Then another woman arrives and cries, the room changes. Happy. Sad. I stay still. Listening. Waiting for Eloise to tell a story. Any story. To end the silence. But it never comes.

Later, at home, Eloise reads while I sleep. Pages turn. Names repeat. Waiting seems important in her books. I don’t know why. I know this: you stay until you’re no longer needed. Then you rest.

Eloise tells a story about a man who loved his reflection too much. He laughs. I sit between him and the mirror. For some reason I growl at him. Sometimes my nose gets information before my brain.

The man talks after that. Humans always do after my growls. Eloise pats me on the head and calls me a “good girl.” She says I solved the case. I think I just removed a distraction. Simple problems like simple solutions.

Eloise mutters words lost in the noise. I may not understand her stories but I like to listen just the same.

I know wind. I can smell all kinds of things carried by the wind. And tonight, what I smell is bad. Eloise follows my gaze. Running feet. Shouting.

Death is always easy to smell because it lingers. Life, moves on. Later, I sleep under the desk while Eloise types. Her books fall open on gods and monsters with too many heads.

Floor. Desk. That spot.

Eloise notices, because she always notices when I sit still. My trusty nose tells me to open the desk drawer. Bloodstained papers. The widow goes quiet. Must be important. Thunder cracks.

I shake water everywhere. Eloise sighs. Calls me her lucky charm. I accept a treat.

Luck is just paying attention, but humans like fancy words.

While Eloise likes to talk a lot—usually about old stories involving people who never learned and paid for it. I don’t care. I watch hands.

Like this man with the ring who keeps touching his plant. I scratch it. Some dirt spills. A severed hand appears. Everyone stares. Eloise laughs and calls me brilliant. I sneeze.

She says heroes come in many sizes. I don’t know about heroes. I know pockets, plants, and men who smell suspicious.

The hooded creature’s laughter quickly turned to a hacking cough. A desk lamp barely lit its pale and translucent mouth, spattered in blood that it quickly licked clean.

“I’m afraid you are the best, doctor. And, as the best, I expect results. You don’t want to end up like the last doctor who failed.”

“Fine. But the next body must be fresher.”

No one knew exactly who the apparently self-proclaimed “King” was, just that they all owed their very existence to this person and now he was dead. Therefore, making merry with drink and laughter seemed perfectly innocent…

It was well into the next morning when a young woman, casually talking to her friends, innocently posed the question, “who’s next?”

Then, the room fell silent. The party was over.

The idol’s purpose was for protection of all mankind but it also granted lifelong serenity to anyone who stood before it and pledged their life’s fortune. For most people, their fortune could never be gold or property.

It was rumored that one woman brought her newborn child! Granting serenity for her but a lifetime of servitude for her son.

Nothing happens without Mama knowing. Everyone respects or fears her and that’s how she likes it. She’s judge, jury and executioner over all. If you need or want anything she can make it happen. For the right price she can give you all you desire. But payment is rather steep.

Even a woman of her size has needs, and not all of them can be paid with cash.

“Where is mother?”

“You come here to ask me that? She is here. The bones you use to walk, the lungs you use to breath, the eyes you see with, the words you speak with. You both are one in the same.”

“Yes, but where is her body?”

He spoke nothing, just looked at the floorboards beneath her feet.

The Vicarious Machine allows you to control what you see and hear for as long as you wear it. And if you act now, we’ll even throw in a pair of gloves and shoes that will make you feel like you’re in the world of your creation.

Lack imagination? No problem! The option to live forever in our world is free!

As the clock ticks down to midnight on the seventh day, weapons are chosen. All television channels and radio stations are interrupted to signal the start of the Jeopardy Games. No one is safe.

Least of all, Carl, who finds himself on the team of his worst enemy.

It wasn’t the smoking that bothered his devoted wife. Or when he would walk away in the middle of conversations at dinner parties in search of a flat surface to write on and a napkin to fold his filters into. It was the fact that he kept each one in a collection of books.

She had enough and told him so with the flat side of a frying pan.

As night drew near the laughing woman parted ways with her friends. Street lights illuminate her path home. A bulb in a street lamp buzzes, then POPS! and goes out. It quickly flickers back to life on an empty street corner, with nothing but the sound of an old Hag cackling in the distance.

Another solution was music. She’d turn on her radio and focus all of her energy on the notes. The melody. She knew what was happening to her. A curse passed down to generations of women in her family. Telepathy is real and there is no cure.

She needs to learn how to control it before it controls her forever.

He looked over at his wife’s expression of disagreement. She had not uttered a word to him since they left on what Landon had called, ‘a weekend of adventure and romance.’

The last thing Clare wanted was to spend another minute, let alone an entire weekend, with her cheating husband. But she had no choice. And off they went, in total silence, on a yacht he borrowed from a friend.

Unfortunately, Clare was dead before the weekend began.

Like the five-string banjo, the sun’s rays kissed a melody on the dew, lazily laying upon the grass. Tiny animals scampered through the garden as the fiddle plucked a bouncing tune on the accompanying breeze.

A bird’s cry made them stop and look up. Beast and its prey. The mandolin followed the bird as it circled overhead, getting lower with every revolution. Then the music stopped. The wind stopped blowing. Making way for the flowers to reach up to the sky. Spreading their petals.

The bird swooped down with a crescendo of music and melody and song all at once.

12:55pm

There would be no more wondering or guessing, hoping or praying. She was assured the phone wouldn’t ring. He would fry for his crimes.

12:56pm

Chains approached. Justice would be served. The last electrocuted inmate on death row. She was the only one brave enough to request a viewing. Make sure the deed was done and all that.

12:58pm

The lights came on in the gallery and his eyes widened. He turned to the warden. “I’m innocent. That’s her. She did it.”

1pm

Squealing. Heavy breathing. Silence.

1:02pm

Pronounced dead. Her work here was done.

After two months of deliberations, one accidental death, and two alternates, the jurors for the most heinous crime of the century returned to the courtroom to deliver their verdict.

Kept sequestered from hotel to juror room, they were not allowed to talk to anyone but themselves about the case. Nor were they allowed to watched the news media who had clearly taken sides depending on what channel was on.

Juror #1 stood in the jury box, before a packed courtroom filled with journalists and family of both sides. With shaky hands she delivered a verdict that would change the world.

The groundhog surfaced long before it would be summoned like it is every year. It managed to chew through its cage and tear the frozen soil where it was kept, right behind the Miller home. Present keepers of the groundhog. All they had to do was keep it alive.

But on this particular night, after managing to escape its prison, the groundhog sought revenge for past transgressions.

After finding its way into the Miller home, the groundhog lay in wait for the first to arise. But while it slept in the living room, a Miller was lurking behind their shadow.