This short story is cross-posted from The Kraken Lore, a Medium pub, for one of its “Monday Mashups,” which is a prompt game for writers. See the notes for specifics and rules for the prompt.
“What the hell just happened?”
“You’re dead, mate.”
“Dead? All I was doing was playing pickleball.”
The avocado-colored man shrugged.
“And why am I so small?” The avocado-colored man was also tiny, as he looked to be precisely the same size. Johnny looked up and noticed that he was standing next to a dandelion that must have been 20,000 feet tall, but it didn’t touch the clouds, which were plentiful. So he figured it out. He was very small. Infinitesimal, perhaps.
Johnny wasn’t willing to accept such an early demise. He was only thirty-two and, as best he knew, in perfect health.
He began to say something, but the avocado-colored man shushed him with a finger to his lips, then crossed his arms as if hugging himself tightly. The thick black bristles of his eyebrows contrasted sharply with his skin as they arched upon his asking, “If you were not dead, what would you be? And if you are dead, what are you now?”
“What kind of a question is that?” asked Johnny, thinking it quite mad.
“Two questions. The questions you must answer. A riddle to solve. But with the same answer.”
“I just want Candy…never mind,” Johnny replied. “Who are you, anyway?”
“I have many names, but you must choose your own.”
“So. Everyone’s a smartass in the afterlife, too,” said Johnny. “Good to know. How about I call you Smart Ass?”
“As you wish.”
“You never answered my question,” said Johnny.
“Ah. Your small size. I could offer to make you much larger, but then you won’t be able to hear me speak or complete your mission, and it is with me you must speak if you wish to thrive.”
“I have no idea what I want. I just got here.” Johnny looked around rather desperately, his eyes hunting for an escape route.
“You want Candy to be well, do you not?”
“Yeah, well, a little late for that. I was only thinking about my sister because…I don’t even know. She’s the first person that popped into my head when I saw you.”
“It is not too late. Not if you consider yourself a warrior,” said Smart Ass.
“I’m an accountant.”
“What if I told you that you’re a warrior?”
“Beyond finding it mildly amusing?”
Smart Ass nodded. Johnny thought Smart Ass’s head looked like a green balloon. Smooth. Barely there ears. A nose so flat he wondered if it disappeared into the surrounding smooth exterior when he slept.
Wait. Did he even sleep?
“I believe you are ready,” said Smart Ass. “The demons who haunt your sister are ready, too. Prepare for battle.”
There are apparently insane people in the afterlife, too, Johnny mused.
As he thought that, he found his right hand wrapped around the hilt of a long sword.
Johnny heard a sound that he thought must be from a cowboy hooting from high above. When he looked up, a bright red creature that looked identical to Smart Ass, a twin, he assumed, only red instead of green, slid down the dandelion stem like he was descending an old-fashioned firehouse pole.
The twin hooted the whole way down until he landed next to Smart Ass.
“Him?” the red twin asked Smart Ass.
“Who else?” replied Smart Ass. “He’s her brother.”
The red twin’s balloon face instantly revealed a sardonic Cheshire grin. “I assure you, my friend, you stand no chance,” he said to Johnny as his small eyes began to glow like tiny yellow headlights.
Johnny decided his best course of action, even though he didn’t know where he was, was to get some distance from these two clowns, so he pirouetted and began to walk away from them.
Ahead was a blue but empty landscape. No grass, no ground, but when he walked, his feet seemed firmly planted. When he looked down at his feet, all he saw was more empty blue expanse.
“Where you going?” Smart Ass whined. “You must do battle with the demons who torture your sister.”
“Yeah, you’re her only hope,” laughed the red twin.
Johnny looked at the sword. The only time he’d swung a sword was by pushing video game controllers. This wasn’t the same. He turned to face the two weirdos. “Where do I go for this… this battle?”
“You must enter her brain,” said Smart Ass. “But whether you receive assistance or not is a roll of the dice.” He produced two dice and rolled them on the floor that wasn’t there. They bounced their way to him. Clickety clack, went the dice.
“No, no, no,” said the red twin. “Just toss a coin.” He produced a coin much bigger than he, and tossed it high into the air. “Heads or tails?”
“Ummm, heads?”
“They always say that,” chuckled the red twin. About a minute later, the coin landed in front of Johnny. It was heads.
“Lucky break,” said the red twin, his sinister but gleeful smile somehow stretching further across his face.
“What does this mean?” asked an increasingly confused Johnny.
“It means you won’t be going into battle alone,” said Smart Ass. “Good thing, too, because your odds indeed would have been long. Okay, then, off you go.”
“Wait!” thundered the red twin in a terrifying voice quite different than the high-pitched, mischievous one from moments ago. “Do we have a bet or not?”
“A bet on what?” asked Johnny.
“Whether you can save your sister.”
