Think you know your werewolf from your vrykolaka? Take a look at various shapeshifter legends from around the world. Then take a good look in the mirror to make sure you're still you!
https://mythicalrealm.com/mythical-creatures/shapeshifters-around-world/
If you enjoy shapeshifters, Skinners - A Love Story is just the tale to chill your blood. Check out a FREE preview:
https://chrisrikerauthor.com/news/short-stories/they-love-you-they-want-to-be-you
(Special thanks to Susanne Allen for the cover design!)
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After they’d spent precious hours running like ponies and grinding red clay into the seats of their blue jeans sliding down the hill, Bo asked his mother, “Can we do this again tomorrow?”
The wild-haired girl, three inches taller than her son despite being only a few years older, answered him with patience. “Probably not. If I had been a better saver, we could, but no. This is why you must save up now. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did when your days turn hard.”
She chose her words carefully whenever she explained things to him, now that he was old enough for banking.
“Eat your grilled cheese sandwich. I fried the bread with lots of butter, so it’s greasy and full of wonderosity for your tummy! I think,” she said, checking the fridge, “yes, we have sweet baby gherkins!” She unscrewed the jar lid and plopped two fat ones on his plate. Mom knew what he liked.
“Awesome!” he shouted, crunching one with his mouth open, spraying pickle bits everywhere.
Her smile faltered as she talked about her own mother spoiling her with special treats from her magical kitchen. Pappy would swoop in and swipe some. It made him so – All of a sudden, her eyes moistened. Girl-Mom said Grammie’s funeral shattered Pappy. She wanted to cry too, she said, but could not. Then, weeks later, she cried and could not stop. “I wish my mom was here in this kitchen with us, three small children laughing and getting into trouble. She’d have loved that.” Mom wiped at her eyes before any tears could escape.
Bo gave her a moment then asked, “When can I see you again, Mommy?”
“Soon, Bo. Soon.”
Bo looked disappointed for a moment. He loved his mother when she played with him this way. He wished Dad would join in, but Dad had to go to the hospital. Dad wasn’t sick; that was Mom. Dad was quiet when he was home. He didn’t talk about Mom, and he refused to play with her when she was home from the hospital and little. He said it was… how did he say it? “Paying for daydreams, but, if it makes you happy, darling…” So, they saw very little of Dad.
Bo missed Mom on the days when she was only big in the hospital being “very sick.” His dad said Bo would visit her there soon, but that he shouldn’t think about it, “shouldn’t remember your mother that way.” How could Bo not remember his mother one way or another? It made little sense.
He would remember his mother after today, just the way she was: right there in their kitchen, stretching herself as tall as she could to reach into the high cupboard and get the Oreos. Of course he would remember this moment; just as he remembered her visit last week, when she was a young woman fresh out of college, talking a mile-a-minute about all the things she’d just learned; or remember the week before when pubescent Mom giggled about her tiny new breasts, “so cute and firm.” He didn’t understand her shameless, pink-cheeked whimsy, but she was happy, and that made Bo happy too.
“I wish I’d saved more of these, Bo.” As she said it, his mother’s face darkened just a shade, with the kind of expression that didn’t belong on the face of a girl of twelve. “Save. Save. Save. You’ll thank me later. Oh, but there I go again, wasting today on thoughts of tomorrow! I have three more hours left. Finish your sandwich, and we’ll run down to the pond and catch tadpoles. I won’t be around, but you can watch them turn into frogs. It’s gross – perfect for a boy!” She poked at his side and made him squirm and squeal, and she joined him in making silly, kid noises.
They spent the next hour catching tadpoles in a bucket and decanting them into the old aquarium in the garage. The hour after that they devoted to smashing toy race cars into each other. The third hour, they sat on the back porch holding hands, drinking Cokes, burping, and staring at the sinking sun. It was a perfect day.
On Mom’s advice, Bo banked a whole week. To his disappointment, when he looked in the bathroom mirror, he couldn’t see any difference. He was hoping he’d find a mustache, but no. He was still nine-and-a-half, no mustache. His mother had told him this was the best way to save, a little at a time. “You’ll be happy one day,” she said.
