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Free Trash

Click here for a lot of free audiobook codes, especially if you’re in the UK.

May 7, 2026

andersen prunty, audiobooks, dark humor, fiction, free audiobook codes uk, horror, writers
Free Dreaditation

My 2022 novel, Dreaditation, about a hapless douchebag who infiltrates a wellness retreat, is now available as an audiobook. Audible has loaded me up with free codes, which I’m sharing with you below. It’s first come, first served. If one doesn’t work, that means it’s already been used. Try the next one.

For the U.S.:

8M2DLAB2SNF3T
8N2EJZDYK7LF4
8ZRLYUKF44L29
A4HM7UPYZYQAC
ARL9GMNEPCT7K
C4TH6TY99KWSJ
CZS75UWCTMZH2
D5AKNBKRFEENK
HCXHZCMQGWRMC
HFN5HG5MCZWTM
KAM437EL96EQ3
L3S2CBMGCUYHS
LJ9PUPQRXNBRB
NCUR5RXB654LF
NMJA9P4BUUR4E
R7B5Z7XSCUDEC
R7DUCMYST27BK
W4BWMY6S57SRF
WBBGE8BX79D6T
X72EKDGSNZAJ3
YNLGKUZP4NHMU
YP2D63LRWMKBL

For the U.K.:

459APRQUXUR6H
5HW9E9S6RDQWC
7ZHHAEKSKGJZB
9FAGCX2JKEGEM
9TJGPQ6XLD9DU
ACNBHJQWHM29N
AGJYA6YLWSLXU
DWY35RPRXYYTC
F63D2AJUBMXUW
FAKYT2WHYBMX4
FDJR2HCPJ88U6
GBP3RJUHZB3EK
H25LZSDBGJ3BE
JRTFYGFTEJFBP
K8X3BKX3XSQR7
MEPHPNQ9NYKNE
MFANB9WNYNE52
MMEHBH4F9XG54
N274YPAKZ72AC
PGZKUTYKTYYBW
SW6L6KHX32W6T
USPNS98QM73CS
WDHQTXMFLET76
YWDJRP2L2XDXP
Z4P6EZPAXJGF9

May 5, 2026

andersen prunty, dark comedy, dreaditation, fiction, free, free audiobook codes, horror, new audiobooks, satire, writers, writing
The Landlord

NOW AVAILABLE

Marcus and Robin meet in an online forum. It isn’t long before the two become a couple and Robin moves in with Marcus. Life in their cozy apartment in the city suits them, until a notice is slid under their door. The cost of rent is going up, something neither of them can afford, and finding a new place that’s within their budget proves to be a challenge.

When Robin discovers an ad for a charming tiny house in a village called Little Falls, not too far from the city, it seems too good to be true. After visiting the town, they convince themselves the house isn’t too small and the landlord is more quirky and eccentric than creepy. Besides, they tell themselves, if it doesn’t work out, they can always move next year when the lease is up.

But shortly after settling in, they begin to question their decision. Something about the ever-present landlord feels off. And when they begin to regret signing the lease, the landlord offers them a chilling warning: breaking it will bring consequences far worse than staying.

December 27, 2025

andersen prunty, cv hunt, horror comedy, new books, new horror, surreal horror, weirdcore
Winter Day

Sometimes a good day is sleeping in, making and eating a good breakfast, sipping coffee and getting high, lighting incense and playing music way too loud, leisurely cleaning the house, taking hot showers, and slowly fucking before taking a nap.

Waking up should feel weird.

November 28, 2025

andersen prunty, free fiction, winter
The Jackthief

The following story appears, in slightly different form, in The Sorrow King.

Oletta Goom woke up on the morning of October 31st and went into the baby’s room, knowing exactly what she would find.

Emptiness.

The crib stood in the middle of the room, white cotton blankets piled up against one side. Outside, the wind, turned cold with the season, spat at the house and invaded the open window. Oletta grabbed the worn wooden rail of the crib with a bony hand and cried, her tears running down her wrinkled face and falling onto the cotton sheet that still smelled faintly of Jacquelyn. “Jack,” Oletta had called her.

