Excerpt from TWISTED TAILS IV: Fantastic Flights of Fantasy
People meet in various ways. Most often those meetings are through the aegis of the gods of chance. Sometimes the coming together is apparently and mysteriously preordained by inexplicable forces, fate for lack of a more fitting term, and couldn’t be avoided under any circumstance. Occasionally folks get paired up through a plan by one or more outside sources for reasons known only to the planners.
Young Sam Sapperstein awakens one too bright Sunday morning to find
himself an unwilling, unwitting party to the latter case and his life is
about to change...radically. Things will never be the same....
Never...ever. Magic will have its way with him.
* * *
OSCULATING BUFONIDAE
by
J. Richard Jacobs
The alarm ground out its obnoxious rhythm. Zzzzzt...zzzzzt...zzzzzt.... But it shouldn’t be doing that, he thought. This is Sunday, right? I thought I turned the thing off last night. Too drunk, I guess. Ooooo, my head is unzipping and falling apart.
Samuel Sapperstien, eyes still closed, slapped the snooze button expertly and pulled a pillow over his head.
It sounded again.
Sam slapped again.
Again it sounded, more insistent.
Again, Sam slapped, but with more force, as if that would convince the alarm to shut up.
A small voice screeched, “Ow.”
Sam peeled the pillow back just enough for him to see the clock. Sitting on top of the controls was a greenish brown something-or-other glaring at him and rubbing at its head. He dragged the pillow over his face, then pulled it slowly down so that his nose and mouth remained covered. It was still there.
“What the hell are you?” Sam said. His voice would have carried a squeaky, terror-filled shrieking sound had it not been muffled and smoothed out by the pillow.
“I’m a dragon, buster, and you’re lucky I didn’t burn off your fingers for that little stunt. You should look before you slap.”
“Dragons don’t exist...and you’re what?—three inches tall, maybe? Dragons are supposed to be big and frightening. You? You’re just a funny little lizard...at best. You have a name?”
“Look, bud, don’t let my diminutive size fool you into thinking you can get the best of me...and I can’t help being small. It’s a long story, Sam, so don’t ask—and you wouldn’t be able to pronounce my name, anyway, so just call me Vern. And I am not a lizard.” The creature unfolded its wings to a full span of a little more than six inches and gave a couple of flaps while releasing tiny puffs of smoke and licks of flame from its nostrils to drive home the point.
“I have time, Vern. Vern—odd name for a dragon, isn’t it? And how did you know my name?”
“My actual name is much more impressive but, like I said, you couldn’t get your tongue around all the consonants with no vowels, and your name is in our files back home in Trillianum. And, as for time, no, you don’t have much of that at all, if we are to do what needs to be done. Now, get up and do whatever it is you people do these days to get ready for a semi-formal party.”
“But...but this is Sunday.”
“So? It’s Sunday. So what?”
“Saturdays and Sundays are my days off and I use my Sundays to repair the damage from Friday and Saturday night. I don’t go anywhere on Sundays, except the Slick-Quick store down the street for one of their Crispy-Crunch Burrito specials...and I haven’t been invited to any parties. Especially not a semi-formal one. Come to think of it, I’ve never been invited to a semi-formal anything. Now, leave me alone. I have some serious sleeping to do. Go back to wherever it is you came from. Um...who sent you here, anyway?”
“Morgud the Great,” the apparition sitting on his clock said with considerable pride. “You wouldn’t know him. He’s a freelance wizard from the suburbs surrounding Trillianum’s outer wall.”
More Good the Great, Sam thought. What kind of a name is that? He pulled the pillow over his eyes and swore under his breath that he would have to stop drinking so much on Friday and Saturday nights.
The creature continued, “I can’t go back to Trillianum until my job here is finished and you, Sam, are my job. As for the party, you’ve just been invited. I invited you. Now, pull down the pillow, throw back the blankets and get up.”
“That’s pretty nervy of you. Suppose I don’t want to go to any party, which I don’t.”
“Sam, I swear I’m going to set that bed ablaze with you in it. You’ll be the Crappy-Crud burrito special, or whatever you called it. Now, just shut up, get up, and let’s go.”
