The gray SUV sailed through the intersection without slowing. He didn’t get 100 meters before the blue and red lights on a police cruiser lit up the night and the rear-view mirror of the SUV driver.

“License and registration,” the officer asked the driver as he came up alongside the SUV.

“Sure, okay, officer. Is there a problem?”

“You ran that stop sign at the intersection back there.”

“Wait, what? There was no stop sign…”

“Sure is. It’s a four way stop. Take a look.”

The driver stuck his head out his window and craned his head around towards the intersection he’d just came through. Sure enough, he could see the silver octagon of the back of a stop sign. “What? I swear that wasn’t there a second ago!”

“Well,” the officer said, “It’s not like the stop sign jumped out of the bushes all of a sudden.”

The driver sighed in defeat. “I guess…”

The officer watched the SUV drive off as he finished his paperwork on the stop before backing back into the pullout. He got out of his cruiser and walked to the stop sign.

“Thanks, Eddie.”

The stop sign rattled acknowledgement.

The officer let a silence pass. “It’s been five years, Eddie. Who would have guessed after that drunk driver T-boned your cruiser you’d be inhabiting this particular stop sign?”

The stop sign rattled agreement. Pause. The stop sign rattled sadly.

“Yeah, Eddie, I miss you, too.”

The stop sign rattled in anticipation.

“Yeah, I hear them coming, too. Shall we?”

The stop sign rattled and then the branch of the shaggy tree right next to the stop sign moved over completely obscuring the stop sign.

“I’m so glad you learned how to do that, Eddie. It helps.”

The stop sign rattled the branch camouflage.

The officer walked back to his cruiser to wait.

Everett opened a blank document in his word processor software. He moved his mouse over to the button in the upper right for SADIE and clicked.
“Hello, Everett,” the modulated voice said. “The Smart Automated Dictation Interface Editor or SADIE is ready to go. Shall we start?”
Everett appreciated how far this technology had come. “Okay, SADIE, start dictation.”
“All right, Everett, I’m online. Start dictating when ready.”
Everett sat back in his desk chair, hands completely off the keyboard and mouse. He picked up his double Old Fashioned off the desk and started telling his story. “I don’t remember when I first thought about the most endangered mammal on the planet, comma, the riverine rabbit of South Africa’s Karoo desert, comma, but once I heard about them I was captivated…”
He continued, watching his words appear as text on the screen word by word, sentence by sentence, and paragraph by paragraph.
SADIE broke into his dictation at one point. “Everett, I believe that last sentence is a fragment.”
Everett furrowed his brow. He knew it was a fragment – it was a fragment for effect. “SADIE disable grammar correction.”
“Grammar correction disabled. Please continue.”
And he did.
A few paragraphs later he stopped. “SADIE, move the last paragraph up above the previous paragraph.”
Everett watched as the last paragraph moved graphically above the previous paragraph.
“Where do you want to start again?” SADIE’s electronic voice asked.
“At the end of the next paragraph – after ‘and so I went to the desert.’ New paragraph.”
The cursor moved to the indicated position. “Please continue,” SADIE instructed.
“I had asked my wife, Leslie, if she would accompany me to study these elusive creatures. She said she wasn’t interested. Had I known she would die while I was in the remote desert field camp, I never would have gone.”
“That’s a bunch of horseshit!” Leslie’s voice came across the speakers. “You know you murdered me!” On the screen the words “That’s a bunch of horseshit. You know you murdered me!” spelled out on a new line as Everett dropped his Old Fashioned.

Akilah is a wealth of story ideas. I wrote about this another time that sometimes it takes a while for one of her story ideas to fully germinate into something I can put on paper. This one… might not have sprouted quite so fully, but it’s fun! So, shake it like a Polaroid picture!

Alan didn’t like being dead. Well, he would have preferred to have just faded out – that’s what he had expected would happen. No fluffy clouds and harps. No damnation and fire. Just fade to black. But that’s not what happened. He didn’t know why, didn’t know who to file a complaint with, didn’t know how long this would last.

He did know he could control the weather. Well, to an extent…

In the darkness he felt his way around the village by feel. Sure, he could walk right through them, but this was habit. He peered into the darkness and there it was, a light came on in the distance – far, but bright and flickering. He thought he could make out images…

Alan preferred his village stay dark.

He raised his hands and sent energy coursing out of him. Snow erupted around him, blocking out the light. No, not blocking it out. Refracting it off the little crystals so that his village sparkled.

..

“Look! It’s doing it again?”

“Honey, what?”

“LOOK! At the snow globe you brought back from Lausanne, Switzerland!”

“Huh,” she said. “You didn’t shake it up?”

“No. And you didn’t either…”

“No, I didn’t,” she said watching the little drifting fake snowflakes in the little globe gently float down through the liquid trapped inside the tiny dome and around the small gingerbread-like Alpine village. “What do you think it is?”

“Heh, maybe it’s haunted!”

“A haunted snow globe? That sounds like pure hell,” she said.

..

Alan sat on the roof of one of the buildings and watched as the last bit of snow settle on the white covered ground and let out a contented sigh. He didn’t like being dead, but this beat fading to black.