horror comedy

Adult Frog (horror short story)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

(estimated reading time: 20 minutes)

Adult Frog

by

Blaine Arcade

A pool in the back is a suburban home’s most vestigial body part. If any sort of major stressor comes along, like the cancer double whammy that got Mom and Dad, one of the ways the house can fortify itself is by shutting down all resources going to the pool. Chlorine? Non-vital expense. Heating? Forget about it. Let the water pick its own temperature; it hardly needs a supervisor to follow the physics rulebook.

Lexi, the Ukrainian pool boy who stopped in once a month to scrub it and do the surrounding grass? Losing him hurt a little, he was hot, but it was just a sting, no actual damage to the property and thus the property owner, me, though I can’t speak to the current status of the paperwork.

Mom and Dad left it to me, the house, the pool, their car, and they even tried to have the medical debt ‘shove off’ from the rest of the estate on a sort of rhetorical raft of scavenged legalese. Anyway, their lawyer told me it didn’t work and they couldn’t leave me any of those savings, just the house, the car, and the pool. Continue reading →

I Still Love the Truck

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

Chucky Brook can’t stop staring at the newly announced cybertr- I mean Gigaterra ultra-modern Atlas smart truck.  He has to have it.  It has to have him.  They must be together.  What follows is a horror comedy short story of one CEO’s dream and everyone else’s struggle to deal with it.

(estimated reading time: 15 minutes)

I Still Love the Truck

by

Blaine Arcade

“It doesn’t look like anything else. It’s not thin-skinned- all stainless steel. You’re welcome. The windows too, let’s show the glass demo. Now take that ball, don’t hold back, really wind up and nail it… Oh my f$$$ing god. That was too hard; nobody told you to throw it that hard. We threw the world at this thing and it didn’t break. For some reason it broke now. We’ll fix it in post.”

-Clive Murger, CEO of Gigaterra

-excerpt of Gigaterra ultra-modern smart truck ‘Atlas’ unveiling event

Chucky Brook’s memory echoed when he accidentally repeated a phrase he’d used hundreds of times throughout middle school: I’m not gay. This time no one was challenging his masculinity via the avenue of the gaping hole where a girlfriend could’ve stood. No, this time he was offering it up unprompted as an addendum to his comment on his first look at the Atlas truck he was currently sweating up the courage to buy.

“Oh man, look at those arms. They look super strong.” Addendum: something something not gay something.

“As if anybody could blame you,” laughed the dealer, pairing it with a smack on Brook’s back. “Those are the patented Atlas arms, an unstoppable vice that can secure any payload in the bed. Cords are a thing of the past. Even at their widest they only block a couple thirds of the side-views.” Continue reading →

Mysterious America Catalog: ‘True Knothole’

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

M-A-C (14): ‘True Knothole’

Category: whatsit

Collection Date: (REDACTED), 1979

Collection Location: (REDACTED), Oregon

Collection Report: This MAC was independently discovered by two parties simultaneously; unfortunately only one was trained to handle such things with caution first and discretion second.

The party affiliated with us, Collector (REDACTED), then junior rank, was following the newly established ‘Horseshit Protocol’, by which agents of the Catalog identify and ferret out local ‘horseshit’, ‘bullshit’, ‘(REDACTED)shit’, and ‘batshit’ stories connected to uncatalogued and improperly stored MACs.

His initial lead was a deceased finch that, when dissected, displayed unnaturally braided feathers, Celtic knot intestines, and tangled muscle and optical fibers.

In one of the earliest examples of the protocol’s effectiveness, he was able to trace it back to a (REDACTED) tree approximately (REDACTED) centuries old on an abandoned property, given wide berth by all surrounding trees, some of which suffered unnaturally knotted branches.

He discovered on this tree a large regular knothole, its back and sides invisible when light was shined directly into it. Any object placed within is swallowed in darkness and emerges knotted, regardless of rigidity, with no other damage.

Our collector arrived just fifteen minutes after the other party that stumbled across the tree, a teenage girl who had placed her left arm inside the knothole. No knots resulting from the MAC can be undone, again regardless of material, and while the victim was initially still able to use her hand the limb had to be amputated at the elbow (REDACTED) years later due to poor circulation, apparently from the gradual tightening of the knot.

After this incident the MAC was uprooted live and transported via flatbed to a private collection where it was replanted. There was as security concern, as a trail of knotted insects had been left all along the route traveled, but it was addressed before any incident by varmint control truck 2.

The MAC has been sealed inside a cylindrical box wrapped about the tree, fitted with a door and knotted key that cannot be copied, to prevent future access.

Current Collector: ‘Sisyphus Philosophizer’, senior rank

Notes from Collector: “I use it to make balloon animals for my kids’ birthdays. They take forever to pop. You wanna sanction me for using it, well you go right ahead and go to the trouble of ripping up those roots and hauling it across state lines a second time, on your dime.”

