “Thank you, Mr. Wells.”

“Speaking confidentially,” he said, leaning in, “I’m going to put you in for a promotion. I think you could handle more field assignments, don’t you think?”

I grinned in spite of myself. “Oh, absolutely.”

“Good. Because there’s another situation coming up. Some problems with a guy named Torquemada in the fifteenth century. Going a little soft when he should be a big player. You up for it?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good.” Mr. Wells patted me on the shoulder again, just as awkwardly.

“Though I have to say,” I added, “I never expected the Spanish Inquisition.”

BLAYLOCK: A FRAGMENT

©2009 by Richard S. Crawford

about 600 words

Download as PDF | Download as HTML

“The first time I killed a man?” Joseph Blaylock took a long drag on his cigarette, then blew out the smoke slowly, pondering the glowing ash. “I was just eight years old.”

Tomas narrowed his eyes. “You’re shitting me.”

“Nope. I was eight, all right. Forty years ago. You’re not even twenty, Tomas, you have no idea what things were like back then.”

“I’ve heard the stories. Marchand, Xiao Lu, O’Connell. The really bad guys.”

“Who’ve you been talking to?”

Tomas shrugged. “I get around.”

“Huh.” Joseph took another long drag. “Silvers was the worst. Back then, there were a few people who started to have the idea that maybe this town didn’t have to be so lawless, that maybe there could be a government, people in charge. I remember I was with my mom in Grant Park, that day we had the first elections. Huang Tsu was elected the first mayor, and that day was the biggest event I can remember from back then. There was a band in the old fountain, the Buckingham, there were fireworks, and people dancing. Hell of a day.”

“Different times, eh?” Tomas was grinning.

“I suppose.” Joseph grinned himself, though he wasn’t quite sure why. “My mom and I were standing right next to that fountain, right up in front of the fiddle player. They were playing ‘Hog of the Forsaken’. You know that song?”

Tomas nodded. “The hog of the forsaken, he is the pork of crime,” he sang. “That the one?”

“That’s it. Anyway, they were playing that song when Silvers and his gang rode up on their horses, Silvers himself in one of those old metal wagons. He stood up and said, ‘That was fun, fun times all around. But it’s about time you stopped playing, and understand what’s really true here.’ Then he took out this big gun, and shot Tsu in the head.”

“Just like that?”

Joseph snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Everyone panicked and started running, even the ones who’d signed up to be part of Tsu’s militia. One of them, a big guy with red hair, dropped his gun right in front of me. I had no idea at the time, but it was really an piece of work. Classic gun, an old big-bore revolver. Well taken care of, too.”

“So you shot someone with it?”

“Nope. Damn thing was heavy. I picked it up and tried to shoot it but the kickback was so hard, it damn near broke my shoulder. I fell over backwards and cracked my head on the cement.”

“I thought you said you killed someone that day.”

“I did. One of those fool men of Silvers’s, he was running right by me. Tripped over my legs, fell down, and cracked his head wide open on a chunk of rock.”

For a moment, Tomas said nothing. Then his eyes widened, and he laughed, loud enough to drown out all the other sounds in the bar.

LITTLE FLUFFY WIGGLETOES CONQUERS THE WORLD

©2009 by Richard S. Crawford

about 1,100 words

Download as PDF | Download as HTML

Good morning boys and girls! It’s been so hard to get to our storytimes because it seems like everywhere I go I see policemen. Do you remember what we do when we see policemen? That’s right, boys and girls, we kick them in the knees and then run away as fast as can. They like that! It’s like playing tag!

If you remember, last time our friend, that naughty Little Fluffy Wiggletoes had become President of the Meadow after overthrowing President Cottontail. This was a victory for democracy, even though President Cottontail had been elected by a big majority of all the animals and birds who lived in the meadow. This is what we call a coup, boys and girls, and one day if a President you don’t like is elected, maybe you should do a coup of your own. The people will think you’re wonderful if you do.

