I've bitten on another
Chuck Wendig Flash Fiction challenge. Playing on the "write what you know" meme, he asked us to take an incident from life and turn
it into a bit of fiction, preferably genre fiction. I'm going to take a pan that once went missing right in my house, and put
it with a ghost on a space ship. It's 1000 words max, but I came in well below.
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Arthur
had waited a long time for the chance to steal something. He didn't even know why he had to, but ever
since he’d died he’d felt like he couldn’t move on until he stole
something from the living. And there is
so little on a space ship that isn't fastened down. He couldn't believe his luck when he saw the
frying pan, just lying on the counter like an abandoned sock. As soon as he wrapped his ghostly hand around
the panhandle, the whole thing vanished into the seventh dimension, where
neither ghost nor living human could enjoy it. What was the point?
* * *
Sarah was
unpacking the shuttle. They'd had a good
holiday Down Below, but it felt good to be home again. She and Gil had lived aboard the Lady Luck since they were married four
years ago, and this had been their first real trip dirtside. Haven was a fully Earth-like planet, and very
little developed, so they'd been able to land the shuttle where they wanted and
had enjoyed a grand week of fishing--you could even eat the local fish--and a
lot of lying in the sun.
She
pulled the kitchen supply bin out of the shuttle, and the frying pan that had cooked
so much tasty fish tottered on the top.
She didn't want it to fall, so she set it aside on the mechanic's bench
and carried the box into the dining bay.
Some spacers let the machines do all the cooking, but Sarah liked to
cook. She'd grown up dirtside on Golden, and always stocked up on what she
called real food. Gil laughed at her, and
sometimes grumbled about the extra space her kitchen supplies took up, but he
liked her cooking and humored her. Still,
he let her haul all the kitchen stuff off and put it away.
Sarah
puttered around the dining bay happily stowing her gear, then a glance at the
chronograph told her it was time to fix some dinner, so she got on with
it. Just a simple dish, the last of the
campfire bread she'd baked that morning, and a bit of the local cheese.
It wasn't
until the next morning that either she or Gil remembered the frying pan, when
she wanted it to cook up some bacon she’d picked up in port. She sent him to fetch it. Gil came back in a minute.
"It's
not there. Are you sure you didn't bring
it up here?"
Sarah
sighed. Typical male. Couldn’t find his head if it wasn’t attached.
"I'll go. I know just where
I put it." She did, too. The trouble was, it wasn't there. The bench was cleared and secured for zero-G,
though they were still running the gravitation motor. There was no frying pan on it. She searched the cargo bay, then each part of
the ship, even the ones they hadn’t entered since returning.
There was
no frying pan anywhere.
"Gil,
it isn't there. And I KNOW I left it
right on the counter. Could the cleaning
’bot have picked it up?"
"I
didn’t run it last night, since we’d just got back. Anyway, it’s programmed to avoid the
mechanic’s bench. We’re the only people on this
vessel, and we didn’t either of us touch it.”
Sarah
looked at him suspiciously. ‘Are you sure. . . I know you think my cooking gear is an
extravagance.”
“Swear by all that’s sacred. Anyway, I
would never get rid of that pan when you had bacon to fry!”
“I suppose not. It’s gone, but no one and nothing
could have picked it up."
"Only
a ghost," he said, and they laughed.
* * *
Down in the cargo bay, Arthur’s last thought as he slipped into
the eighth dimension was that, at last, he knew why he had to steal. He’d never see that pan again—but it had
freed him at last of the blasted ship.