Bo’s father made him breakfast – a Pop-Tart and some orange juice. “I have to head out, kiddo. I just talked to Maria,” he said, holding up his phone, “and she’ll be here in a few minutes. You be good to her. No back-talk.”
“I don’t like Maria. She never plays with me like someone my age.”
“She can’t, Bo. She grew up in a poor family. I explained this all to you.”
“I know, you gotta have money to do banking.”
“Yes, uh, that’s about right. Look, I gotta get to the hospital. The doctors say –” His father stopped himself and stood there silently with his eyes closed. Dad looked like he hadn’t slept well. He always looked tired these days. Bo wished Dad would use his kid days. He wished he’d stop worrying about money and doctors and dumb grown-up things. Dad said that growing up his parents only had a little money, so he didn’t have “much time to kid around.” Bo got the sense Dad didn’t like banking, but he always told him, “We have the money, Bo, so you can save up like Mom did. It’s your choice.”
His father hugged him very hard and very long, then left and drove off. Bo spent the day with Maria, who made him work on fractions. He hated fractions. He just wanted to go out to the garage and see whether his tadpoles had turned into pollywogs. He wondered whether rich frogs went back to having little stunted pollywog limbs some days. He hoped they did. He’d find out.
Bo missed his mother. His father was taking a “sabbatical” from his job at the college. They were living on savings. That meant his father could go to the hospital to visit Mom every day. It also meant his father could enjoy his yucky drinks every night in front of the big screen, watching his favorite vacation mem-vids of him and Mom in Ecuador, Morrocco, and Queensland. They’d loved to travel when they first got married.
The next day, Bo’s father took him to the hospital to see Mom.
She was thin, very thin. Things stuck out of her arm and her face looked narrow and sad – sadder than he could ever remember her. Bo couldn’t see the little girl in her at all.
His father stopped a doctor passing in the hall, and they traded hissing words. Bo didn’t understand all of it. He caught “are you sure all this projection and recall isn’t making her worse?” and “working the way it was intended” and finally, in tones even more hushed “not much longer now” Bo tried and tried not to remember that last bit.
“Just for a moment,” Dad said. “She’s awake.” He was glad his father had told him that, because when he looked, he wasn’t sure. “Tell her that you love her, Bo. Tell her nicely, like a good boy. ‘I love you, Mommy.’”
Bo didn’t want to say the words. He didn’t know why. He certainly did not want to get any closer to the woman in the bed. Every step closer screamed, Mommy looks wrong! This wasn’t the girl who taught him to tie a necktie, or the fresh-faced woman who explained to him that what women really want is someone who’ll listen and that he needed to learn to do that when it came time for him to date, or the wet-eyed twenty-something who tried to explain that funerals were a farewell party for people going to a better place. This was NOT Mommy!
“Go, Bo. Please. Just get close and say, ‘Love you!’” His father was on the brink of panic.
Bo was already closer than he wanted to be. “I love… you… Mommy.”
His mother’s eyes focused in that moment. Her face turned ever so slightly in his direction. The barest flicker of a smile lit her face, the barest semblance of the Mommy he loved to play with. Then she closed her eyes.
A monitor on the wall bleeped, and a nurse came in. The monitor was one of two very different kinds of devices in the room. The other, a slender passbook sitting open on a bedside table, showed two bright tally pages. The page on the left in amber showed a low number. The one on the righthand page had a 1 glowing in Incredible-Hulk-green. The nurse checked both devices, looked at his father, and told him and Bo it was best if they left for now.
That night, Maria watched him while his father stayed at the hospital with his mom. Bo looked at his own banking passbook, the one his parents had bought for him. The left page was blacked out. They’d set it so he couldn’t check that number. The right page showed a green 17. He had 17 days saved up. For reasons Bo could not put into words, he felt that was a very small number.
He picked up his passbook, decided on a number, and keyed it in just the way they’d taught him.
The next morning, his father stopped by for a shower and change of clothes. He didn’t bother shaving or tucking in his shirt. He was just headed out the door when Mom arrived.
There she was, in the living room, Mom as a nine-year-old girl.