How am I supposed to know? Johnny wondered. “Sure,” he said.
With that, he found himself in a busy, frenetic place that also seemed mostly blue but also saturated in colors he didn’t recognize. He began to wonder if someone at the pickleball courts had given him acid, but he had never tried acid, so he couldn’t ponder the possibility in detail.
Next to him was what looked like a fairy. She was tiny, even compared to him, about the size of his nose. Her silver body and wings buzzed around his head for a moment, then seemed to collide with a roulette wheel a few feet away.
The collision started the wheel.
As the wheel spun, she buzzed back to him and said, “Come,” then flew back to the wheel, which moved at such a rate he was unable to discern the symbols that blurred within its motion.
“Open your hand, please,” she said to him as he approached.
When Johnny did as instructed, she deposited a large skeleton key into his palm. “What’s this for?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing,” she giggled. “It was just in my way.”
“What’s the roulette wheel for?” Johnny asked, feeling remarkably inquisitive, he thought, for a dead guy.
“We’re going to see who your guide is. After that, you’ll be on your way,” she said merrily.
The roulette wheel stopped at a symbol that looked like a duck’s bill. Then, an animal about half Johnny’s size appeared next to him. “Ready, soldier?” asked a smiling, cartoonish platypus staring up at him.
“I’m ready for this goofy dream to end,” said Johnny.
“Great, let’s get to it. My name is Wolf. Let’s go save your sister.”
If this was all some kind of bizarre joke, it wasn’t funny. His sister had been fighting both cancer and a substance abuse problem, and was now in a coma. The cancer was in remission. The substance abuse problem was not. Hence, the coma, which Johnny had learned had been caused by heroin cut with fentanyl.
None of this was funny to him.
Before all this nonsense, he had been playing pickleball as a way to destress after spending hours, then days, at the hospital.
His sister had been a successful marketing executive until she hurt her back in a car accident. Then the opioids, the immobilization, the husband who left after only a month into her injury, leaving her with a young boy to take care of and no way to do it.
Johnny tried to help. He cut out the partying on weekends to help take care of her son, Nick. He worked a little extra so he could swing by with a big, fat, fluffy parka for him one cold winter day, and a bunch of toys on other days. He cooked dinner for her after work and started a side gig doing taxes so he could hire a full-time nurse for her.
As her back healed, she developed an addiction to opioids, then got hammered by cancer of the esophagus. More drugs, some chemo, and finally remission, but the opioids stubbornly remained.
It was a long, ugly ordeal. She had won so many victories, but not this last one. And now, Johnny was gone, understanding that grief was not only for the survivors of the dead, but for him, too, unable to help his sister, unable to be there for her or for Nick.
The bipedal platypus, looking just a little sad, Johnny thought, took his hand, and they disappeared into a nest of fibers and filaments.
Wolf let go of Johnny’s hand before approaching a tall human with massive shoulders covered by a long white robe and a long beard that reached his navel. The man handed Wolf a long, thin sword and a backpack, then pointed in the direction Wolf had been leading Johnny.
“There are more of them now than ever,” said the bearded man. “Good luck.”
Wolf looked up at Johnny and motioned him forward. “Follow me.” Wolf pulled a small device out of his backpack and pressed something. A vehicle that looked like a bumper car approached from the nest of multicolored fibers.
“In you go,” said Wolf. Johnny reluctantly climbed in, and Wolf sat in the seat in front of him. “Hold on to the bar in front of you. Like you’re on a roller coaster.”
“You know what a roller coaster is?” Johnny asked, surprised a cartoonish platypus would know such things.
“Dude.”
“Okay, okay,” Johnny said. When he grasped the bar, the car took off at an alarming and sudden speed.
“Where the hell are we going?” yelled Johnny as the bumper car careened past spider-like objects with eyes in their center, past long tendrils with bulbs at the end, past fibers and coils and clusters of three-dimensional splatters and splats and splinters and spikes.
“We’re riding a neurotransmitter in your sister’s brain!” yelled Wolf in reply. “Be prepared to fight!”
Fight what? Johnny wondered.
Creatures of all shapes and sizes lunged for the car as they rode past. Creatures with winding tendrils, short tendrils, thousands of tendrils, sometimes just one tendril seemed to target the car, just barely missing. Spikey things, round things, oblong things. Dark things, bright things, grey things, red things, black things.
“Them?” asked Johnny desperately.
“Just hold on!” bellowed the platypus.
The vehicle stopped in front of a ravishing beauty pushing one arm forward with her palm facing Johnny and Wolf.
“Come hither,” said the beauty.
Johnny eagerly jumped out of the vehicle, taking a rather major tumble to the ground in doing so.
The beauty spoke: “What you saw during your brief journey here was nothing more than a parade of organisms that populate human brains. Harmless to you and your companion.
