I have no clue what prompted this story.
You’re just flipping a coin one day
The air shimmers and spurts blue sparks and from the place where your money has been disappearing a pair of gloves appear and float down to you, carried by two cherubs. The cherubs unnerve you mightily as they are literally fat naked children with wings, but when you make eye contact with one as it floats gently to Earth it gives you a spiteful look and flicks you the middle finger.
From the cloudless blue sky a lightning bolt arcs from the heavens and strikes the little fat bastard in the skull, sending electricity coursing through his body and, after a moment, causing him to explode in a violent wash of bright, almost neon purple blood and guts. It gets all over you and the other cherub, as well as the asphalt of the street. Yet the gloves are untouched.
At last the remaining cherub gets the gloves down to your head height and floats there nervously, eyeballs looking left to right, as though it too expected an errant lightning bolt. The gloves float, miraculously right in front of your face and you hesitate, just staring at them for a moment. This pisses the cherub off and he mutters under his breath, “just take the damn things so I can get out of here. He’s acting crazy again, you don’t…”
Mid-sentence the remaining cherub’s face caves in on itself like the center of a gravitational singularity, and quickly thereafter the rest of his pasty white skin and baby fat is sucked into a single, ultra dense point. After a moment the last of the cherub disappears into the dot with a wet pop, and the gloves fall unceremoniously to the ground at your feet.
This has all unnerved you fairly significantly, and you wonder about whether to even touch the gloves. In fact, you choose not to, as you figure something weird is most certainly going on here. Slowly you begin to back away from the area and then, mind made up, you swing around to run. But as you take your first step you nearly topple over when you find that the gloves are now on your hands. You swing back around, panicked, and they are no longer on the ground. This troubles you.
Without thinking you tear a glove off and fling it as hard as you can, only to have it disappear in mid-air and reappear on your hand. You try this a few more times before finally giving up and trying to think, hard. Thinking doesn’t get you much of anywhere, except regretting throwing your money into the air, and you are about to go to a hospital when a voice, the same from before, comes from everywhere and nowhere.
“Do something cool.”
You instinctively look up, although that is not where the voice came from. The voice speaks again.
“You are so boring! Do something cool! Just whatever, anything. Go!”
This is a pretty bare bones instruction, but you remember the lightning bolt and the weird blackhole thing and decide to give it a go. Unsure what the gloves do, you try the very first thing that comes to mind. You stand up, walk over to the nearest curbside tree, an oak, very old, trunk maybe a meter in diameter, taller than a four story building, and, placing your palm loosely on the bark, you try to lift it up.
With a terrible roar the tree is torn free of the moorings of the Earth as though it were a twig secured with Elmer’s Glue. You see the long and circuitous root system wriggling free from the cement of the sidewalk and the road for a dozen meters in every direction. The sudden loss of the great underground mass of the tree causes the ground nearby to shift violently and a house on the corner of Grant Street partially collapses into a sink hole, it’s occupants racing out the front door just in time to see you standing there, impossibly, holding an oak tree over your head as though it weighed nothing at all.
You apologize to the homeowners sheepishly, unsure what to do with the giant tree you now wield. The voice makes a suggestion.
“Throw it at them.”
You ask the voice, which you’ve assumed from the start must be God or a God like figure, what the fuck it meant by that.
“I mean throw the fucking tree at them you pussy.”
God, or whatever it was that was talking to you, seems like a real asshole to you, and you tell him as much. Then, you try and imagine the tree returning to its original state, undoing the damage you’d just caused and, to your amazement, that is precisely what happens. The tree buries itself back into the earth, the cement and the street accept the roots back into themselves and repair their damage, and the house raises itself up and refortifies its broken frame.
The voice is pissed.
“Boring! I think you need some motivation.”
You are mulling what that could possibly mean when you hear a roar that echoes over the landscape terribly and sounds like metal being scratched on metal near a microphone. You look up toward the skyline of the city in the far distance and there, stomping its way through the skyscrapers, firing an energy beam from its mouth, is Godzilla.
“OK, get at it.”
Of course this happens today, you can’t help but think, fucking Tuesdays.
Then you start running off in the direction of the city.
The voice in the sky is not patient. You’ve only been running for a few minutes before it chimes in angrily.
“Seriously? Are you gonna run to the city? It’s ten miles! In the name of Me, use the damn gloves!”
‘In the name of Me’ strikes you as an odd euphemism and one with some ridiculous implications, but you hardly have time to consider them as Godzilla is smashing through skyscrapers left and right. Not sure what the parameters for the gloves are just yet, you decide to try and fly, fast. Thinking there’s no time like the present, you just jump up and find that you take off like a rocket for no reason that is apparent to you. However you find your flight a bit difficult to control and before you figure out how to get some altitude you realize you are about to slam into the side of a house.