But now Jack was gone.

Just like all of the girls that had come before her. And it was always on this day, the first birthday, Halloween, that the Jackthief came and took them away. Now she would have to wait another year before going into the haunted woods to claim her prize.

Unless she could find out where the Jackthief took the babies. Unless she could get this one back.

Oletta had been several years younger when she had retreated to her house in the woods. Perhaps it was more of a shack, but it served the purposes of shelter and warmth just fine and that was all she needed now. Shelter and warmth. Maybe it wasn’t all she wanted, but it was all she needed, along with a little food every now and then.

What Oletta wanted more than anything was a baby. She was not a young woman anymore, twenty years past childbearing age, but that desire had never left her. It was only since the death of her husband that she realized it was an impossibility. Before, she had always prayed for a miracle. Maybe, she had thought, God would fix whatever was broken inside of her and she would finally get pregnant. But it was never meant to be.

So her husband had died and she had moved to the woods feeling like, if she was going to be alone, she was going to do it right.

But moving to the woods proved to be the source of more joy and sorrow than she would ever know.

It was there she met the Jackthief. There, during the strangest of circumstances.

Summer was buried, Halloween standing atop it like a cold gray tombstone, and Oletta didn’t see how she was going to spend a winter alone in the tiny shack. She figured her best days were well behind her and there weren’t going to be any good ones ahead. She found a length of strong rope in the old woodshed. She was going to take the rope out into the woods, find a good sturdy branch, and hang herself. She didn’t plan on learning how to do it proper. If she had to dangle for a while, choking on her own windpipe, then she just figured that would be penance for the awesome sin she was about to undertake.

After a brief survey, she found a branch that would do the trick. The rope was slung around her neck to give her frail arms the strength to carry an old wooden ladder. It was a gray day. The clouds were bloated black-gray, threatening rain. Maybe, if it rained, it would help weigh down her body.

It took about a half an hour to make sure everything was in place. She figured the knot was strong enough to do the trick. Climbing to the top of the ladder, the fiber of the rope scratchy around her neck, the sky rumbled a hungry growl and she hoped it would drown out the sound of her strangling to death.

Standing at the top of the ladder, she wondered if she was doing the right thing. But this wasn’t a spontaneous decision. It was something she had thought about for a very long time. This was the only way out. The lonely days had become unendurable and she was too proud to be stuck in this constant state of self-pity.

The sky screamed.

Oletta took a deep breath and kicked the ladder away.

She dropped. The rope tightened around her neck.

And then broke.

She fell to the ground, lightning streaked across the sky, fat cold drops of rain hammered down, and her life changed forever.

On the other side of the tree she had tried to use to kill herself, she heard a baby crying. Oletta unfastened the rope from around her neck, not believing what it was she thought she heard. Nursing a twisted ankle, she trudged through the dead leaves, turned soggy, until she found the source of the crying.

When she saw the baby, swaddled in black cloth, at the base of the tree, her face split and her tears mingled with the beating rain. Stooping down, she picked up the baby and took it back to the house, wanting to get it out of the rain, wanting to get it into the warmth.

Sometimes, Oletta knew, when a person wanted something so much, it was not necessary to question the source. It was not necessary to question the truth or validity behind that desire. A Christian wanted a God to save her and an afterlife to house her soul when she dies. The Christian does not question these things, she believes them and calls that belief faith. So Oletta believed in her new baby maybe not so much as born but given to her on this Halloween day.

She took it home with her. First she named her Jacquelyn and called her Jack. She loved Jack. She fed her and sang to her and talked to her and cared for her and took her everywhere she went. She even took her into the town to buy food and clothes, not caring if the folk talked and wondered. They would, Oletta knew, come up with their own reasons why she now had a baby and those reasons could not come even remotely close to the fantastic truth.

For exactly one year, Oletta was the mother of a beautiful baby.