“What you face next will be considerably more fearsome: The demons who have stolen your sister’s life. After all that work she put into making herself healthy, she was ambushed by unimaginably devious, and deviant, beings.”
The beauty continued: “They have found a way in. I cannot guarantee you can save her. You were given a riddle by the gatekeeper, were you not?”
Johnny nodded.
“Bear the riddle in mind as you face your nemesis,” said the beauty. “Or more accurately, nemeses”
Johnny nodded again, transfixed by the tall, shimmering beauty in her sparkling, glowing blue robe.
“Proceed,” she said, stepping aside.
One of Wolfe’s arms stretched out impossibly, spanning several lengths of his body, as his hand grasped Johnny and pulled him into the bumper car. The vehicle simultaneously sped past the beauty. This left Johnny with his feet in the air and his back on the bench of the car seat.
He struggled to sit up, then finally did just as the car screeched to a halt. Johnny looked around, not seeing any pavement, so he wondered how the screech was produced. He hadn’t even noticed if the bumper car had tires. He thought not.
This place was weird. He hoped that if this was the afterlife, there would be another afterlife after this one, because it pretty much sucked, aside, perhaps, from the beauty.
“Follow me,” said Wolf, who was no longer a platypus but instead an upright wolf with two long, curved fangs curling from the top of his mouth, a thick coat of long, brown and grey fur, and claws like sickles.
Sighing, Johnny followed, thinking that, no, he wasn’t dead. It was all just a bad dream.
Wolf exhaled a tremendous roar as he charged forward.
Johnny, as usual, felt lost because he didn’t see where Wolf was charging. There were no threats that he could see.
But as Wolf continued his charge, Johnny following close behind, he noticed a misty red fog thicken in the direction of Wolf’s gait. Out of it emerged a monstrous entity, with canines the size of elephant tusks drooping from the lips of each of its three heads, gargantuan, yellow scleras decorating its narrow eyes, muscular arms with ropes of burled muscle, its scaly, phosphorescent, dark red skin utterly naked, its member swinging between its thick legs like a hanging victim tossed by violent gusts.
Wolf charged with his sword, but was instantly swatted by the beast’s long, thorny tail.
“What are you?” it laughed at Johnny in a deep voice that sounded like it arrived from inside a massive barrel. Johnny noticed that Wolf’s corpse was impaled on the tail’s two long thorns as the tail snapped around the beast like it was eagerly awaiting another attack.
But Wolf shook himself free like nothing happened and fell in front of Johnny, morphing back into the platypus as he did so.
Johnny thought about the riddle.
What was he now? It was a fair question, he thought as the beast glowered.
He thought about Candy, and her forever struggle. He thought about how she once begged Johnny through a sea of tears, “God, Johnny, I wish you could slay these demons for me. I wish someone could”
He thought about how much he loved her.
“Who am I?” Johnny smiled. “I’m the one who has solved the riddle. I am Love.”
The platypus laughed haughtily when Johnny spoke. “You are not,” it said.
The beast, though, caterwauled, then vaporized into a pyramid of red dust.
At that, the platypus changed its shape yet again, this time into the red twin, who angrily yacked something in a foreign tongue. The red twin jumped up and down with its fists in the air as it shriveled as if baked in the sun for days, then also disappeared into a pile of red dust.
Above Johnny, a bright blue sky adorned with beautiful yellow and white clouds opened up to a visage, spreading across the sky, of Candy waking up from her coma, the slightest smile breaking upon her lips, a tear squeezing out of the corner of her eye, as she said, “Thank you, Johnny. I love you, too.”
Notes
To those who aren’t familiar with my writing: I suffered a hemorrhagic stroke last November, so I think about death a lot these days. Before you ask: I’m okay. It mostly only affected my vision. I was lucky. I can’t see straight, but that’s not a major change (brief chuckle).
But… that kind of thing does change one’s perspective on life, and what may or may not come after. It has definitely affected my writing of late. Lots of musings about afterlives and final analysis.
Thanks for reading!
Notes
This story appeared on September 29 in The Kraken Lore publication on Medium. I cheated and used more than four constraints, because I was in a mood.
The prompts were as follows (free link):
Main Theme (Worth 2 points, flip a coin or choose one!):
Prompt #1:
Your protagonist must master a new game to survive!
This, apparently, can be done with or without a hacksaw and a creepy doll.
Prompt #2:
Make a bet against the devil… and win!
Just be careful — like Medium, I hear he cheats!
Constraints Worth 1 point each (Choose 4 or roll 4 6-sided dice):
A coin
A pair of dice
A roulette wheel
A deadly disease
A wise old man (or similar creature)
A key that isn’t a key
Hardcore Constraint Worth 2 points (Flip a coin or choose one):
An animal companion
A plant creature
Literary Device (Worth 5 points):
Introduce a riddle for the characters to solve.
