I pulled a
random book off my shelf: This Book if
Full of Spiders by David Wong
Using a random
number generator, I chose the sentence starting on the second line of the seventy-seventh
page.
I wrote for ten minutes. This is the story I got.
“But you say Franky seemed normal when he
left.”
“Well, yeah, he
was normal but he wasn’t a hundred percent normal,” I tell Claire. “I mean what does ‘normal’ really mean?”
“It means to be
not screaming about how there are eyes staring at you from your own shadow.”
I considered
this. “Well, yeah, under that
extremely strict definition of the word, I suppose that Franky wasn’t too
normal when he left the party last night.”
“What
happened? Did he drop acid? Do you think someone put something in
his drink?”
“No, no, no,
no. It was nothing like that.”
“Then what was
it?”
“We may have, summoned
Aroknu, the goddess of darkness.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing, Franky’s
just been stressed out recently with his job and finals and we found this
amulet and he’s having trouble with Marcy again.”
“Huh?”
“He and Marcy
have been fighting all the time.”
“What was that
about an amulet?”
The bathroom door
opened and out emerged a slender woman with skin the color of a corpse that had
been submerged in ice water for a week.
Her eyes were hollowed out caverns, her teeth jet-black needles and her
hair woven from the night. “You
guys are out of hot water.”
“Sorry abut that
Aroknu!”
Claire and the
woman stared at each other.
I picked up on
the hint. “Sorry! Claire, this is Aroknu, the goddess of
darkness. Aroknu, this is my
girlfriend Claire. She’s the goddess
of…. me.”
They shook
hands. While she was touching the
dead flesh, Claire’s shadow grew black flames and blood dripped from its mouth. Of course she didn’t notice.
Aroknu walked
back to my guest bedroom and I ran after her. “By the way, that guy you sort of cursed last night, is
there any way you could maybe stop that?”
“He cheats at Mario Kart.” Aroknu intoned.
“Yeah, I know
but he’s also a friend of ours so-.”
“All who cheat
must be punished. I will expect
hot water for my twilight bath as well as a dozen virgins to be my sacrifice.”
“Right, I’ll get
on that.”
She closed the door.
I sat at my
kitchen counter, picked up a “grocery list” notepad and started writing the
names of every potential virgin I knew.
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