On Jack’s first birthday, Oletta opened the door to her room and discovered the baby gone, the bedroom window open, a cold wind blowing in. The following year, she searched for baby Jack. Searched and mourned because she knew the baby was gone.

That was the worst year of Oletta’s life, having had something and then lost it. Each day was worse than the one before. Her life had become a spiraling black nightmare as she wondered about who would steal the only thing she had ever wanted. She never found the Jackthief but she had a picture of him in her mind.

The Jackthief was carved from wood and bone. He traveled by moonlight and drank the sorrow of others. He was drawn to this sorrow and, drunk off it, had to create more. Oletta knew the Jackthief had always been there. He was the one who had snapped the rope when the only thing she wanted to do was snap her neck. He did it because she had not suffered enough. She was a well of suffering and the Jackthief had not drunk the last of that well. So he had let her love the baby for a year. And just as quickly, he had taken it away. Now he surrounded her in the woods, watching her, mocking her silently as she searched and searched.

A year later, she found baby Jack in the same place she had found her two years earlier. The baby was the same size as the very first time Oletta found her and she had a distinct feeling of falling back two years in time. But, once again, the sorrow had lifted. She had her baby. Maybe the circumstances were not normal. Maybe they weren’t even believable, but it was nice to hold Jack in her arms once again and feel a year of sadness melt away.

Over the next two years, the cycle repeated itself.

Always from Halloween to Halloween. One year of joy. One of sorrow. One a trick. The other, of course, a treat.

After losing Jack again, Oletta did not search for her.

She sat in her house and waited, her mind expanding out into that depressed madness, knowing her time would come again. Yet knowing that did not make it easier. The only thing she could think of was the year after that, when she would have to go without the baby again. The Trickyear. And, after all, wasn’t the point of having a baby to watch it grow? To shape it and give it a good life? To see what kind of adult it became?

That year, Oletta decided she was not going to go without Jack again.

On October 31st, when she found Jack under the tree, Oletta said to her, “I’m never letting you go. If he takes you again, I will find you.” And she took the baby back home and they had another good year—the Treatyear—but now the time had come again and Oletta stood in an empty room, surrounded by nightmares.

That morning, she left the house in search of the Jackthief, knowing he was out there, somewhere. She was not going to go back home until she found the baby. For days, she wandered deeper into the woods, the noose of cold and hunger wrapping around her neck.

Madness rats nibbled at her brain. She followed the Jackthief. She followed his scent. He smelled like wax and fallen leaves. He smelled like memories. Some nights, she thought she heard the baby crying. Some nights, she thought she heard the Jackthief laughing.

She became hungry and confused, knowing she was too far from her house to ever get back. The sorrow was black and swollen in her mind. She let it grow, knowing that the greater the sorrow, the more likely she was to see the Jackthief. And then she could take her baby back.

On the night of her death, before the Jackthief came and took the sorrow away for good, Oletta couldn’t open her eyes. She couldn’t see the Jackthief. But she thought she could open her eyes far enough to see the little black bundle he held in his arms. She pawed at the blankets, wanting to touch Jack’s soft baby skin one last time but the thing inside the blankets was not Jack.

It was carved from wood and bone.

It smelled like burning wax and dead leaves.

And when it opened its mouth, it didn’t want milk, it wanted to drink sorrow and a whole life filled with longing. And when it satiated itself on those things, it laughed, and moved onto the next person in the next town.

October 31, 2025

andersen prunty, free story friday, gothic, halloween stories, horror
A Fresh Head

I watch the boy across the street ride his skateboard. He does a horrible job. Every day it’s the same thing. He rides it, very slowly and cautiously, down to the end of the driveway and stops. He kicks it around and maneuvers it with his feet.

I can’t take it anymore.

I stroll over to the boy and snatch the skateboard away.

“Let me show you how it’s done,” I say, even though I don’t have a clue as to how one rides a skateboard. Nevertheless, I put my all into it. I start way back at his garage and take off, full speed, for the road. I get to the end of the driveway and try to flip it back around so I’m facing the garage. Of course, something goes terribly awry.