“Lana?” His father struggled for the word, as a diver trapped under the ice might suck in a last pocket of precious air. He stared at her, through her.
"Don,” she cried, hugging him about the waist.
He stood, blank-faced, his hands hanging awkwardly by his sides. “I never knew you like this.”
“It’s so wonderful to be nine again, just when I needed it most. I always imagined I’d end up spending these days alone, skipping rope and picking daisies. Instead, all I want is to share these days with Bo.”
“I’d hoped, maybe you would have saved a day from when we –”
“It’s my last day. I saved this day just for today. The three of us can –”
“No! I have to be with you – with you at the hospital.”
Bo watched Dad leave as if ghosts were chasing him.
His mother turned to him. “What would you like to do today? Would you like to check on the tadpoles?”
“No. That’s silly,” Bo said. “Kid stuff.”
She looked him up and down. “Good thing we’re kids then, right? Let’s do nine-year-old stuff.”
“I’m eleven.”
“Bo-Bear, you’re nine. Well, nine-and-a-half. I think I know my own son’s birthday.” Her pretty blue eyes shaded over with concern. She looked at him more closely. “Wait. Your face! Your pant cuffs! Are you taller? It’s so hard to keep track when I keep changing height. Bo – Bo-Bear, what have you done?”
Bo hesitated, then explained that he had squirreled away a big chunk of his childhood so he could enjoy it when he was old. He said, “We’ll have loads of time to play and do fun stuff, go for hikes and play games and... and please don’t call me Bo-Bear.”
Mom’s jaw dropped open in a way that the jaws of seven-year-old girls did not. “Honey, don’t forget the tadpoles. You can do all those other things, and you will. I can’t be with you for that. You need to find someone…” The words choked in her throat. After a moment, she said, “someone your… own age.”
Maria came by and took them out for pizza but mostly left them to themselves. The morning cloud passed, and they spent the day talking about dinosaurs, and Mom taught him to make a big wet fart noise by pressing the palms of her hands against her mouth and blowing. He laughed until he thought he’d pee himself. It was magical.
Just before she left, Mom asked Bo, “You know what? Don’t bank too many days. Maybe even hit clear. I’m not sure how that works, but maybe…” She paused, drawing in a deep, jagged breath. Mom took her boy’s hands, smiled her biggest smile – she was missing a front tooth – and looked into his eyes. “Spend your days, Bo-Bear. Every one. Burn em bright as the sun!”
Her face beaming at him turned his insides all funny, a lot happy and a little sad, but it was a perfect day.
One of his very best.
***
As Bo grew into a teenager, his father never showed up as a boy or teen or young man to play with him. Dad showed up often, as Dad, and did what he could to fill the void in both their lives. He said he’d cleared his banking account. He would never say what numbers were on the amber left page or the Hulk-green right; insisted he never even thought about glowing numbers. Bo thought carefully about that while looking over his own passbook.
Sometimes, they would eat grilled cheese sandwiches and watch the mem-vids from Queensland. Dad showed Bo the time Mom got to hug a koala. The newlywed couple acted like they had a baby, bouncing it and dancing around in a circle to some unheard melody. In that special moment, she was a happy woman-child.
“That’s you when you were a baby koala!” Dad teased him.
Bo and his dad chuckled at the silliness, and, from some secret place within him, Bo could hear Mom laughing along.
###
Thanks for checking out my little story. I hoped you enjoyed it. If you did... please take a look at my novels. Here's a couple you might enjoy!
https://www.amazon.com/Goody-Celeste-Chris-Riker/dp/1665307072/
https://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Butcher-Chris-Riker/dp/B0D6PT9KX6/
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In my novel, Darkling - An American Hymn, one such slave comes to Newport in the care of a demon, Orv, who tells her how lucky she is.
Adaeze must fend off Orv's perverse worldview, survive her bondage, keep her daughter safe, and ultimately decide her true place in the world.
https://chrisrikerauthor.com/news/short-stories/can-the-future-overcome-the-sins-of-the-past
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The Great Nazi Sea Monkey Christmas Blitz
or
Triumph of the Krill
by
Chris Riker
***
for Marjorie
***
In the decades following WWII, a Jewish-born neo-Nazi named Harold von Braunhut got rich by placing ads in comic books to sell brine shrimp wearing crowns, known as sea monkeys. This is a fact.
