How to Live Forever
Cameron Pierce

Time had frozen in southern California. People got stuck in Los Angeles traffic for sixty years. While trying to create a black hole on the side of Highway 101, Charles Bender had glued Time to his cardboard hands. He was a clumsy scientist. It took six earth decades to unstick Time. The flesh peeled off of his hands, so when Time kicked into gear again, Charles was transported to the center northbound lane of Highway 101. Los Angeles traffic turned into a deadly board game where nobody died. Cars ate their drivers and digested them into fuel. Officers on motorcycles rode around as mad-robotic gargoyles. The freeways lifted up and licked the sky like concrete tongues. Bender the Scientist received the worst of the lot. Now he was nothing more than a giant rubber hand.

Charles froggered across Highway 101 on his four fingers. A semi with the face of a dragon belched fire and scorched the metal hairs on his thumb-head. Charles went blind and fell onto a cactus beside the road. The spines of the cactus pierced his fingertips and side. His face melted. Nobody died anymore, so he laid there and listened to the world play out in fast forward. He cursed his miserable predicament and wondered what went wrong with his experiment. He had always dreamed of living forever, but not like this. This was not what he envisioned when he schemed up a plan to live forever.

The machine creatures honked and screeched. It sounded like they were enjoying the new world. Charles Bender sighed. He would be stuck here for a long time.

Some while later, an owl-shaped helicopter swooped down and took Charles in its beak. The evil noise of traffic faded. Charles Bender’s hollow stomach churned as he rose higher into the air. Thank God I am saved, he thought. A deflated smile appeared on his melted face. But the helicopter was without a pilot and had scooped him up by mere chance. It dropped Charles when it reached the upper layer of smog, favoring a winged otter over his rubber body. Charles fell. He landed in a bush beside the highway. He laughed now, for the tyranny of life was such a joyous, mysterious thing.

A semi spit flames, lighting Charles and the bush on fire.

Somewhere in Hollywood, a black hole checked into a motel.

Cameron Pierce is the author of Shark Hunting in Paradise Garden and The Ass Goblins of Auschwitz. His fiction has appeared in Bare Bone, Bust Down the Door & Eat All the Chickens, The Horror Library Vol. II, and Sein und Werden, among other publications. He lives in Portland, OR, where he is notorious for cooking up eldritch culinary hororrs.