I fall off and crack my head on the cement, losing consciousness for a few seconds.

I regain my vision. The boy is hovering over top of me.

“I’m in pretty bad shape,” I moan. “Maybe you should call the ambulance.”

“There’s no need for that,” the boy says. “I’m a doctor.”

“Knock it off. My skull feels cracked and I can’t move my left arm.”

“Really,” he says. “It’s no problem.”

He reaches down and pulls my head and arm from my body, tossing them nonchalantly to the side.

“Just hold on now,” he says, noticing my panic.

Within a few minutes, I have a fresh head and arm. I stand up. I feel great.

“That’s amazing,” I say. “How’d you do that?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Was it some kind of magic?”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” he says. He picks the skateboard up from the road and rides it slowly back up to the garage. From the garage he calls, “You run on back home now.”

I do what he says.

January 17, 2025
The Chancellor

I look up and the Chancellor is standing in my doorway once again. Filling the doorway. This is the fifth night he has put in an appearance and I already know how the evening is going to turn out. He trundles into my room, modeling a pair of skin-tight black leather pants, cellulite jiggling wildly as he turns in robust circles of pride. The twin loaves of fat-filled flesh above the waistband bob rhythmically. Aw hell, I wish he’d leave me the fuck alone. Of course he’s going to ask me how he looks, modestly referring to himself as a fat cow, trying to evoke pity, conjure up a compliment. Then he’s going to drag me away from my writing to go watch the hangings at the Dangle Bar, laughing as the accused ejaculate all over the stage the moment the rope snaps their necks, taking enormous gulps of his Bavarian ale and hollering for them to bring out the next one, his gaseous breath blowing off the clinging flecks of foam from his mustache. He’ll turn to me and tell me how some of the hanged are fags, he just knows it. Or he’ll shout, “Don’t he look like somebody who masturbates?!” Yes, of course, whatever, Chancellor, can’t you just leave me alone? I have some writing to do. Feeling a little tipsy, think I’ll just—No, no, you sit right down here. Free drinks! No free thinks! Then we stagger out of the bar and I’m too drunk to even get it up but he insists on buying us whores. The only good thing is that he usually gives me the more attractive one because he likes to watch us while he fucks his. Even though I don’t want to let him watch, don’t even want to be anywhere near him, his power is such that I have to acquiesce. He is the Chancellor. Then we’ll go back to the hotel and he’ll make me read him stories until he falls asleep, which sometimes takes hours. He prefers Bible stories and any children’s books that in some way or the other involve the mother as an integral part of the plot. He’s developed an extensive guideline for this. Then he’ll sleep, occasionally crying out for me to come ‘rub salve on his feet.’ But tonight, to my dismay, he collapses in mid-pirouette. I roll him out of the room and continue writing.

January 10, 2025
Happy New Year

Things will probably look a lot different this time next year.

January 1, 2025
Storming

The storm calls on Wednesday. I answer on the phone downstairs. The storm sounds angry and hateful, rumbly and static-filled. I hang up the phone and my right foot begins vibrating. I’ve been chosen. I suppose I should let the boarder know. I knock on his door. It’s right next to the phone. The boarder is a circus strongman. I don’t know his name. I call him Mr. Strongman. He signed the lease with an “X”. No help there.

His door swings open. He’s a classic circus strongman, standing there in his crimson singlet. His black hair is greased and parted down the middle. An ostentatious handlebar mustache, waxed to perfection, reaches out from either side of his face. Years ago, training for the Olympics, Mr. Strongman strained his mouth and has been unable to speak through it since. Instead, he has trained his left deltoid to speak. He turns around and his deltoid says, “Hello.” I always want to touch it but I resist the urge. He would probably break me in half.

“My foot’s vibrating,” I blurt out, gesturing down to it. Even with a shoe on, you can tell it’s moving, twittering rapidly back and forth like something’s trying to get out.

Mr. Strongman is looking at me over his shoulder. Surprise and a certain amount of horror fill his eyes.