In 1998, John Glenn flew aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery along with 400 million sea monkey eggs to study the effects of radiation. Glenn and the eggs returned safely. This is a fact.
What follows is true flash fiction based on actual speculation.
*
Dressed in their garish uniforms, decked in medals and symbols of death, his general staff gathered themselves to Schrimplgruber’s side. The assembly hovered before him, column upon column of swarmtroopers ready to act as one, responding to a will to power. Derr Lurher’s will.
“My fellow crustaceans! This is our moment. No longer will we humble ourselves, denying our innate superiority over a world of mongrel scrod!” The cheers of his fighters warmed his cephalothorax, as did the proud smile on the face of his mistress, Eva Prawn. “Too long have we suffered at the hands of the one true enemy.” The crowd knew the euphemism, as it was a frequent part of their lurher’s speeches. “Be assured, my people, Those who will not eat us will not defeat us!” The water churned with riotous waving of millions of phyllopodia. “Let our Thousand-Tide Reich begin!”
Even as the adulation peaked, Schrimplgruber swam down to the castle on the gravelly bottom of the aquagarten. His general staff followed him to the secret bunker inside.
When they were assembled, Schrimplgruber took his place behind his desk and began. “My plan is moving as I always told you it would. Even as we speak, The Wolffish, General Steinbítur, is launching his attack! His specially equipped Oberflächentruppen have gone forth! Today, the rumpus room, tomorrow the kitchen!”
Chief of the Army General Staff Krabs fixed himself, thorax as straight as it would go. “Mein Lurher, about Steinbitur…”
Boebbels and Borfinn flagellated in place, glancing nervously at one another.
Schrimplgruber waited without meeting Krabs’ compound eyes. At last, he delivered the news. “Steinbitur didn’t have enough force,” Krabs said. “The attack did not take place.”
With quaking claspers, Schrimplgruber removed his glasses and ordered most of the generals out of the room. To those remaining, he screamed, “That was an order! Steinbitur’s attack was an order!”
“But, mein Lurher…” Krabs attempted, weakly.
Schrimplgruber cut him off. “Since the day our people received the gift of cosmic radiation, we have evolved and planned and waited. This generation must succeed where past generations have failed. The Artemian Genus must realize its place of supremacy. Steinbitur will regroup and attack the Levi family. We will annex this entire split-level Mediterranean-style four-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath home and from it launch a Blitzwelle upon the entire Greenwood subdivision!”
Krabs, perhaps realizing he was already deveined and cooked, revealed the terrible truth. “Mein Lurher, General Steinbitur’s forces are gone. The cat ate them.”
“Three whole divisions?”
“Sadie is a big cat.”
Seizing the moment, Propaganda Minister Boebbels spoke up. “We have a plan, Mein Lurher. Even now, a brilliant scientist known as the Angelfish of Death is working to unlock our genetic code. He has promised me he will grow us to one thousand times our present size and adapt our gills to operate in open air. We will be unstoppable.” A thought occurring, he quickly added, “You’ll recall, it was your idea.”
“Yes, of course I recall. When will my plan be ready?”’
Never one to miss out on glory, Borfinn exerted his spell-like influence over Schrimplgruber. “It will happen by Christmas!” he unabashedly claimed, adding under his breath, “or certainly by next Christmas.”
This appeared to calm the agitated lurher. “Good. Good. We cannot fail. We will not fail. The heavens owe me a better fate. God will answer for binding grand ambition within this tiny shell!”
Boebbels moved to reclaim control of the moment, summoning his off-key tenor to launch into “Lili Marlin.” Those gathered in the room immediately joined in, and the sounds from outside confirmed that the melancholy melody had filled every briny mouth as well.
*
Nathan looked sheepish as his father led him into the Levi Family’s rumpus room, where the water in the fish tank undulated with activity.
“Pop, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that about that Braunhut guy. It didn’t say anything about him in the ad.”