Not sure how to stop or how to navigate, you simply close your eyes and hope for the best. When you don’t die you open them and find that you’ve left the house far behind you, and you look ahead just in time to see yourself pass straight through another house. Except neither you, nor the house, nor its occupants are caused any damage. Instead you noclip through the house without any resistance.
You begin to wrap your head around one possibility of what the gloves do.
With a thought you will yourself faster and higher and float effortlessly across the landscape, much faster than the speed of sound but without so much as a stiff breeze to contend with. Eventually you make it to the city’s edge and Godzilla looms before you. Missiles pepper its thick hide and cause no damage, the explosions blowing out the windows of skyscrapers.
You float in mid air at Godzilla’s chest height, totally unsure what the hell you are supposed to do. While you consider your options, Godzilla swats at you with its tail and the blow sends you flying across the city, your body boring holes through buildings, like some anime hero. Your ears ring and you see dots as you arrest your speed and come to your senses. You touch at your nose and find blood there.
“That’s right fucker – fight! Mortaaaaaallllll Kommmbaaaaat”
You really don’t like the voice. But you also don’t want to be beaten by Godzilla. Concentrating hard, you imbue your body with incredible strength and speed, and will an adamantium sword to appear in your right hand and a vibranium shield to appear in your left, though you are unsure of the properties of both items as you are keenly aware neither material actually exists. Yet there they are.
With a sonic wave that arcs behind you, your body catapults into a diving attack, the sword extended in front. You fly back through the holes in buildings through which you just came, aiming the tip of your sword at Godzilla’s chest. The beast sees your approach and a glow forms in its titanic jaws. The glow explodes into a light blue beam of pure energy that threatens to dissolve you mid flight. You twist in the air, dodging the beam by inches, juking around at random, as the creature regularly adjusts its aim, searing your surroundings for a half mile behind you.
At last you are right beneath the monster and as its beam hits the ground between its feet, you jolt up at a 90 degree angle from the ground and scythe directly through its gargantuan neck, going in from the bottom and coming out from the back of its skull, covered in green ooze.
Godzilla makes a strange, metallic whimper and then collapses forward, landing face first on the Church of Scientology building which, up until then, had been miraculously untouched.
You will yourself down to the ground and wipe the muck out of your eyes. Pedestrians take in the whole scene with abject terror and look upon you with a mixture of gratitude and fear.
“Not bad man. Not bad.”
The voice chimes in again. It continues,
“But now I’ve got something really crazy in store for… oh shit. Dad? No, I’m not feeling well. Yeah, I’m, uh, I’m in bed. No, no no no, don’t come in I, uh, I needed to…
The voice goes silent and in the background you can hear an argument and then a loud slap, and then childish crying that fades into the distance. For a moment there’s nothing, and then a different voice comes on, deeper and warmer.
“Jesus. What did’ya do now? Hey, hi, sorry about that. I had to use the bathroom and my son stepped in for a second without my permission. He’s, uh…”
The voice paused and then sucked his teeth,
“Well, he’s a bit of a jerk. Anyways, I’m gonna load up an old save and we’ll just forget this ever happened, OK?”
You have some questions. You begin to ask them.
“Oh, boy. I’d love to get into this, but I really don’t have time right now. Just uh, I guess some wisdom…um…yeah, just remember not to take anything too seriously, K?”
This is extraordinarily dissatisfying. You say as much just as you are no longer where you are and instead walking down the calm, suburban sidewalk headed toward Grant street.
Just another damned Tuesday morning. You walk toward your carpool, mindlessly flipping a quarter into the air.
If You Enjoyed This Story – Or Any Of The Hundreds Of Other Legends From The Multiverse – And Want To Give A Dollar To The Madman Behind The Curtain Who Writes Them All:
Subscribe to the RSS feed or leave a comment anywhere on the r/LFTM subreddit with “!subscribeme” or “subscribeme!”, and you’ll receive a notification whenever a new story or continuation is posted.
READ MORE FLASH FICTION
| ACTION | APOCALYPTIC | DARK | ESTABLISHED UNIVERSE | FANTASY |
| FUNNY MAYBE | HORROR | MISC | WTF IS THIS? | SAD |
| SCIENCE FICTION | SCIENCE FANTASY | TWIST ENDING | RANDOM |
READ LONGER STORIES
| THE DEMON’S CANTOS | INCIDENTAL SUPERHERO |
| BENEATH | THE HUMANITY SAGA |
| THE TRAVELER | I, LYCANTHROPE |