“You know what this means,” I say.

“I certainly do,” his deltoid says.

“I think you’d probably better go.”

“I’d rather not.”

“If you stay here, it’s quite likely you’ll die.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

“I would rather you didn’t. I don’t want to be responsible for another person.”

“I’d rather not move all these weights.” Mr. Strongman gestures into his room. It’s filled from floor to ceiling with globular iron weights in varying diameters. He has a point. I wouldn’t want to move all that stuff either.

“Surely you have some strongman friends who can help you?” I’m nearly pleading with him.

“They’ve all passed on.”

“Suit yourself then.”

“Do you know when?”

“I’m afraid I don’t. Soon, I imagine. With the way my foot’s vibrating.”

“I’ll be prepared.”

“You can only prepare so much for something like this.”

“You’ll have to go see the doctor next.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Would you like me to go with you?”

I think about it. Maybe it would be nice to have company. And I do not have a car.

“If you’re willing.”

“Let me get my keys.”

He disappears back into the room and I hear the clattering of iron weights. I don’t know what that has to do with keys. When he comes back to the door, his muscles are ripped and he’s sweating profusely. “I had to do a few reps.”

We head out to his tiny two-seater parked on the curb. The car is rusted and leans to the driver’s side. Probably because Mr. Strongman weighs so much.

“Wanna drive?” he asks. We both know this might be my last time to do this.

“Sure.”

He tosses the keys at me. His throw is slightly off. I miss the keys. They hit me on the side of the face and clatter down to the sidewalk. Bending down to pick them up, I can hear my foot vibrating. I look up at the sky and do not see a single cloud but I know this will change. The storm will come. The storm will rage through and change everything. How could I have let life become so stagnant?

We get into the car and I drive us to the doctor’s. It’s a small single-story shack on the outskirts of town. It doesn’t take very long. The town is not very large. I get out of the car.

“I’ll wait in here, if you don’t mind,” Mr. Strongman says.

“No, not at all. I’ll be right back.”

I walk through the parking lot, taking tentative steps around the vibrating foot. I pull the door to the doctor’s open. He has one of those bells that jangle over the door. He’s asleep in the middle of the floor. I approach him and nudge him with my foot. He lets out a final honking snore and pries his bloodshot eyes open.

“My foot’s vibrating.”

He’s in the perfect position to observe this. He rolls over onto his side, facing my foot. He puts his hand around it and squeezes. He puts his ear to the shoe.

“So it is. Can you help me up? We’ll get this taken care of.”

I hold out my hand and he clasps it.

“Come on back here with me.”

I follow him through a tattered wooden door. It creaks open and bangs shut. There is an old cot in the middle of the dimly lit room.

“Sit.” He points to the cot.

I sit down. He grabs a giant pair of what looks like hedge clippers and pulls a chair over beside the cot.

“Upsy daisy,” he says and pats his thigh.

I put my vibrating foot on his knee. He grabs the handles of the clippers and angles the business end around the top of my foot, just below the ankle.

“Here goes,” he says, and takes a mighty clip.

My foot is now off. There isn’t any blood or anything.

“That went well,” he says. “Now for your surrogate.”

He goes to a large box in the back corner of the room and rummages around. He comes back carrying a very large yellowish eagle talon.

“I’m afraid this’ll have to do.”

He sits back down on the chair and lines the talon up with the bottom of my leg. He grabs the clippers and does the same thing he did to remove the foot, the blades slicing through the empty space. When he’s finished, the talon is affixed securely to the leg.

“There we go,” he says.

“Thanks,” I say.

“We’ll get this sent off for you.” He holds my foot up in the air.

“That’d be great.”

Mr. Strongman has pulled the car around to the front of the building. That’s very considerate of him. I slide into the passenger seat.

“When we get home,” I say. “We’ll have to begin dismantling the house.”

He grunts and guides the car away from the doctor’s.

The tiny car squeals to a stop in front of the house. I place my new right foot, my talon, out onto the sidewalk. An old lady walking by looks at it and says, through her bent and twisted face, “So it’s true.” She gives me the evil eye and continues on her way. I want to shout something after her but she has every right to be angry.

