Snafu

Published as "Beauty and the Beast" in The Speculative Book 1 (2016)

Something had clearly gone wrong in Afterlife. A misfiling probably. Happens in any office, and that one was bigger than most. Considerably. Hardly surprising really. Didn’t make it any easier to deal with. In fact, he was more than a touch annoyed. He swung his trunk at the dresser in disgust. It past silently through the mahogany and crushed his genitals.

Tearful, Quargon floated through the magnolia wall into the master bedroom and looked at the human in the bed. What was he supposed to do with that? He reopened the Letter of Sentence. “…to haunt the aforementioned spouse until death or insanity invalidate this document.” Great. Really great. He couldn’t have wished for more. Only one small problem: that wasn’t the “aforementioned spouse.” Wasn’t even the right species. Being off by one wouldn’t have been so bad: haunting the wife’s sister. He could’ve handled that. That wouldn’t have been such a bad Afterlife. But this? The wrong species? The wrong planet? No job satisfaction anymore, that was the problem. No pride in a job well done. Something should be done about it. He’d complain to someone. That’d show them.

He settled on top of the wardrobe and examined the alleged spouse. Not being much of a traveller, he’d never seen a real human before. The Joneses next door had coughed up for a package tour. Six week cruise. All the sights. Roswell. Bonnybridge. Bermuda. But he and Jirrl had always preferred the Staycation. Why go to all that trouble when you have perfectly good fjords and perfectly good suns in your own backyard.

It didn’t look that scary. The teeth he’d heard so much about were safely out of harm’s way, though the low growl it emitted was disturbing. He couldn’t see what was under the sheet, but maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. It looked quite peaceful lying there, and not at all like the cartoons. Maybe it wasn’t a monster. You never knew with these things. It could be Beauty and the Beast all over again.