Current Status: active

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Mysterious Americana Catalog: ‘Firebird’

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

M-A-C (13): ‘Firebird’

Category: varmint

Collection Date: November 25th, 1999

Collection Location: (REDACTED), New Mexico

Collection Report: A seemingly ordinary frozen turkey was purchased at (REDACTED) Foods and stored in preparation for the (REDACTED) family’s third annual hybrid Mexican-Thanksgiving dinner, where they cooked both traditional holiday dishes and cultural hybrids like pumpkin pie churros and hot pepper stuffing.

When the bird carcass was removed from its opaque bag, in the presence of seven witnesses, it immediately thrashed. It was dropped, but brought itself to its nub feet and aimed at the nearby open door of the oven. The oven was not yet heated, but the turkey ran for it, launched itself inside, and continued to flail.

After some seconds, multiple bystanders witnessed it ‘realize something’ and extract itself before fleeing.

Four individuals pursued it out of the kitchen, out of the house, and through a neighbor’s backyard where it created a dangerous situation by leaping into a vat of boiling oil the neighbor was about to use to deep fry their own turkey. The resulting splash dissuaded all but one pursuer.

Seemingly dissatisfied with the overturned oil as its secondary suicide method, the M-A-C proceeded through the doggy door of the next house over and attempted to insert itself into their oven.

This house belonged to a then-member of the catalog, and they acted quickly in turning away the last pursuer on the grounds of trespassing. After wrangling and registration by catalog varmint control truck 4, it was observed that the carcass, nicknamed ‘Firebird’, would perpetually try to cook itself by any methods available. It could only be contained by keeping it in a pit lined with aluminum foil, where it then ambled perpetually and aimlessly.

Current Collector: (REDACTED) Alvarez, junior rank, expelled

Notes from Collector: “In my defense, I didn’t know my family expected me to host Thanksgiving that year. They showed up and I had nothing… except for a bird begging to be cooked. If anything, it should have counted as research; we now know it tasted normal and didn’t make us run for any open graves.”

Current Status: inactive (consumed), skeleton displays no unusual properties

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Cardiac Zack’s Healthy Human Shack (an animatronic horror tale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 5 Comments

Holden Geats makes his scratch snapping pictures of abandoned places, and he’s heard of a new one: a kid-centric educational play place about the human body.  A quick bribe and he’s in, only the singing and dancing animatronics populating the place didn’t exactly get the ‘abandoned’ memo…

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 27 minutes)

Cardiac Zack Thumbnail

Cardiac Zack’s Healthy Human Shack

by

Blaine Arcade

Sometimes it was difficult to get all the animals out of the way. Bugs were the worst of course, too small to shoo and too fast in flight to keep their trails out of the shafts of light coming through any fissures in the ceiling. They weren’t the only ones though: birds, rats, cats, and occasionally frogs tried to ruin it too.

An indoor miniature golf course where the artificial turf now had mountain ranges of artfully-fallen ceiling plaster. A former public park where vines with sunhat leaves had eaten a listing seesaw. The outdoor section of a dilapidated lawn goods store, a flock of plastic herons standing vigilant even though their feathers and eyes had peeled white.

Every shot was devoid of live animals, but there was a big one just behind the lens, and his name was Holden Geats. Snapping pictures was his livelihood, and what renown he had came from his very narrow purview, as he only sold pictures of a world abandoned, of a speculative future Earth where mankind had vanished months or years prior achieved by finding the quiet little places that found themselves for a time unprofitable, suitable for investment only to Mother Nature herself. Continue reading →

Spilled Milk and Curbside Cookies

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(estimated reading time: 7 minutes)

Spilled Milk and Curbside Cookies

by

Blaine Arcade

Something died in the Klaxton house. The response to it was rather slow, partly because the symptoms of its demise did not present for over two weeks. January thirteenth, around there, was the likeliest date for when the first needle changed color. The evergreen dropped the ever, and then the green, and then some of the needles themselves. Continue reading →

Big-Saw-in-Law

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

Glassy eyes, gaping mouths, matted fur…  Sports mascots are supposed to be fun, but if you see them in the wrong light you can feel a jolt of fear.  What if they weren’t just a joke?  What if they were as alive as anything else, with their own instincts and hungers?

(reading time: 1 hour, 7 minutes)

Big-Saw-In-Law

by

Blaine Arcade

The Kleinbury High Spinners were up three games that season so far, so morale had improved in the neighborhood. Perhaps enough that he could return uneventfully, which was what Kevin Woods tried that Saturday afternoon. He was never the biggest football fan, more of a baseball guy as he always told people, but his son Matt was on the team. Continue reading →