The phone is ringing from the house. Mr. Strongman, aware of my condition, races to answer it. I’m walking up to the house when he appears in the doorway, his back to me, his deltoid saying, “It’s for you.”

Walking on this talon is tricky. After a couple minutes I reach the phone. It’s the storm again. It sounds closer. Even angrier. I imagine it gathering steam somewhere over the plains of Kansas. Taking in deep breaths and roiling around itself. Ready to spew out its vitriolic guts on me and my house. I could argue with it, but it wouldn’t do any good.

The next two days, Mr. Strongman and I dismantle the house. I pull the siding off the lower parts. He’s good with the ladder. He’s able to get the second floor. We strip off the siding and place it in the backyard. He places his weights over the various piles. The walls are huge and very heavy, giant chunks of drywall. I supervise as he pulls them from the support beams. He stacks these in the backyard as well.

“You want me to do the roof?” he asks.

I squint up at the roof. “Nah, it needs replaced anyway.”

“It’s too bad this has to happen to you.”

“There’s no other way. I want to let you know this house is yours after the storm, for all your hard work.”

“Aw, thanks. That’s not necessary.”

“I insist.”

“Very well.”

“Now I think I’m going to go wait for it.”

“Need any help.”

“I’ll get it. You should probably hide in the basement … when the time comes.”

“I’ll stay out here with you. I can’t let you do something like this alone.”

“It was meant to be done alone.”

“It could have been me who answered the phone.”

“That’s not the way it works. You know that.”

He lowers his head as if he is already in mourning.

I grab my green lawn chair I bought just for this occasion and enter the house through the missing wall. We left the stairs because both of us decided we didn’t know how they would go back together. It wouldn’t matter to me anyway. I climb the stairs to the second floor.

From downstairs, the phone rings.

No one answers it.

The day is sunny.

I study the horizon.

And then I see it over the house across the street. Black and perilous. Moving quickly. I clutch the arms of the lawn chair, set my jaw, and wait for it.

Downstairs, Mr. Strongman is supporting himself in a doorway that is lacking a door.

The giant cloud reaches my house and stops. There is a loud boom of thunder. Lightning shoots out. Rain pounds down. I notice there is a crowd of people gathered on the sidewalk. They ooh and aah as the storm delivers its beating. A funnel cloud extends down, beginning at the edge of the lawn and working its way toward the house. I release the lawn chair and push myself to the edge of the floor, where the wall used to be. I raise my arms to the storm and, like a hateful father, it scoops me up and lifts me into its black fold. Below, I see Mr. Strongman squinting up at me, at the storm carrying me away. I wonder if he was the one who had called the storm or if it was really just my time.

The inside of the storm is cold and loud. It races across the mountains, toward the coast. We reach the ocean in a matter of hours and it coughs me out. I plunge down into the salty water. Somewhere, a sea gull is laughing at me. I pull the water into my lungs. It is cold. I put my head down and swim toward the shore, eager to start over.

November 29, 2024

absurd stories, absurdist fiction, anxiety, free stories, free story friday, storms, weather
The Lift

I got mad, went outside, and tried to lift a truck. It was dark. I couldn’t tell what color the truck was. I squatted down and put my hands under the rear bumper and, struggling, attempted to raise the truck above my head. I could only manage to get it to rock a couple of inches. The tires didn’t even leave the ground. With every bit of strength I had I strained to lift, veins bulging in my forearms, cords standing out on my neck. My head felt full of blood, like a balloon, like it could explode any minute. I got tired and, breathing heavily, decided to sit on the rear bumper and rest a little. Already, much of the anger had melted away, replaced with a sense of gratifying fatigue.

A burly man wearing a flannel shirt and a straw cowboy hat opened the door of the truck, climbed out, and came around to the bumper.

“You try to lift the truck?” he asked, staring somewhere just behind me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t know you were in it. Sorry.”

