A taxi, an old enemy, and Valentine's Day

“Taxi!” Amber called out, her hand extended desperately in the rain.  Of course there was a downpour on Valentine’s Day.  That’s just how bad luck works.  But sure enough, a cab pulled up right next to her.  “Thanks,” she said, stepping in and shaking her stuff off.  Looking up at the road ahead, she was alarmed to find a gun pointed right at her and a familiar face looking back from the driver’s seat.

“Hello, Amber,” he growled.  “Long time no see.”

Thanksgiving on Mars

"It's Thanksgiving on Mars. So what are the colonists giving thanks for? What event or dreadful times did they survive and now celebrate? Are there heroes and villains? Was it Human versus Nature? Who survived and who died?

You can write their first Thanksgiving. Or their tenth. Or their hundredth.

What is the meal like? What kind of food do they grow on Mars? What would count as a feast? Are there special foods that tie into the period they're giving thanks for?"

It had been 85 years since the first colonization of Mars.  Traditions never die, certainly, but the change of yearly orbit time certainly threw off people’s calendars.  Still, adjustments happened and the old holidays flourished, including Thanksgiving.  That said, given that there was a new world to hold it on, changes to the menu were inevitable.

Turkeys got smaller due to them being raised in confined areas and the spuds now had a reddish tint to them.  Pumpkin pie hadn’t changed much, but that was almost red anyway.  Corn, of all things, was purple and massive, due to some elements in the soil triggering a reaction in the stalks.  Similarly, cranberries had also swelled to an enormous size and could be juiced to make sauce for five households or sliced up and enjoyed like a melon.

When the plane landed, there was no one on board.

“But the weirdest thing was,” Joe continued, sitting on the couch, “when the plane landed, there was no one on board.”

“Okay, stop,” Louis said, shoveling dinner onto their respective plates.  “This already sounds like the plot from The Langoleirs and you know how I feel about Stephen King.  If this is leading up to one big Stephen King troll, you’re going to wake up with boiling ravioli in your sheets.”

“Hey, come on, bro, I’m serious!  I watched that entire thing from the window.  Cops went into the plane, they came out, no one came with them.”

“And the pilot?”

“I could see that clearest of all.  No one was sitting in that cockpit.  You think it had something to do with… you know, all that stuff earlier today?”

Louis looked at his calendar.  December 21^st, 2012.

silver cups, crystal vases, and candelabra

“Oh, baby darling…” Geralt crooned as he looked into the dark chamber.  “So many goodies for me to take.  Silver cups, crystal vases and…”  He gasped in mock adoration.  “A candelabra for me?  You shouldn’t have.”  Slinking around the room, he started grabbing more and more valuables until his bag couldn’t fit any more.  That was it.  He was made for life after this.

He started moving towards the door when he felt a shock running through his entire body.  His body seized up and he dropped the bag with a thunderous clang.  Finally, the jolt stopped and he had a split second of painful reprieve before he felt his bag hit him across the head.  Everything went dark.

It was drizzling...

It was drizzling outside, the rain tapping against the window.  Mrs. Langtree leaned back into her armchair as the old record spun on its turntable.  The sound that com from it was a warm sound from the twenties, a kindly old voice warbling with a rustic tin horn accompanying it.  Outside, it was cold, though it might get colder if the storm picked up.  In here, though, the warmth was everpresent.

Mrs. Langtree pulled her blanket tighter around her as she sipped her tea.  She looked at the clock and realized that it was half-past nine.

Respect? Respect this...

"Respect?" the one called Mr. G. said to the two armed guards before pulling back his sleeve.  "Respect this, Jack and Jill.  You think I got these numbers etched into my arms at my kids birthday party?  No!  This is a token of surviving for three years while I watched friends and family get sent to their deaths.  Throughout the day, I would always wonder if I was inhaling them when I choked on the crap coming out of the smoke stacks.  I played it smart for all those years to make sure I wasn't sent to the gas chambers and made damn sure to pull everyone I could out of there.  Now you tell that to your precious Don in there and see if that's worthy of his 'respect.'"

Both guards stared at him for a long moment, their expressions blank.  Then one of them turned and walked a fair distance to talk into his earpiece.  Finally, he came back and faced Mr. G.  "The Don will see you now."

braise, glutton, fourteenth

Once he had gotten through his fourteenth plate of succulent short ribs, Hal had officially been declared a glutton by the staff.  They didn’t even have time to braise another order of the ribs before he was calling for more.  He had already worked his way through a mountain of corn, once dripping with butter but redoced to nothing but cobb now.  The mashed potatoes, rife with garlic and rib dripping, had been polished off as well, along with the many artichokes bathed in the oily sauce that gave them just the right amount of salty flavor.

All of a sudden, as he was making his next order, Hal’s eyes bulged out and, after a moment of turning a vivid green, keeled over onto the floor, still as a scarecrow.  Everyone was in an uproar as the local doctor came over to him and looked him over, doing every test he could without a lab.  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but it looks like the poor man has died.”

“Of a heart attack?” a scared customer asked.

“No,” the doctor replied.  “Of hunger.”