A Break in a Cold Case
I was burning the midnight oil in my office, working a case that was so cold it would’ve given a lesser gumshoe frostbite. No lights. I like it dark as ink because it helps me think.
I go back to square one. “Kid” Hooper knocks over a bank twenty-two years ago. They find his body a year later, but no trace of the fifty-two grand he stole. Now his widow hires me to find the loot (she says she’ll give me a taste of the game) or prove her husband innocent.
I hear footsteps nearby. I shine my flashlight at the door and see a note on the floor. It says, “Time Capsule, Nine tomorrow morning. Ford High School garden.” The other side of the note says, “Be there. Could be worth fifty G’s.”
Tomorrow arrives. “The class of 1934 left instructions to open this time capsule now, in 1956,” a school principal tells a couple hundred students and a dozen adults, including me.
He opens the lid of a dirty metal container and the stench overwhelms. The crowd recoils, the principal drops the box, and I dive and get my mitts on it. But another hand is on mine.
Treading Lightly
It isn't a time capsule, it's a time bomb.
It exploded in slow motion decades ago, but the pieces and parts have been carefully preserved. Several zip-lock bags segregate different types, and they all fit inside a couple of shoe boxes. The bags and box wear no labels, but I know them well.
"What's that?" she asks, helping me cull items from my shed. Some stuff will be sold, some donated, and a surprising amount is trash. I've hauled everything in this outbuilding around for at least two moves, and the upcoming would be the third.
It's time to let things go.
I smile but don't really answer. "It goes in a 'keep' box," I say, pretending not to smell perfumed letters from one of the bags.
She pretends not to notice that I dodged her question.
It's okay. I still pretend to dodge shrapnel from the girl who wrote those letters decades ago, but I’m not very agile.
The folded pages of college-ruled wear the inky scrawl of a teen girl in love with a boy.
She grew up and so did I, but the time capsule of letters from a love that once was makes memory a minefield.
Resolution 2 go
I pushed the rolled up paper in to the bottle and sealed it.
Staggering to the balcony of my beach house.
I flung it into the water.
My intoxicated mind thought,two birds in the hand with one stone?
Then i thought what if the great whale swallows this,and Jonah finds it.
He probably thinks it's from god to quench his thirst.
I can see Jonah now, Spat out of the whales mouth.
Landing on dry land in the heat.
His eyes burning from journey, from darkness to light.
He's probably taking a sip,or worse he's chugging the bottle to fight the dry temperature.
He's probably passed out now,under a tree.
And the worm has crawled out of the bottle,chewing the roots of the plant.
He's waking up now,the tree is fallen,smashing the bottle to pieces.
He starts walking towards his destination.
A group of villagers approach him.
He slurs a few words,and vomits out the rolled up paper,and falls to the ground and dies.
The villagers take the rolled up paper to a prophet in the village.
The prophet prays to his gods,for him to better understand the meaning of the words.
It reads,smoking maybe dangerous to your health.
.
When Shroddinger’s Cat Did Eat the Poison
Melanie Warren was the odd contender for gloomiest girl in their year, strawberry blond curls, dainty freckles across her nose, it was almost gaudy costume wear-- to have the rattiest sweaters of the most displeasing dull colors a person could think of. Nor was her pretty hair ever clean either, always full of dandruff.
And her eyes, Melanie had one picture of the color they were supposed to be. A moony grey, but had washed out to a stormy, dark glower that glimmered with scorching lightning.
That picture lay at her chest in a cheap plastic gold locket. Only seen by one person.
Her friend Sierra Gallegos.
**15 yrs. later**
It was technically cheating, Officer Oaks knew that-- except the strawberry blond grand larcenist had simply vanished.
And he cared about her more than the law or his job allowed.
Not simply for being a useful demon half the time, but in part for the fondness she would speak about... 'the one woman she loved.'
A past he used against her now as he dug up the time capsule for the class of Westover Hall 2000.
**Corvallis Oregon**
Sierra spun around the grand empty space.
Her newly bought, simple home.
The Unsealed
They cracked it open with a crowbar because the lock had rusted to glue, and the hinges moaned like they remembered. The crowd pressed in —a sweating, shifting wall of small-town pride—and the mayor, wiping his brow with a pocket square, declared it historic, though no one could remember what year it’d been buried or by whom.
The lid swung back. Silence knotted itself tight, heavy, as if the air had turned thick with waiting. Someone coughed. And then it hit—a smell like burnt hair and rotten lamb and old metal, flooding out in waves, rippling nausea through the crowd. Someone gagged. A child cried. The air recoiled.
Inside, the contents glistened wet and wrong. Not artifacts. Not memories. Things that squirmed, that pulsed faintly, that shivered like they were waking up. Something with too many legs and no face scuttled over the lip and dropped to the ground with a sound like meat slapping stone.
The mayor tried to speak, but his mouth foamed instead, his words guttural and alien, a voice that wasn’t his clawing out from somewhere deeper.
And then the lid slammed itself shut.
The ground beneath it cracked open, and the world began to tilt.
Journey to eternal lake a glimpse
Ramaiyya's P.O.V.
I don't know why I am going with these people, but I believe them to be linked with the box which shocked me to my core and I nearly lost my voice. Yes I started to stammer from the moment I opened that box. No one knows the truth except me, and I can not tell them without learning it completely. Maybe the lake will help me learn the truth completely and I could save them. My amma and pati. They were, and still are tied in that small box, but how in such a tiny box and I am not able to release them. They are bound by some dangerous dark magic, which doesn't allow me to touch the thread or rope on them. They are shrunk into the size of a small toy, but they can talk, that how I learnt who they were. They spoke to me, but they don't know that I am Ramaiyya, their son/grandson. And I have taken a oath to tell them this truth only after relasing them. Maybe till then I complete my reading and reciting practice so that I could speak to them freely after releasing them. Hail trees.
A Witch’s Guide to the Universe
As the ruling Coven of the 100th fold, we were destined for greatness. Rest assured, we took great care to honor humanity. We only turned them into giant apples to be eaten. Their sweet crunches were music to our ears.
As one could imagine, when we located the capsule from the depths of the Hellfire Lake with the absolutely voluntary help of one hundred slaves, we had high expectations. As the hexes were carefully disarmed, we dreamed of the dark magic unlocked before our eyes.
The smoke knocked me out the minute it opened, and when I woke up, I suddenly found out that the sun, which was covered by our darkness spells, actually came out for once. Miraculously, the pitiful humans passing by were not slaving away anymore to our bidding but actually thriving and—dare I say it—laughing at me! It was intolerable. According to the juicy taste of his last words, the greatest spell of history saved in that time capsule was a disastrous spell that inverted everything except for me.
Why would our ancestors make such a time bomb and rid us of the joy of human apples? I can’t tell. Maybe a certain snake might know…