“Thought maybe you could use some help.”

“Sure. If you could lend a hand … I think that would be a big help.”

“No problem. I hope you don’t mind. Me bein’ in the truck and all.”

“No. Not at all. Is this your truck?”

“Yep. I was passed out. I don’t like to go home ’til dawn.”

“Sure,” I said, rising from the bumper.

We both squatted down and put our hands beneath the bumper.

“Here we go,” he said and gave a great heave.

The truck nearly flew into the air, the burly man holding it above his head. I was on his right side and, while I had my hands on the bumper, I didn’t think I was really doing much of the lifting.

“Back down,” he said. His face was red and a trickle of sweat ran down his cheek. “That was a good lift.”

“Definitely.”

“Say, you want to come with me for a pack of smokes. I ran out.”

“Yeah, I guess I could come with you. I have a few things I need to pick up as well.”

“Yeah, okay … You’ll have to ride in the back. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No. Not at all.” I didn’t know why I had to ride in the back. I didn’t see anyone else in the cab. Maybe the man was hiding something. Or maybe he didn’t trust me. I climbed up into the bed of the truck. The man got back into the cab, fired the engine, and we sped off into the night. He drove like a maniac, running lights and hitting cars. I contemplated jumping out if he actually stopped the truck. But it didn’t stop until we reached a convenience store on the outskirts of town. It was one I’d never been to before. Mainly because I had always thought it was abandoned. I couldn’t recall ever seeing a light on inside it and many of the windows were broken.

The man turned the ignition off and picked up a large rock. He threw it at one of the remaining windows and it shattered with a noisy crash.

“The owner gets in there and falls asleep. You have to throw a rock just to wake him up.”

I followed the man into the store. The old man, presumably the owner, was behind the counter, rising from an old Army cot spread with blankets. Blearily, he staggered to the counter and stared out over the darkened store. The only light was that coming from the fluorescent lights from the road.

He gave the burly man a pack of cigarettes and said, “They’re on the house,” turning his attention to me. I grabbed a blue bandana and a snorkel—they had such an odd assortment of items. I could have looked around and found more stuff but it was so dark I couldn’t see very well and I had to hurry so the owner could get back to sleep. I threw the items on the counter and he charged me at least five times what they were worth. He didn’t ring anything into a cash register. He just called a number from the top of his head. On closer inspection I noticed there wasn’t a cash register. I didn’t have any cash so I gave him a credit card. He gently fingered the raised name and numbers and looked intently at the ceiling. “That’s a good one,” he said, handing it back.

“May I have a receipt?” I asked, thinking maybe I would put the items on my expense account.

“I need to get some sleep,” the old man said.

“Yeah, but, a receipt?” I asked.

“Too tired,” he said, dropping back onto his cot.

The burly man had already exited the store and sat in the cab of his truck, smoking. He smoked very fast, furiously. A cloud filled the cab of the truck and rolled out.

“I think maybe you should drive,” he said. “I’ll be busy smoking.”

He tossed his cigarette away and lit another one, scooting over into the passenger seat. I climbed in behind the wheel, wondering how I went from riding in the back to driving the truck.

I drove back home and got out of the truck. I assumed the burly man would slide over into the driver’s seat but, instead, he got out of the truck and began walking in the opposite direction.

“Thanks for helping me lift that,” I said.

He turned, a fresh cigarette in his mouth, and said, “That’s not my truck at all.”

I nodded my head as though I understood but I didn’t. I came to the steps leading to my house and stopped, holding the snorkel in one hand and wiping the sweat from my face with the bandana. I couldn’t remember what inside the house had made me so mad but I felt a sense of dread as I looked at it. There had to be something in there that caused me to get mad and go try to lift a truck. As hard as I tried to think about it, it wouldn’t come. So, not knowing what else to do, I put the snorkel in my mouth and opened the front door.

It all came flooding back but it was too late to turn and run.

October 18, 2024

absurd stories, absurdist fiction, anger management, cult fiction, free fiction, free stories, free story friday, niche fiction