Author: Jennifer Gregson

Killing someone is harder than it looks. I should have used a gun. My old bow and arrow worked, but it was messy.

See, a few years ago, an old witch cursed me. She cackled when she did it too. She claimed my dreams would come true, and I naively thought that was a good thing. Dad’s new girlfriend moved in yesterday. I dreamt about that affair a year ago. Mom and Tony, her tennis instructor, are somewhere in Mexico on vacation. That one was just last month. And if last week’s dream is any indication, Richie is about to piss off some very important mobsters.

The worst thing happened two nights ago. I dreamt I was murdered. And no one cared. I’m not sure which upsets me more actually.

I went and tried to reason with the old woman, but she blames me for Natasha’s death. We were best friends. She’d been drinking that night, but so had I. I should have called a cab, I should have called someone, but I didn’t. I walked away with a broken wrist, her granddaughter didn’t walk away at all.

So, trying to talk to her didn’t go well. In fact, she spit on my feet, yelled at me in Russian or something, and closed the door in my face. I knew that I had to act fast.

I wrote down everything I could remember from my dream. I saw a middle-aged man. Brown hair, mustache, shabby ill-fitting suit. I had no idea what his beef was with me exactly, and I had no time to figure that out. We were in an alleyway that looked very familiar.

Figuring out the where was crucial. I racked my brain until it finally came to me – right behind the high school. I graduated this past May so there was no reason for me to be there, but that was the alleyway, make no mistake.

I grabbed the bow and arrows and ran to the school. Half way there I worried that I was walking into a trap – would it be better to avoid the school all together? Or would that cause events to shift, cause this man to kill me somewhere else? No, I kept going.

Nighttime came fast. I didn’t have to wait too long for the man of my dreams to arrive. Honestly, I don’t remember firing off the arrow. I saw his gun and I shot. Years of archery paid off, he clutched his chest and fell over. Actually, strike what I wrote earlier, killing someone isn’t that hard at all. I just wish the detective had believed me when I went in to confess, but I guess pretty blonde girls can get away with anything in this town. I wonder what I’ll dream about tonight? I wonder why that guy wanted to kill me? I wonder if that cute detective is single?

Love,
Lauren
P.S. – I should really tell Richie to lay off the ponies.

“I should have dumped your ink a long time ago,” Sylvia said as she tried to open the fountain pen.

“You can’t, I won’t let you.”

The pen wrestled out of her hand and started scribbling something on the nearby pad of paper. Sylvia stood, stunned that the pen could somehow write on it’s own.

“But…how?”

“I’m more powerful, because you loved me.”

She watched as the pen’s scribblings came together to form a tiger. She grabbed her book bag and bolted for the door. She slammed it shut just as a loud roar came from the other side.

“I guess you don’t love me back, huh?”

She fumbled in her bag for the little booklet that came with the pen. Sylvia scanned the instructions about how to fill it and how to clean it. She was just about to wad the whole thing up in disgust when she saw the small print on the very last page.

This pen is magic, use at your own risk. To reverse the magic, please empty the pen, put it back into the original black case, and say these words three times: Fountain Mountain Poo.
“Fountain Mountain Poo?” Sylvia said out loud.

“Doesn’t work as long as I’m full of ink,” the pen sang from the other side of the door.

She dug around her bag to see if the case was in there, but she remembered it was sitting on her desk which was inside her room with the tiger. All she had on her was a sketch book, a few colored pencils, and a large eraser with the words, can be used on ink, written on its side.

Perfect! Now, all she had to do was open the door and maybe she could erase the tiger and whatever else the stupid pen was thinking up, before….well, she wasn’t quite sure what would happen if she was eaten by a pen drawn tiger actually.

With the large eraser in front of her, she pushed open the door. The tiger leapt for her, but she quickly slashed at its mouth, erasing all but one sharp fang. Sylvia erased the tiger part by part, but before it was completely erased, its left paw swung at her and knocked the eraser to the floor. She dropped to her knees, picked up the eraser, swiveled, and finished off the beast leaving nothing but disjoined black lines all over the floor.

“Look what you did,” the pen shouted. It started to draw again. “Try this on for size.

“Is that… a clown?” she asked.

The pen laughed. Sylvia dropped the eraser. When she bent over to pick it up she noticed blood. Her blood. The tiger must have snagged her right hand, blood was dripping everywhere. She squeezed it and swallowed. Clowns scared her, no, terrified her, and this one was no exception. The pen had made him tall and menacing. No time to be scared, she thought. Sylvia grabbed the eraser with her left hand and lunged forward. She took out the clown in four slashes.

The pen was still laughing, so she grabbed the case and jumped across the room. She picked up the pen, threw open the ink well and dumped it. She then shoved the pen into the case and snapped it shut.

“Fountain Mountain Poo. Fountain Mountain Poo. Fountain Mountain Poo.”

The laughing finally stopped.

Later that evening, after she had cleaned up her room, bandaged her hand, and finished her homework, Sylvia was reading in bed.

“Sylvia.”

“Yes?” she asked, looking around her room.

“Fill me back up, please. You know you want to.”

And that’s how Sylvia’s fountain pen got buried behind her Mom’s prized rose bushes.