“I don’t care. The smell of shellfish is bad enough; I won’t have tainted shrimp under my roof.”
Reluctantly, Nathan inserted a syphon hose into the aquarium containing his miscreant pets. He sucked the other end as hard as his eight-year-old lungs would allow until he felt the water coming. Quickly, so as not to spill on his mother’s good Turkish rug, he hung the hose out the window.
Water gushed forth, drawing the attention of a pair of golden eyes. As tiny, singing morsels splashed onto the ground before her, Sadie purred and crept in to feast.
###
If you enjoyed this story, what's wrong with you? Oh well, you might as well keep going... Check out:
https://www.amazon.com/Come-Eventide-Chris-Riker/dp/1631834525/
and...
https://www.amazon.com/Skinners-Love-Story-Riker/dp/B0C534L136/
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Laramidia was a fine place to roam and roar on a fine Late Cretaceous morn on this fine 27th of May, 67,000,002 years before now.
Miss Abigail Triplehorn ambled through her misty jungle in the shadow of the solitary, smoking mountain, her cares a million years distant, enjoying an endless buffet of ferns, cycads, and palms. Sometimes she preferred to eat palms, cycads, and ferns. The cycads’ big leafy bits stuck up from the middle of the stubby seed plant and proved irresistible to Miss Abigail Triplehorn. “Who can blame me for going back for seconds. Or thirds. Or –” That was as high as she could count, so she took another chomp. Day after pleasant day, her beak busily snapped one stalk after another after another, until her thirty-foot Triceratops frame boasted ten tons of thunderous power.
One day, while gleefully stripping everything green she could get her beak on, Miss Abigail Triplehorn met Wizard Mark.
Wizard Mark was a Purgatorius.
A Purgatorius was a tiny thing with a rather large opinion of itself.
With its long nose, scampering feet, and a bushy tail, Purgatoriuses were expert at not getting eaten. Much. Well, there was some amount of getting eaten, but that was just the way the world spun, wasn’t it? Watching Miss Abigail Triplehorn amble from leaf to leaf and meal to meal, Wizard Mark stared in awe, and he trembled. “Please do not mistake me for a nut or a flower.”
“You are not so pretty as a flower,” Miss Abigail Triplehorn responded, “and you smell far worse than any nut I have ever had the pleasure of eating. Fear not. I will not munch you. I like my splendid jungle salad. In any case, you are barely a morsel. A T-Rex might see your whole family and not bother to bend down to snatch you up.”
Wizard Mark took this comment one way, and then he tried to take it another. “I may not be much now,” he told her, “but give me time, and I’ll stand up straight and tall and oppose my thumb and rule the world!” As he finished speaking, a passing pterosaur dropped a nut on his head.
“How much time?” Miss Abigail Triplehorn asked.
“What? How much? Um… sixty or seventy million years ought to do it,” Wizard Mark said.
“You will be here after so much time?”
“I will. Well, not like this. I hope to be taller, and the thumb thing will come in time.”
It was a silly conversation to have with a Purgatorius, which was obviously a silly animal that would never amount to anything no matter how many millions of years rolled by.
Miss Abigail Triplehorn was about to head to the river, where she had spotted some tasty fiddle-head ferns still rolled tight when Wizard Mark added, “I will be here, but you will not.”
Miss Abigail Triplehorn stopped chewing. “And just what do you mean by that, o tiny pest with outsized dreams?”
“It’s just a little something in the sky. You can see it twinkling even in the daytime.”
“Twinkly things are called stars, little pest. Everyone knows what you see at night is the light of Alamosauruseses standing atop distant hills, lighting their farts. Boy Alamos, of course.”
“Of course. Everyone knows that,” Wizard Mark agreed.
“Those boys eat even more plants than I do, so they have to light their farts all night long. We must look at this logically, little pest. Logic tells us this daytime twinkler in the sky is nothing more than a great big farting Alamo.”
“Indeed.” Wizard Mark looked at her for a moment, then spoke again. “Would that it were so. As much as I dislike correcting you, I know that this daylight star is really a rock that is coming our way. It is getting ready to fall on our heads!”