Well, as you know, Little Fluffy Wiggletoes wasn’t just satisfied with being President of the Meadow. He wanted to be the ruler of the entire world. But how could he be ruler of the entire world if he was just a little fluffy bunny in the meadow? In order to conquer the entire world, he would have to have a huge army. Now, of course Little Fluffy Wiggletoes didn’t have a huge army. He was just a little bunny, after all, and little bunnies don’t have huge armies, not even powerful President bunnies like Little Fluffy Wiggletoes.

Now of course, boys and girls, you know what you should do whenever you want something that someone else has, right? Yes, little Susie, you could ask them to share, but that isn’t going to work and you’re stupid if you think it will. No, boys and girls, the best thing to do is to steal what you want from the person who has it and then it’s yours. Sharing? Susie, don’t make me laugh.

So Little Fluffy Wiggletoes knew that he had to steal an army from somewhere or someone. But the only army he knew of was the big mercenary army that Mr. Toad had in the pond on the other side of the playground. Remember that playground, boys and girls? That’s where Peter Cottontail euthanized all those children last year after Little Fluffy Wiggletoes had tried to hypnotize them all. That’s right, Little Timmy, sometimes there are some things worse than death, like always having to run away when you see the police or your mommies.

Well, Mr. Toad’s army was a big one, and Little Fluffy Wiggletoes knew that stealing it from Mr. Toad wasn’t going to be easy. A single Hypno-Ray waasn’t going to do it this time. So Little Fluffy Wiggletoes decided to go to WalMart to do some shopping, because WalMart has everything that a little bunny who wants to take over the world might need. And to his surprise, he found that WalMart was now selling Hypno-Powder! This wonderful powder, according to the package, could be dissolved in water and then whoever drank it would be under the control of anyone who also had a Hypno-Ray. Since Little Fluffy Wiggletoes already had a Hypno-Ray, he knew that he had to have this powder. So he slipped it under his jacket and walked carefully out of the store. Because remember, boys and girls, that you should never have to pay for anything that you take out of the store. Always put it into your jacket and walk out casually so that no one knows you’re stealing it. Are you listening, Little Susie?

So after Little Fluffy Wiggletoes got the Hypno-Powder and a brand new Hypno-Ray, he went over to the pond on the other side of the playground. He had to sneak under the barbed wire and past the land mines, but he was a clever bunny and it was easy for him to do that. Then he poured the Hypno-Powder into the pond, and waited for everyone in Mr. Toad’s army to drink. And when they did, they were all under Little Fluffy Wiggletoes’s control.

So now Little Fluffy Wiggletoes had two armies. But he needed a lot more, because the world is a big place, isn’t it boys and girls? It’s scary, too. Do you know what you should do with things that are scary that you don’t understand? That’s right, Little Susie, you beat them up. It’s good that you’re learning, because I thought you were really stupid. But you shouldn’t be too smart, Little Susie, because little girls aren’t supposed to be smart. Otherwise they get sassy, and don’t obey their husbands.

Little Fluffy Wiggletoes knew he was going to need a lot more armies than just two. He was going to need people armies. And that wasn’t going to be easy. But the first thing he did was use the two armies he controlled to take over the WalMart store he always went to. You should have seen all the people running around that day, because they were all scared of Little Fluffy Wiggletoes and his armies! But soon Little Fluffy Wiggletoes had them all under control too, and then he made them make more Hypno-Powder.

And on and on it went. The only one who could have stopped Little Fluffy Wiggletoes was Peter Cottontail, and where do you think he was? That’s right, Little Fluffy Wiggletoes had thrown him right into jail for being subversive and for thinking too much.

But while Little Fluffy Wiggletoes was conquering the world something was happening back at the prison where Peter Cottontail was being kept, and pretty soon Little Fluffy Wiggletoes was going to regret letting Peter Cottontail live.

Unfortunately, boys and girls, I can’t tell you what that is, because I can tell by the sirens that the police are coming here again and they’re going to be looking for me. Remember that when the policemen are here you’re supposed to kick them in the shins and then run away, right? And make sure they never find me!

Bye boys and girls!