To whom it may concern

The time canoe had discovered the car's ability to take on human form, and now it was jealous and refusing to work. Marshall Teller, his socks both damp and temporally displaced due to an overflowing time stream that was somehow leaking out from under the shower tray, took a deep breath and tried to remain calm.

"Nobody's saying you can't be a person," he said, stepping backwards to avoid a spreading puddle of soda whose brand name was unknown to anyone born before 2047. "If you want, after this we can go to the Eerie Mall and do all kinds of cool people things. But for there to be an 'after', there needs to first of all be a right now, and right now our kitchen sink is overflowing with the space-time continuum and the contents of the laundry hamper is being used to soak up misplaced probabilities, and-"

He realised he was shouting and lowered his voice.

"And so right now what I really, really need is a time canoe, a linear paddle, and for you to let me tie this dino-proof twine around your centreline."

The time canoe flickered, sulkily, as it phased back into reality.

"Thank you."

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

( Read more... )

Ongoing Verse: Milkman

( Read more... )

Even the nubbly and butter-drenched logic of the Popcorn Cultists seemed flummoxed by this. They conferred amongst themselves, black hoods bobbing ominously.

"How does that even work?" asked their spokesman. "Why would a car think a person who owned a car wouldn't understand the concept of a car?"

"Right?" said Marshall. "It's like, I bought the car, I signed up for all the things that went along with car ownership, why would that be more foreign to me than the sudden appearance of an elementary school kid that wants me to feed her gasoline and leave her outside all night?"

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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The car had snuck out the previous evening.

Marshall, shooing a persistently tapping Night Gaunt away from his bedroom window in the early hours, had glanced at the street below and found his usual parking spot empty. He'd debated going out to look for her, but the thought of driving around Eerie at three in the morning had been unappealing even before his sleep-addled mind had remembered he would, of necessity, be walking.

"You," he said, opening the driver-side door and sliding into a chair pulled too far forward to be comfortable, "Are in trouble."

He sniffed.

"Is that perfume?!"

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

( Read more... )

There was an air-freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror, and Marshall was absolutely sure it hadn't been there before. It was shaped like a bouquet of roses, coloured an eye-watering shade of pink that even Betty Wilson might have balked at, and he was pretty sure the smell was giving him some kind of artificially-induced hay fever.

He reached for it, and the car radio crackled out a long, threatening stream of static. He put his hand back on the wheel.

"Seriously?" he said. "You're going to get us run off the road by a dead girl in bobby socks."

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

( Read more... )

The Phantom Prom Date narrowed her gloriously made-up eyes, one manicured hand clenching around a promotional leaflet advertising the Eerie Nursery and Garden Centre's new range of corsages.

"What," she hissed, in a voice like spider-webbed safety glass and bare skin grinding on asphalt, "Is your car doing right now?"

Marshall glanced fearfully over his shoulder.

"Oh," he said, taking in the coquettishly lowered headlights, the contented rumble of two engines, and the faint, staticky strains of "Lady in Red" drifting on the night breeze.

He turned back towards the restless spirit.

"I guess they like each other?" he said.

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Ongoing Verse: Andrea/Marisea

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Prequel to "Parking".

Marshall Teller stepped out of the run-down apartment building, letting the heavy fire door swing close behind him. His breath plumed in the frosty air and he dug in his coat pocket for his car keys, trudging down a garden path gone slick with ice.

He stopped at the sidewalk and looked around.

"No," he said, his tone one of rapidly dawning horror. "No, no, no."

A little girl in pigtails and black patent Mary Janes too light for the weather looked up at him.

"What's wrong with you?" she asked.

"Somebody stole my car!" Marshall almost shouted. He took a deep breath, feeling the cold air scour his lungs, and forced himself to lower his voice.

"Have you seen it?" he asked. "It was parked right where you're standing. It's red with an "I Brake For Cryptids" bumper sticker and..." He trailed off, noting the black and yellow Bigfoot silhouette on the girl's candy-apple sweater.

"Oh no," he said.

"Oh yes," said his car, beaming up at him with a mouthful of headlight-bright milk teeth. "I thought you might be upset about your vehicle achieving full sentience, so I took a form your human brain can comprehend."

"I'm pretty sure the human brain can comprehend cars," said Marshall.

The car shook her human head, white-blonde hair whipping wildly about her round, rosy cheeks.

"Not talking ones," she said. "Not without going insane and dying from the sheer mind-destroying shock of it."

"No," said Marshall. "We're actually pretty okay with talking cars."

The car looked worried.

"I think you might have gone insane already," she said. She mounted the curb, her knees shrieking like an axle being dragged over asphalt. Marshall flinched back.

"It's okay," said the car, reaching for his hand. "This happened with Hasslehoff too."

Marshall started screaming.

( Read the rest of the Microwave verse here )

The mechanic pushed his greasy ball cap further back on his head and scratched at his hair with oil-smeared fingers. A smudge of glistening black spread from his eyebrow to his hairline.

“Yup,” he said. “That’s a ghost-shark bite alright. See the ectoplasm burns around the edges?” He traced the charred and jagged line of the roughly circular hole in Marshall’s driver side door as he spoke.

Marshal’s lips thinned, his expression remarkably similar to the one his mother wore when a Things Incorporated experiment took up residence in her linen closet.

“Really,” he said, his voice carefully devoid of inflection. “Ghost-sharks, you say. The same ghost-sharks that can only be found in the drained reservoir north of town.” He turned to Dash. “The reservoir I explicitly said not to drive my car in, specifically due to the presence of spectral fish with too many teeth.”

“Maybe I was trying to save a kindergarten class that was picnicking in the bottom of the basin,” said Dash. “Maybe you shouldn’t always assume the worst of me.”

“Maybe I would believe that,” said Marshall. “Except that my car was fine yesterday morning, and last night there was leprechaun drag racing out there.”

( Read the rest of the Microwave-verse here )