“So what? A rock? What can a rock do to me? I have an armored collar in case you hadn’t noticed. So, fling as many rocks at me as you like.”
Wizard Mark sighed, then he tried again. “This is a big rock. Very, very big. And it is coming at us very, very fast. When it hits, it will raise fire and ash all over. The T-Rex, even the farting Alamos will fall to the terrible storm, and all the green leaves will vanish for many, many years. It’s true some things will survive, including my kind, but I do not like to think about what will happen to the dinosaurs and so many others.”
Miss Abigail Triplehorn said, “That sounds serious.”
Wizard Mark said, “It is very serious, I’m afraid.”
Miss Abigail Triplehorn looked glum. “How do you know this, little pest?”
“Because, in addition to being a Purgatorius, I am a wizard. Wizard Mark, at your service. I see things from far away and know the truth.”
“And, when will this big, fast rock hit us?”
“Soon,” he answered, not meeting her tiny eyes which were now filled with triceratears.
“Oh, dear! I wish that mean old rock would go away and not come back for a million years! You must do something! A wizard, you say? Darn it, Mark… WIZ!”
“But I have no such powers in that area. We would need help. Big help.” Right on cue, the ground rumbled, low, and loud, and long. Avians, both pterosaurs and the new feathery kind, rose like a cloud from the treetops, screeching and squawking as they went. “What was that?”
Miss Abigail Triplehorn snuffled up her snotty tears, and her tone turns serious. “How can you know things millions of years from now but not know what is happening on the other side of that jungle?”
“Some of us travel closer to the ground than others. The view is… different.”
“Oh.” She lowered her beak, pointing all three of her lady-like horns towards a solitary mountain that rose above the trees. “That’s Volcano King Eric.”
“A Volcano named Eric?”
“A Volcano named Eric. He has a wife named Ariana who lives far, far away. She’s a real hot-head!”
“I’ll bet.” A though suddenly beamed across Wizard Mark’s face. “Wait!”
“How long? That stupid rock is getting closer.”
“No, I mean ‘Wait, I have an idea.’ A wonderful idea. A tremendous idea. A – ”
“It’s a boring idea unless you share it.”
“Of course. Walk with me. Better yet, you walk, I’ll ride.” So saying the little
Together, Wizard Mark and Miss Abigail Triplehorn struck off through the jungle in the direction of the rumbling mountain named Eric. Wizard Mark did a lot of talking, but Miss Abigail Triplehorn was too distracted by palms, cycads, and ferns and ferns, cycads, and palms to listen too closely to what he was saying.
After a time, they reached the volcano and began to climb its slopes. Eric was a twisty volcano king, as volcano kings go. This was lucky for the two pilgrims, since it meant they could use his gentle spirals to climb quite high up.
“That tickles,” rumbled Volcano King Eric. “Who’s nibbling at my ferns and palms?”
“And cycads,” answered Miss Abigail Triplehorn, her mouth full. It was a breach of etiquette to talk while munching, but the greenery on this fertile slope was simply irresistible.
“We are here to seek your help, o wise Volcano King Eric.”
“My help? Explain.”
“We need to play billiards with the universe,” Wizard Mark said.
“Uh…”
“As I was explaining to Miss Abigail Triplehorn, this involves a big rock that’s flying at all of use and will wipe most of us out – except me and my descendants, but never mind that – unless you do something.”
Volcano King Eric released a thoughtful puff of smoke. “Me? You think there’s something I can do?”
“Yes, because you are big and stronger than anyone else around. I have a plan.” Scratching with his tiny claws in the ash and soil on the mountainside, Wizard Mark explained, “It involves a man named Newton's universal law of gravitation: .”
“This again,” huffed Miss Abigail Triplehorn. “I apologize. He was spouting this sort of silliness all the way here.”
Volcano King Eric regarded the odd lines and curls Wizard Mark had scratched into his side. “I’m not really about math. I’m more about geology, but I’ll take your word for it. I have only one question.”
“Yes?”
“Who is Newton?” Volcano King Eric asked.
To which Miss Abigail Triplehorn added, “And what is a ‘man?’”
