A Practical Joke

The boisterous surrounding crowd fell silent as the small spacecraft descended, a silver disk so stereotypical it was almost laughable falling gently from an overcast sky.

It touched down lightly as a soap bubble, the silence stretching thin but holding fast until a small hatch in the craft's underside slid open to an accompanying jubilant roar.

Aliens! It was true, they were real, we were not alone and Company had arrived!

A stout, oddly adorable rounded alien creature waddled solemnly out of the hatch, blinking four large luminous eyes in the Earth's brightly lit atmosphere. It surveyed the crowd minutely. The crowd rumbled slowly back into silence. An interminable few moments passed.

"Keeneetaa?" said the alien at last, a plaintive note jangling in its otherwise dulcet tone.

Silence. Everyone wondered, what did that mean?

The alien's eyes were distant and sad. After a while it slowly shook its head. Without another sound it turned and waddled, crestfallen, back up to the hatch, which engulfed it and then folded up neatly and closed itself tight. The spacecraft flew away.

Humanity was left mystified. Keeneetaa? Every scientist on earth bent their minds to study. What was keeneetaa? Speculation ran amok. Theories abounded. Every academic journal and every university course and every political conversation began to revolve around the question of keeneetaa.

A few years later the alien returned to the scene of its initial appearace.

Sniggering a bit, it whispered to its two alien friends, "Watch this!"

"What?" asked one friend while the other asked excitedly, "Did they fall for it?"

"Just watch," the first alien told them, and opened the hatch.

It waddled out once more, this time to a sea of humans all shouting together, "Keeneetaa! Keeneetaa!"

The two alien friends turned to one another, laughing. "Oh my stars, they did fall for it!"

"That's mean," one alien friend finally gasped. "You're corrupting their culture."

"They'll be fine."

"Keeneetaa!" cried the other alien friend hysterically, still laughing.

Keeneetaa is an obscene Ferblornian slang word that translates roughly to "Genitalia."

I opened my eyes upon a bare white room. It contained only myself and a single white chair. The walls were eggshell smooth, perfect and unblemished, unbesmirched by any smallest speck of dirt or dust. The emptiness of the room was striking.

I blinked twice and then turned on the spot, eyes darting round the perimeter, searching for a nonexistent exit. The smooth walls extended around me like a virtual hug, impersonal but inexorable. I felt a cold quiver of claustrophobia climb my insides.

I quashed it and observed the lone chair. It was a stiff, upright wing style, upholstered in white on white brocade. The textured pattern shimmered in the diffuse white light, beautiful and cold, uninviting.

Upon the seat of the chair sat a white envelope. It bore crisp black letters, the only splash of substantiality in this blank place.

I picked up the envelope and read my own first name. The chill climbing my insides shot up through the top of my head. The crisp black letters seened to dance before my eyes.

Where was I?

Frantically I tried to remember where I had been and what I had been doing before arriving here. I remembered my whole pointless life--but not the past day. I remembered yesterday, brushing what was left of my teeth. Going to bed. Getting up this morning? I drew a blank. Had I gotten up at all?

Fear kindled a fire in my belly. I tore the envelope open. Inside was a sheet of thick, smooth, dead white paper, cut with more crisp black lettering.

There was one sentence written on the whole folded page.

Welcome to Hell.

Numbly, I sat down on the uninviting white chair and stared at the unmarked white wall.

I stared and stared. The room was silent. I could hear the rush of my blood.

I was alone with my thoughts.

Eventually, I started to scream.

No, poetry and flash fic exclusively. I'd love to wrote a novel but I trip all over myself

It was a very ordinary package. Wrapped in brown paper and tied up with twine, it squatted uncomfortably underneath the brightly decorated boughs of my slapdash little Christmas tree. I got a chill every time I passed by it.

The label seemed to shriek at me in a mocking tone, From Satan! From Satan!

From whom, now?

Yeah. Always proofread your letters, kids. Spell checker can...overlook things. Important things.

Very important things, such as whether you are writing to the jolly old elf at the North Pole for a new pair of snow boots--or to the fallen angel Lucifer of Hell for god only knows what.

I hadn't checked my spelling. Oh no, too good for a read-through, no chance that I'd transposed a couple letters and accidentally broken the seal to the Underworld. Not me. Why, I was really good at spelling.

So when the mail ran and the brown paper package appeared on the front step, I was both shocked and appalled to learn of its origin. The damn thing smelled faintly of sulfur, for crying out loud!

Thus what had hitherto been a sense of pleasant anticipation became transformed at once into a sense of terrible dread. There was a package from Satan under my tree!

The days passed inexorably.

Christmas was upon me!

I faced the hellish package with trepidation, sniffing the whiff of sulfur that still arose from the dusty brown paper. With my tiny pocket knife, I cut through the unbleached twine.

I ripped aside the paper grimly to reveal a square cardboard box, clean but rather dented, smelling even more sulfurous than the wrapping. I lifted the lid with trembling hands.

"Augh!" My own face confronted me unexpectedly. At an unflattering angle, no less.

I looked down at myself (and up) in confusion. The mirror was shiny new, with a simple yet elegant filigree frame, tasteful arabesques. I met my own reflected eye and shuddered. In the mirror my gaze seemed full of rage. I saw my dainty features all dark and twisted, and I had to look away. Evil thing, I thought, unsure if I meant the gift or my own self.

Boo, said my face in the mirror, and I slung it edge on like a boomerang into the wall. It left a deep dent in the drywall before shattering.

I looked at the mess.

I met my own gaze, rageful, in a hundred shiny fragments, and I screamed.