Dawn comes early in summer, and the wishes are restless. Nobody in the house can sleep while they’re out there chiming and trilling. Jake scritches his fuzzy eyes and pads out bareback to open their coop.
They flurry-flap and scatter out into the pen, then regather to nudge his arms and legs as he measures out a bowl of crushed Adderall. Once they’re eagerly pecking, he checks their nests. Nothing’s hatched, of course. Jake doesn’t know why the house keeps them anymore; their food is expensive, and you can’t let them go hungry. Given the chance, they’ll eat you alive.
Jake dies and goes to Hell.
“This sucks!” says Jake.
“Right?!” says a demon.
“I thought I’d stop existing.”
“Nah,” grins the demon. “Death just takes your measure. No more quantum possibility, no more choices, no more branches. This is it. This is all you get.”
“Aha,” says Jake. “Well. In my life, I searched for certainty, so it’s poetic that—”
“Shut up!” says the demon, and throws him into a bunch of fire.
Jake also goes to Heaven when he dies, but that Jake can’t know about the one in Hell. That’s kind of what the point of Heaven is.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Jake is living a small life when a fracking company arrives to frack his backyard. The company rips out his garden and trees and burns them and then sends Jake an invoice for doing so. The fracking noise starts loud. It increases. The gases from the frack-hole make Jake and his neighbors sick. The floor falls out of Jake’s house. Jake loses most of his sleep, and most of his hearing, and before long the fracking company has him replaced at his job.
“Did you hear about the fracking?” everyone texts Jake.
“Yes,” says Jake.
“Pretty crazy stuff!” everyone says.
Friday, September 25, 2026