Wizard Mark’s shoulders slouched. “Let me put it another way. We’re looking at a big, fast rock. We need a big rock that’s much faster to hit it, like swatting away a pesky insect.”
Volcano King Eric stood stonily non-plussed. “And you see me, a volcano king, and assume any old volcano king can shoot rocks into the sky on a whim?”
“Uh… something like that.”
“No, I cannot simply do it on command.”
“There must be some way to make you… pop.”
“The last time I ‘popped’ was because a pterosaur dropped something into my caldera. I think it was a cycad. The darn things grow all over my slopes, and whenever they get close to my rim, I sneeze.”
Wizard Mark and Miss Abigail Triplehorn were hard at work before he finished his thought. They scurried about the fire mountain, as best as a ten-ton girl can scurry, ripping whole cycads out of the ground and stacking them on her back. Gathering the great haul near Volcano King Eric’s rim, they could feel his allergies kick in.
The ground rumbled mightily. “Aaahhhh… aaahhhh…” went Volcano King Eric.
Miss Abigail Triplehorn looked at the respectable mound of cycads they’d piled near the king’s rim. She looked them up and down, and a dribble of drool dripped daintily from her beak. “Surely, he wouldn’t miss one or two of those delectable cycads…”
“No, no! Please, Miss Abigail Triplehorn. Don’t eat those. We need every last one of them. That rock is getting closer and closer! It will make a big, big mess down here!”
“Oh, poo!” said Miss Abigail Triplehorn, kicking the dirt with her foot.
She lowered her horns and did what she hated doing. She pushed her precious pile of cycads over the top of the rim and into Volcano King Eric’s fiery caldera.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, something happened.
A fresh round of rumbles shook the ground so hard, creatures fell from their perches in the trees below.
Giant lizards and tiny mammals alike stopped in their tracks. “Aaaaaaaahhhhhh… aaaaaaaahhhhhh…” went Volcano King Eric.
The very air about them seemed to hold still, waiting for the inevitable. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh…” went Volcano King Eric.
And then…
“Pfwoot!” Volcano King Eric sneezed.
Oh, but this one no ordinary Pfwoot. This was a volcano king’s Pfwoot. A Pfwoot of grandeur. A Pfwoot of destiny. Dinosaurs, insects, and avians heard the great ‘Pfwoot!’ from one end of Laramidia to the other.
From his red-hot caldera, Volcano King Eric sneezed a rock of tremendous size, snottily shooting it into space at a speed not seen since the Big Bang. Looking up, everyone could see its dazzling tail arc across the sky until finally it collided with a strange twinkling star, knocking it so that the intruder moved ever so slightly to the left.
Laramidia was saved.
From a great distance, the Late Cretaceous, late May breeze carried the sound of Volcano Queen Ariana’s voice, offering a “Gesundheit.”
“Thank you, my dear,” replied Volcano King Eric.
“Lay off the cycads,” said Volcano Queen Ariana.
“Yes, dear,” said Volcano King Eric.
Miss Abigail Triplehorn and Wizard Mark thanked their new fiery friend and even promised to return from time to time to keep the cycads from growing too high on the mountain’s slopes – by eating them, naturally.
Going back to her preferred business – which was, of course, munching – she told Wizard Mark between mouthfuls, “I’m glad we were able to stop that stupid old rock.”
“No. We have not stopped it. We’ve merely knocked it into a wider orbit. It will be back.”
“When?” she asked.
Wizard Mark told her, “Just as you wished, in a million years.”
“A million years. That’s more than one or two. Very well, I refuse to worry about it any longer.” With that Miss Abigail Triplehorn went back to munching with great gusto, all cares a million years distant.
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I've said before that I grew up utterly oblivious to the fact that my home state of Rhode Island was the center of slavery in America for centuries.
I don't blame my teachers, but the time has come to shine a light on this forgotten chapter of history. Now, others are coming to the same conclusion...
I hope you'll check out Darkling An American Hymn,
a story that looks at slavery through the lens of those who felt it was the right choice...
and those who lived with the consequences.
https://www.amazon.com/Darkling-American-Hymn-Chris-Riker-ebook/dp/B0FMJN6PR8/
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