The Special Works Unit

Jurgen was chosen at a young age to join the special works unit. This was considered an extreme honor. Only the strongest, most durable children were selected. His parents received a large stipend as a reward, and his primary school held a celebratory send-off in his honor.

Jurgen waited for the day of his departure with a mixture of excitement and dread. On the one hand, as a future member of the special works unit he was already receiving special privileges.

On the other hand, the reality was he would spend the rest of his life as a menial laborer.

My Grandfather's Pocket Knife

When he asked me to guess what he had in his pocket, I had no idea he was carrying a star. An honest-to goodness star, not some chunk of comet or a bit of dust.

I didn't believe him. When he opened his pocket, all I could see was a determined blackness threatening to pull me into its bleakness and never let go. He said this was a black hole, and after he explained the physics of it all, it seemed he was telling the truth.

I realized just how woefully unprepared I was for show and tell.

Mathematical Calamity

Calamity followed him everywhere. His primary school was destroyed in a tornado. His middle school suffered an earthquake. His high school burned down in an electrical fire.

As the catastrophes mounted, journalists and theologians began looking at the pattern and noticed him at its center. They speculated he was a malevolent hell-spawn.

It wasn't until his death at the age of one hundred and seven, a four-time widower and the survivor of several plane crashes, two world wars, and the nuclear holocaust, that a mathematician finally made the proper assessment.

Ralph Warner was officially the luckiest man to ever live.

Kite Prisons

The state of Montana, hoping to profit on the nation's overcrowding problems, built the first kite prisons in 2036. They tied the prisoners to the backs of kites and let the wind take them hundreds of feet in the air. They saved millions on construction and maintenance costs. All you needed was a few old men who made sure no one came along and cut the strings.

The congressional hearings began in 2051, when it was discovered that the Montana DOC was allowing prisoners to starve to death rather than feed them.

Leave it to the liberals to ruin a good thing.

The Mist

One morning, Mayor Baffels woke up to find a dark mist had descended upon the city.

His first thought was on how the mist would play in the upcoming election. People would look for him to have the answers. Was it caused by pollution? Had there been an explosion? Were their lives in danger?

Baffels would use the opportunity to bolster his leadership credentials during a crisis. He expected it would ensure his reelection.

In the end, he did win, but the hellfire and destruction that were unleashed by his deal with devil made his victory rather pyrrhic in nature.

Homophasmatic

George had always been different. His parents first noticed something was wrong when he was only three because he had a habit of confusing words that sounded the same.

It took many different specialists before George was finally identified as a homophasmatic. They determined a portion of his brain was insufficiently developed and it prevented him from distinguishing certain sounds, much like a person who is color blind can't tell the difference between red and green.

The worst part for George was that he kept eating his soap and washing himself with his soup, so everything about him smelled awful.

The Trousseau

Eleanor eyed the old trunk. Inside was the collection of presents and hand-me-downs her aunties had assembled for her trousseau. But three years into her marriage, she had never opened it before tonight.

The objects were mostly as she expected, recipes and trinkets meant to give her certain disposable comforts in her new household. But now she had need of one particular item packed away at the bottom: her grandmother's wand.

When she had married Stephen, she'd promised to give up witchcraft. But now that he had cheated on her, every one of her vows was going to be broken.

E-Book Now On Sale

Book Tango is the first e-book store to offer Picasso Painted Dinosaurs, my collection of 100 100-word stories. It includes two original essays on the art of microfiction, and more than 50% of the content is available exclusively in the e-book. The collection has been sent to all major online stores, including Amazon, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble, and should be available with them in the three to four weeks.For now, check out Book Tango, where you can purchase Picasso Painted Dinosaurs for the very reasonable price of $2.00. It is availabe in epub, pdf, and mobi formats. Your purchase of the book helps to fund the continued operation of this website.Thank you, as always, for your support. It is greatly appreciated.

The Vigorish

Sal lurked in the hallways of the gambling den, all greasy hair and cigarette stench. No one acknowledged his presence, not even the proprietor who employed him. He was considered a necessary evil by some, the angel of reckoning by others.

They called him the Vigorish. His job was to calculate and collect the interest. He wasn't the muscle--he was too much of a worm to behave violently. He was just the one doing the math.

If he came to your table, you knew you'd been cut off. If he came to your home, you knew you were dead.

The Diapason

Before the stroke, Malcolm was obsessed with football.

Afterwards, Malcolm found a part of his brain that had never been used before was now actively engaged. In grade school, he had failed to learn even a rudimentary song on the piano. Now music was everywhere.

When it came to natural phenomenon, the wind, breathing, the setting of the sun, he heard their rhythms as a harmonious symphony. Machines and furniture emitted a cacophony of unholy clamor that caused waves of nausea.

Malcolm held the keys to the universe inside his injured brain. His new obsession was the destruction of God.